colinb

So, not gravity or radio waves?

the same Arab countries that ejected their long-established Jewish populations en-masse in 1948? I wonder where they thought those people were going to go. In 1948.

It’s less than one per hundred teachers and that’s with the assumption that there’s never two complaints about a single teacher in a year. I guess we have different ideas of a lot, which is fair enough.

I have no direct experience of this being an engineer rather than a teacher. I have been subject to an HR complaint once in my career. At Cisco. I’m not sorry. I can easily believe that it’s a stressful and unpleasant experience, especially for those people, the great majority, who are exonerated.

I was curious about the numbers. Apologies for the year mismatch. I can only report what I found. This year there are about 466000 teachers working in primary and secondary education in the UK. In 2024 there were 1684 complaints to the TRA about teachers. (No idea how many were to because of physical contact) of 1055 were dismissed. So around 600 upheld complaints. Or 0.3% of teachers. That doesn’t seem too bad to me.

The greater scandal is that the average time to clear each case was around 103 weeks.

I know. I’m willing to bet the first thing they’d do after seizing the guns would be to stop unfriendly media from first hand reporting of events in the White House.

Then, when they know they’re proof against an armed citizenry, they’ll start running government policy as a way to line their own pockets. Why, it wouldn’t surprise me if a sufficiently emboldened crook, safe in the knowledge, that you personally cannot stop them by armed force, started to flout the laws left and right.

Put it another way. I never fail to be amazed by the fantasies that govern significant chunks of American thought. People who’ve lived there, and also in other places are able to figure out pretty quickly where they’re actually safer, and more respected by their government, and able to live a decent wholesome life.

I’ll note in passing that there are other countries with similar levels of gun ownership but less suicide and violence. Perhaps the first is because they have slightly more left leaning social policies. I’m all but convinced that the second is because they aren’t driven to a frenzy of terror by their local media. Maybe that cat has escaped its bag and isn’t ever going back. A shame. To live one’s life in fear of angry frightened people with guns sounds awful to me.

Last thing. I’ve had guns pointed at me twice. Once by an infant British soldier in 1990s Belfast. And once by a robbing bastard in a very wealthy part of Los Angeles. Neither was fun, but at least the soldier was predictable in the then prevailing circumstances

Your italicised text is /exactly/ wrong. Hen eggs are fertilised inside the hen’s oviduct. I mean, eggs are somewhat porous after laying, but they’re not that porous.

(I don’t know about you. I’m just a programmer holding strong opinions about avian physiology. Maybe there’s an actual biologist on the plane who can correct me)

I think I strongly disagree with your first sentence. Strongly. I've worked with enough people with fine coding skills and terrible English to know that the two are not an uncommon combination. Last year, I worked with someone whose first language was something from China - no idea which flavour - and they would often pass their written comms through an LLM. I could tell when they had done so by the onset of sudden grammatical correctness. But I don't think they were doing this with the intention of deceiving, merely of communicating clearly and correctly.

Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.

Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.

Not accessible in the EU cuz GDPR. “We thought about having a business that wasn’t exploitative and abusive of our users, and decided against it.”

Can you explain more please? I recognise some Claude-isms when reading text, and I recall image generators that added more fingers than are usual, but I don’t know what the 2-d graphics on the app home page signify in this respect.

ah, my apologies. I read more than you wrote. I think you and I are probably more in agreement than not. I read a book last year, "Monsters: What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People" by Claire Dederer, on this topic. Good in parts. Left me hanging. She talks a lot about several probably bad people, Polanski, Woody Allen, Picasso etc. But she never seems to hit a conclusion. Maybe that's the answer; there is no easy, pat answer. You just have to push through each case, as you find it, according to your judgement at the time.

While writing this, I dug out a Reddit thread about the book, where one of the participants (YakSlothLemon FTW!) hits us with Wagner. Well, yes, game over. I'm not a fan of that sort of (to my ears) overcooked opera, but if you like it, play it. The dirtbag isn't getting any royalties because he's good and dead.

I too thought of Polanski (Roman, not Zac) while reading these threads. I’m not sure the comparison or perhaps, the parallel holds though. PO’b may have been a bad husband. Or he may have been married to a bad wife. Or maybe they were both a bit rough. I don’t know an any real evidence either way, and life has taught me that it’s hard to see inside the truth of other people’s relationships. I have trouble enough with my own, and I’m present in real-time!

Polanski R is not the same thing. He drugged and raped a child and was defended for decades by people who ought to know better because of his directorial genius. I don’t dispute that genius. I just can’t watch his movies again without feeling a little sick.

All of this to say, judging Polanski for being a monster is not the same as judging PO’b for being a jerk. I reread the Aubrey-Maturin novels every four or five years and they enrich my life on every occasion. And I don’t feel even slightly bad about it.

(Disappointingly, I did lose an argument over a big family dinner several years ago when it turned it that tracklement is a neologism. Imagine my embarrassment!)

I have to say I’m really enjoying the Eternal September of Software comments here. They make me wonder about the vintage of the authors. Was Windows 7 the first stable OS they used? Some crustifarian Debian? I don’t actually recall if the Multicians I knew thought New Jersey software was rubbish. I know I still miss the solidity and useful abstractions of VAXcluster. Kubernetes would be funny by comparison if it weren’t so tragic.

It was always better in the past. The capitalists always ruined it in the past. Only I am the true bearer of the artisanal software flame. /s

Not in any way being negative about what you’ve done, but… Mac only. Is this just because of inbuilt knowledge about file system shape or some more important Apple exclusive tool/environmental quirk?