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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • This is sadly quite common, and I think by design in many places.

    Rather than long, open roads having a 30mph speed and smaller residential roads at 20, the opposite is chosen, purely because councils know that they can put speed cameras there to make some money. Making roads safer through design costs money, and many roads where accidents are common are largely ignored.

    It’s these tactics that feed into the hysteria that these measures are an attack on motorists. While I largely agree with the rules, many councils really take the piss. I was caught doing 24mph in a 20, but was able to overturn it because the camera was placed in the middle of a hill with a sharp enough decline to not make it legal to police.

    They probably made a ton from that camera, all while the top of the hill is a small junction where people regularly crash - which is 30 and is only repaired when someone crashes into the traffic lights (not a rare occurrence).






  • They absolutely deserve the blame, but the point is that these people have always existed, and probably in much larger numbers than we’d like to believe.

    A lot of people seemingly believe that the UK went from a country that loves all immigrants to a hate-filled country in just over a decade of Tory rule, but all that has happened is the government and the media have informed the public that extreme views are welcome in society.

    IMO what needs to happen is a swift push from the government to say “no, violent protest will result in prison” AND actually fucking stopping them. The police know ahead of time where people are protesting, and the second so much as a can is thrown at a building the police should be making arrests - hundreds of them. Doing anything else sends a message that peaceful protest results in jail time, whereas torching an immigration law firm or hotel is fine.



  • That is a wild assumption with two key flaws

    1. Windows in many workplaces has updates locked down too, except in circumstances where critical security or vulnerability patches are pushed through.

    2. The same is true for many servers that run Linux.

    As someone that works on tier1 services for arguably the biggest tech company right now, that’s how it works in most of FAANG. Updates are gated, sure, but like with many things there’s a vetting process where some things that look super important and safe just slip through.

    In regards to your edit, I guess most cases are different from others, but if your entire business requires you to be able to use a machine 100% of the time then you should have the means to either use a different machine to continue transactions (ideally one with a known state that won’t change, or has been tested in the last few months). If you need to log transactions and process 24-48 hours later do that on something that’s locked down hard, with printed/hard backups if necessary.

    Ultimately, risk is always something you factor in. If you don’t care about 48 hours of downtime over several years, it’s not a huge concern. I’d probably argue that many companies lost more money during these days than they would have spent in both money and people-hours training them on a contingency system to use in case of downtime.


  • No. If everyone were on Linux and there was a breaking change introduced by a third-party there would be similar problems.

    The problem is that critical infrastructure isn’t treated like critical infrastructure. If something you rely on can go down due to a single point of failure, maybe don’t fucking use it?! Have backups, have systems that can replace those systems, have contingency! Slapping Windows on to a small machine and running some shitty Chromium app to work as a cash register is a fucking stupid idea when you consider that it is responsible for your whole income.

    The problem was never Windows. It was companies that were too cheap to have contingency, because an event like this was considered extraordinary and not worth investing in.



  • Atlassian is one of those companies that I equally laugh at, love, and hate.

    They’re in so many markets in software and project management, and have so many large clients that pay for Confluence, Jira, BitBucket, etc. Despite this, people almost universally despise their products, with bugs being left open for years, features blissfully ignored, etc.

    I often imagine what it would be like to work for Atlassian, and what “that” code based must look like. Working there must be fun as hell given the impact and breadth of opportunities, equally frustrating if you dogfood your own products, and infuriating given just how much stuff must be utter shit under the hood.


  • I know that they’ve been in power for 14 years, but the writing was on the wall for the Tories when they chose May. She empowered the right, and allowed BoJo to not only seize control, but to utterly purge the party of actual conservatives. Now that the Tories have been decimated, many of the established names in the party that were favourites to lead from both the right and the central ground lost their seats. The worst thing the Tories ever did was push the Brexit vote and then subsequently let the right get power, as they now face an existential threat for an entire generation.

    For the Americans here, this is the one silver lining of Trump. In the same way that the surprise of the Brexit vote signalled the rise of Trump, you could potentially look at how the cult of personality around Brexit destroyed the Tories and see parallels to the Republicans. They’ve tied themselves solely to Trump, and if he were to lose there’s no real candidate that could realistically unite the country AND win the support of Trump (who will probably run again in 4 years time). He’s cast a shadow that has eclipsed the growth of right-leaning politics, damaging conservatism for the future.


  • On one hand, Farage is a massive cunt, an enemy of the state, and the man responsible for irreparable damage to UK politics due to Brexit.

    On the other, if Reform is going to run against the Tories, there’s a real opportunity his tinpot party takes the Gammon/flag-shagger vote away from Sunak’s populist run as Tory leader, and in a month we see the Tory party get absolutely annihilated.

    Years ago, I said that it was quite sad to see that Conservative’s had lost their party to the populism of the Boris era, because many MP’s that wanted to see a strong union (bear in mind the full name of the Tories is the Conservative and Unionist Party) were expelled from the party and ostracised to make room for grifters under BoJo. While I’m no conservative, many voters value conservatism in their politics, and while I don’t like Starmer much either, he’s basically the closest thing to a Conservative AND a Liberal in major party politics in the UK.

    My vote is probably with the Greens this year, but in many areas Labour should absolutely destroy the Tories, hopefully to the point where they become the third or fourth party in the UK.


  • From a company perspective, it’s a common sentiment. Google and Amazon have mantras around trying to stay agile and relevant despite being behemoths, and both have arguably kept into boomer tech territory the second they made a poor CEO hire. Microsoft had their Ballmer era, and while Nadella did a lot of good at Microsoft they’ve had a lot of failures in established divisions to be soaked up by AI and sales.

    I think that all of big tech has struggled over the last 3 years. Sacrificing employee skill for shareholder value has ultimately moved them all into IBM territory, whereas the cool tech is happening at startups again. If AI is a bust, and another company comes along and eats their lunch in their established markets like consumer devices, web tooling, or cloud computing, they’re in real danger of another huge set of layoffs and resetting their businesses to only core profit-making ventures. What I think we’ve seen companies shift towards death, Day 2, rotting from the inside, or whatever your business calls stagnation.



  • This is an unpopular opinion, but vote for who you believe in. If there is a party or candidate that backs your beliefs then you should vote for them. You only need to look at UKIP/Brexit/Reform to see that a small party can have a big impact, even if it’s backed by the media and run by bellends.

    Wanting your vote to count by voting for a big party is like supporting Man City because you want your support to count…



  • While I don’t support shoplifting, it’s literally not inconveniencing anyone involved here. Worst-case, security calls the police, and they claim losses from insurance.

    That man will probably press charges, and get some money he probably needs, assuming he’s okay. Those involved will almost certainly lose their jobs, and will probably end up in the position that this other person was in - unemployable.

    I really don’t get what their end goal was here, other than to beat the shit out of someone.



  • Those offices are usually locked down anyway, on floors where the unwashed masses aren’t granted access. Hell, if you want to even be on a call with someone like the CTO you’ll have to reach out to three different entities, book a specific room, and reach out to that person’s team of assistants to ensure everything is aligned.

    If they got access to the CTO office they definitely broke in, or evaded security in some way. That alone at any company will get you fired, and probably arrested.

    Source: Once attended a meeting with a SVP at a big tech company. I genuinely think it would be easier to meet the president.