Huh?
I’m trying to get my head around the fact that Meta are sueing their customers because their own content moderation mechanisms don’t work.
Truly these are strange times…
594 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2007
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Although what I think meta the Zuckburghers deserve, and would constitute fair compensation may differ from what they think they deserve.
They probably had fewer face eating leopards in mind for a start…
“ I'd put money on it that the CEO - had he been awake - wouldn't have decided to close the entire airport for 20 hours when the fire had only been burning for an hour or so.”
You may well be right, but I’d also put money on it that had a decision not to shut down went horribly wrong resulting in wholesale death and/or injury said CEO wouldn’t be in a hurry to step forward and accept responsibility for it. Well, maybe in a mealy mouthed, platitudinous, statement to the press kind of way, but not in an actual personally accepting consequences way…
Management absolutely is a specialist skill.
It’s just that (in technical fields at least) it’s orthogonal to the skills of those managed and not neccesarily (or in the tech field often) more valuable or harder to come by, making it doubly stupid and frustrating that management is depressingly often the only career path available to senior technical staff.
The result of this is a middle management class packed with people who (again depressingly often) hate their jobs, aren’t terribly good at them, and get far too involved and “hands on” in the work they’re supposed to be facilitating. I consider myself extremely lucky to have ended my career working for a company who (while not neccesarily perfect in every regard) were prepared to be creative with roles, job titles, and pay scales because I am in no doubt that I would have ended up amongst that number…
I have a vague recollection of a game/challenge involving two (or more) chunks of code executing concurrently within the shared memory space of a simple virtual machine with the objective being for (human) participants to produce a piece of code which could locate and then disrupt, corrupt, or otherwise disable its “competitors”.
Anyone else remember that, or did I just imagine it or come across it in a work of fiction….?
Have you tried making things people want to buy at a price they’re willing to pay?
That may sound trite and obvious, but, taking the specific case of automobiles, when Ford started offering the Gen 5 (2005) and later Mustang through regular dealerships, with proper factory warranties (and in the case of the UK from 2015 on with the steering wheel in the right place) it actually did rather well…
That’s actually not a bad use of a nominally “in office” day, especially if the management justification for a mandatory “in” day is to build relationships and networks.
Years back I did a few years contract work for a company based in Sweden, I used to fly over to Stockholm regularly to spend some time in the office and the first time I went in I was absolutely gob-smacked to find that every week there was a day when the whole (small, maybe a dozen people) would get together to prepare and cook an actual meal from scratch in the kitchen area, set a table, sit down to eat together like family, and then clear away and wash up together, any management team members present would join in alongside. That could easily take up three hours in total but it was the best, most effective way of getting a team to communicate and build relationships I’ve ever seen…
“ Having a single person's DNA sequence tells you nothing about your family members if you do not have the said family members DNA to compare it with.”
I suspect that comparison would quite often result in some awkward conversations… :-)
People keep saying there was no upside to Brexit (and on the whole I completely agree with that judgement) but it did buy my youngest son (who’d just started a job as a customs clearance agent with FedEx at Stansted Airport) a BMW M3, a wedding, and a nice starter flat on overtime/shift payments… :-)
Do the Oligarchy reckon that they can drive down wages and enshittify employment conditions sufficiently to sell domestically produced goods at prices which can undercut current producers even with the advantage of tariffs or is the USAnian consumer just going to have to get used to everything being at least 25% more expensive for the foreseeable future?
I can’t help thinking that’s ultimately going to be tough sell once the reality sets in…
Well, they probably can. If a manufacturer claims that their TV is 4K resolution then that’s an objectively verifiable claim, and if it turns out it’s got a boring old 1920x1080 panel in it then they can be nailed to the wall. Similarly, if they say it’s capable of displaying a particular brightness level and it can’t then again it an objectively measurable claim, and if they’re challenged on it and can’t demonstrate compliance they’ll be nailed to the wall, likewise for contrast ratios, colour gamuts etc.
In this case the complainant has simply fallen for a bit of marketing bullshit and been disappointed. Sucks to be them, film at eleven…
As far as I’m aware all LEDs rely on quantum phenomena to do their turning electricity into light thing, and all flat screen displays are pixel based (meaning that they’re made up of a bunch of dots). Ergo any LED TV has as many quantum dots as it has addressable pixels in it’s display panel (possible plus a couple more for status indicators) and every LED TV is a quantum dot TV.
I’ve always assumed that the words “Quantum Dot” in the description of a TV is simply a bullshit marketing term with no objective definition that a piece of hardware can be tested again are. Somebody somewhere may have registered it as a trade mark for their partic7display techno6, but as far as I can see it such a generic term that I can’t I imagine it would be enforceable in practice…
It’s almost as though different users doing different jobs on different hardware have different requirements/preferences for how they interact with a computer and that forcing a single model upon them in the interests of consistency was a bad idea.
Who would have thought it?
Speaking as a person rather than a standardised unit of productive capacity I’m all in favour of this kind of choice and think it’s long pst time developers finally started writing/designing applications to conform to the UI guidelines of whatever platform/desktop/whatever the user wants to run them on rather than using ever larger hammers to impose The One True Way on their customers…
So no downvote from me.
‘Call me a boring old fart, but the whole point of PDF was supposed to be that it was as immutable as a paper document, didn't run code in the background, and is pretty safe to open.”
Oh dear sweet, sweet summer child… :-)
I have made quite a decent living over the last 12 years ago out of the fact that if you set out to design a file format specifically to act as a delivery vehicle for malware you’d be hard pressed to “improve” on PDF, and that’s just the documented bits working as designed before you consider the possibility of implementation flaws…
Seriously, have a very quick skim[1] through the specifications…
https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf/#pdf-1
https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf/
…and if it doesn’t make your blood run cold you’re either not looking properly or shouldn’t be working in the IT industry.
[1] Given the size of them more than the most cursory glance would be a big ask, but that should be enough.
Depends what size and how much performance you’re looking for really…
Even though it’s been around a while the Polestar 2 would be high on my personal shopping list if I was looking to replace my current Leaf E+, if you want something bigger and faster but can’t run to a Porsche Taycan then Hyundai’s Ioniq 5N or the Kia EV6GT are strong contenders.
The Ford Mustang E doesn’t suck either…
Once upon a time Tesla had a monopoly on larger, longer range EVs.
Now they don’t and other manufacturers products are (for various reasons, aesthetic, technical, political, and other) looking like a more attractive choice than Tesla’s (rather stale looking these days) offerings.
MuskCo wouldn’t be the first high profile company to come to grief through taking their customer base for granted and if they do fall by the wayside it seems unlikely that they’d be the last…
Film at 11…
“There are plenty of councils whose systems are not in this dire state with regards to finances and auditing, that's not to say that the others are perfect, but they are at least sufficiently functional for the auditors to do their job of ensuring financial probity.”
…and many of them are probably looking at the likes of Birmingham in terror as the platforms which their current (stable, reliable, satisfactory) solutions were built on have been end-of-lifed by vendors leaving them faced with either exorbitant fees for extended support or simply having the plug pulled.
It would be unfair to mention one without the other.
It started out as ICL Pathway’s crock of shit and while Fujitsu had 15 years to fix it, didn’t, and doubled down by conspiring with the POst Office to pervert the course of justice it seems only fair to give the original architects their fair share of the credit…
‘85 percent of business leaders have a "hard time knowing for sure that their people are being productive.”’
Really?
So 85% of business leaders don’t know what the core objectives of the organisations they claim to be the leaders of are or whether those objectives gives are being met??
And the *workforce* are supposed to be the problem???
If I were a shareholder in one of those businesses I’d be very worried about that statistic, and it wouldn’t be the workforce I’d be asking awkward questions about come AGM time…
It’s not about whether Trump (or whoever) *knows what honesty is, it’s about whether they *care*w hat honesty is when faced with the opportunity for a shit load of money and/or the opportunity to excercise massive personal power with very little responsibility or consequences. And I think we know what the answer to that is…
“ robbing me from the illusion that PDFs were benign in terms of safety.”
This is a joke right?
I owe 12 years of gainful employment (up until my retirement just before Christmas) to the fact that if you custom designed a file format to act as a malware delivery vehicle you’d probably end up with PDF…
Buying into the iThing infrastructure and swallowing the Apple Kool-Aid was always something of a pact with the devil but you know what?
I knew that when I wrote the cheques. I looked at the alternatives, I signed the cheques anyway, and I’ll still take Apples blend of seamless experience and barely concealed avarice over Google and X’s brands of clunky enshitification every time.
[shrug] Giving the Chinese state access to my relentlessly vanilla tastes in media consumption seems like a small price to pay for either juggling 4 remotes or relying on Logitech (and potentially supplying them with similar information) to continue to support an occasionally slightly wayward third party solution (Harmony) they don’t sell any more…
[shrug] Giving the Chinese state access to my relentlessly vanilla tastes in media consumption seems like a small price to pay for either juggling 4 remotes or relying on Logitech to continue to support an occasionally slightly wayward third party solution they don’t sell any more…