Posts by Andy the ex-Brit 138 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2012
Google Street View has a huge database of photos showing the fronts of houses including, often, the door, the cars in the driveways, and my understanding is that some of those houses may contain, at times, children!
Really, it's just a gift to kidnappers and car thieves everywhere.
In high school (age 16 or so) the PCs in the computer lab ran something DOS-like and were used mostly to write and run BASIC programs, which everyone stored on floppies. I wrote a program that just showed the C:> prompt and watched for a disk to exist in the A drive. Then it showed a growing row of dots . . . . . . . followed by FORMAT COMPLETE while reading the A: drive to make the appropriate sound and blinking light.
Then it started POKEing random memory locations so that the computer would lock up and nobody could see my code. I'm sure I caused a few moments of panic.
Now I'm wondering what I'm missing. My memory of mechanical mice was irritation when the rollers got grungy, and the first symptom was jumpy pointer behaviour. I'm using a cheap Logitech wireless optical mouse right now, and I can move the pointer in single pixel increments. How much more precise can it be? My limitation is pretty much just the stiction of the little plastic pads that touch my desk.
One fun project I did at work when optical mice first came out was to gut one and put it above a rubber conveyor belt at a production facility, sort of like a long supermarket cash register conveyor belt. We used it to measure the belt speed by reading the signals coming off the IC. It was way cheaper than anything marketed for the purpose.
I for one look forward to the world where 90% of economic* activity is in trillion dollar single employee AI companies whose business plan is helping other people start their own trillion dollar single person AI run companies which teach other people to start their own single person trillion dollar AI run companies....
* in USD/GBP/EUR etc. moving around, not in actual productivity of goods and services we want to consume
I had one absolutely terrible boss. I never realized until reporting to him that me and the rest of my high functioning team were actually slackers who were lucky he didn't fire us. He eventually got shunted off somewhere else and things got better.
Another reorg, and I heard they he'd applied to supervise the group that most of us would be moved into. I went to the manager and said "if he's my boss again, he won't be my boss for more than an hour." I was completely prepared to walk. Luckily he didn't get it, and actually got laid off shortly after. Good riddance!
I've been with State Farm for over 35 years now. I did get on their Drive Safe and Save program a few years ago, because it will always lower your rate, never raise it. I drive a MINI and like to go around corners a bit fast (when safe to do so) so I get dinged for that, but still I get about a $15 discount every six months, so I'm up several hundred dollars by now.
I'd literally starve. I'm a very healthy weight (161 lb / 74 kg at 5'9" / 1.75 m) and with the amount of exercise I get I'm burning an average of 3000 Calories a day. There's no way he can get enough exercise to keep his cardiovascular system healthy and not lose weight.
I spend maybe an hour a day watching YouTube, mostly channels I subscribe to. I've been getting these pop-ups recently (using Adblock) and just closing them with no consequences.
However, most of the channels I watch, mostly science, cycling, or urbanism related, are also available ad-free on other services with a small fee, such as Nebula. If I get too frustrated with Youtube, it won't hurt too much to jump ship.
I don't see why Google can't very quickly figure out that the road is closed. Surely they could have noticed that of the hundreds or thousands of people it sent that way over the years, exactly zero went across the bridge. It's an easier problem than showing congestion due to construction or crashes.
They could even follow-up with an in-app message to a few users, just like it asks "is the speed trap still there?"
We noticed you turned around at this location. Please select the reason.
1. Road temporarily closed
2. Road permanently closed
3. Bridge missing
4. Troll attack
When I was an engineering intern at a very small company, I was doing some board level troubleshooting and using our one and only Fluke multimeter in milliAmp mode to measure some currents. When I stepped away, an experienced engineer came and borrowed the meter to check the 480 V power supply to a milling machine. He changed the dial from mA to VAC mode and put the test leads on the supply wires. This immediately resulted in a flash, a loud bang, and bits of the face of the multimeter hitting the ground several metres away. It was not repairable.
He had, of course, neglected to move the red lead from the ammeter side to the voltmeter side, causing the meter to be a dead short. He tried to blame it on me, but nobody fell for that.
Don't hang up immediately. Tell them you're very interested and ask them if they can hold on a minute. Then put the phone down until they hang up.
If we can waste enough of their time they become unprofitable. Some Youtubers (Scammer Payback, Kitboga) are doing the Lord's work baiting scammers and wasting hours of their time until they flip out.
I've seen some bicycle reviews and related articles recently that look to be generated by AI to me.
www.stringbike dot com /tern-gsd-vs-hsd/
That article is filled with contradictions and blatant untruths.
Clicking around the stringbike site, every article looks like it was written by a bad AI, then lightly edited by a teenager.
Here's some more absolute garbage. It mixes up "10 speed" bikes and BMX bikes within the same article, a mistake I doubt even the laziest person creating a platform for monetizing ads with crappy "articles" would make. Then, of all things, it starts talking about 10-speed vehicle transmissions and fuel economy.
www.stringbike dot com /10-speed-bike/
I don't have a car that's likely to be stolen (it's 18 years old and has a manual transmission in the US) but if I did, I'd install a hidden switch somewhere in the cabin, with a relay that simply cut power to the ECU when toggled off, then make a habit of flipping it when I parked the car. Maybe a couple of hours of work for a lot of peace of mind.
My employer has been using it for a couple of years now. It is, indeed, terrible, but I actually like it because what we had before was even more terrible (a cobbled together combination of Lotus Notes applications, IBM mainframe applications in a terminal window, emailed PDFs. and actual paper.)
When I started this job 25 years ago, all the HR papers were sent home with us to be brought in signed with required documents the next day. A colleague, apparently smarter than me, took advantage of this to print out superficially identical forms but with pesky things like non-competes reworded to be meaningless. They never caught on.
Non-competes are no longer enforceable in my state (Illinois) for those making less than $75k US (about 60k GBP), though I make a bit more than that. Colleagues have left for direct competitors before with no repercussions, so they're really not enforcing it unless you directly take trade secrets with you.
The one they do enforce is if I were to leave and go to a supplier, I can't come back on-site to my current employer for business until a year later, which does make some sense.
I nearly only give 10s at work now. If I give an 8 or 9, you messed up.
This after working under a survey system at the same job, where my [2nd worst ever] supervisor decided that anything less than a 7 "exceeded expectations" meant a meeting with her and the internal customer to determine what had gone wrong. I had several of those, and she didn't get the hint even when the customer was there with her saying "why are we having this meeting? I marked "met expectations."
We were also expected by her to improve our average survey results by x% each year, pretty tough when a 4-6 was "met expectations" and my average was about 8.5 . So yeah, f that, nothing but 10s for my colleagues.
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