halo

Agreed - I suspect recompilation and decompilation is an unusually good task for models for many reasons.

I have a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets and Excel.

Spreadsheets are good for ad-hoc tasks on small-to-medium amounts of data (let’s say the old 64k row limit) of medium-to-low complexity. In practice, that covers a lot of tasks.

The problem is that Excel is the only flexible tool many people have so they bend it to do everything in lieu of anything better.

Wonder if the reaction would be the same if Wine was conditional on buying a license to Windows.

In my experience, good mature organisations have clear review processes to ensure quality, improve collaboration and reduce errors and risk. This is regardless of field. It does slow you down - not 10x - but the benefits outweigh the downsides in the long run.

The worst places I’ve worked have a pattern where someone senior drives a major change without any oversight, review or understanding causing multiple ongoing issues. This problem then gets dumped onto more junior colleagues, at which point it becomes harder and more time consuming to fix (“technical debt”). The senior role then boasts about their successful agile delivery to their superiors who don’t have visibility of the issues, much to the eye-rolls of all the people dealing with the constant problems.

BT was only successful if you take a very narrow view of success. They dragged their heels on rolling out ADSL to maximise short-term profits from ISDN which has had a hugely negative effect on the country.

Government spent decades figuring out how to regulate it and even today OpenReach is far than ideal.

If this is the case, why are many other EU postal services still state-owned (e.g. Ireland, Poland, Cyprus, Greece)? The UK left the EU 5 years ago yet it’s still being used as cover for UK political decisions.

On a similar note, I’ve always liked the idea of being able to mark functions as pure (for some reasonable definition of pure).

The principle of reducing state changes and side-effects feels a good one.

That telephone monopoly was privatised - and later dragged their heels on rolling out broadband because ISDN was so profitable, causing untold damage to the UK tech economy as the country fell behind on connectivity.

It’s a great parable of badly-managed state-run monopoly vs badly-managed privatised monopoly.

I’m beginning to think my reluctance to shamelessly copy has held me back in life. It’s clearly more widespread than I naively assumed (and I say that without casting judgment).

I’m convinced a major reason Windows Phone failed is because Google didn’t support it for self-serving reasons. It rarely gets mentioned but no YouTube or Google Maps apps is a big deal and a major barrier to adoption. The tech giants don’t want competition.

If nothing else, it’s clear communication and shows they have seen the online discourse. We’ll see if they follow through.

There’s a certain logic to it too: they’ll be far more interested in upselling to existing Canva subscribers than selling Canva to the far smaller Affinity userbase.

My understanding is that these sorts of sites allow companies to pay to boost positive reviews to de-emphasise negative reviews, not remove bad reviews.

Still somewhat shady.

The biggest problem with Bristol is how much of it has been taken over by upper and upper-middle class people moving from the South East.

Yes and no. Isn’t there an argument that Gmail and Outlook.com (combined with Microsoft 365/Exchange Online), while superficially interoperable, have enough market share that their actions make running other mail providers very difficult in practice?