For me if Christmas eve is a Monday we usually get the whole Monday off, if it’s later in the week we only get a half day. We get from Christmas eve 12 noon to January 1 off normally

I used to really like an apple turnover. Warm, with cream

It just was not much different to 98 and had less good UI

keyboard layout resets

Most people don’t care as they only have one layout. You and me are odd. I usually set my preferred layout as default

It’s going to annoy me. I keep the task bar on the bottom on my machine and on the side for remote/virtual machines

I wouldn’t, but only because I enjoy writing, even for email

I have a friend who’s a new PM (in scaled agile). He isn’t up on expectation management.

We have a process where we request data from another agency which takes “from 7 seconds to 12 days”

And of course he tells people that. And of course they hear “7 seconds”

I have told him that if the SLA is 12 days, say “less than 12 days”

I miss CRT monitors in text mode with the field in “idle CRT screen” black and the text in cyan

Dark mode tries, but always goes for maximum contrast

As

That looks like an oddly capitalised “as”

That really gives the reason it’s acceptable to use apostrophes when pluralising that sort of case

If they didn’t properly test validation I would complain about that, what that regularly miss is a test showing correct function for each major use case

As a PO I’m usually asking QA for some tests that actually show the product meets the requirements

There might be 50 pages proving it rejects bad input, and nothing showing it can successfully handle a perfectly correct case. We seem bad at training testers.

High tech blinkers

That’s her 5 year old kid’s. Super sweet :)

Don’t you want it to look a little nicer? echo __LINE__ . “: Moo!”;

I mean, presuming cowsay is unavailable

And escape the newlines that you introduce in the strings

Me to Google support for a problem with my brand new pixel 3 back when the 3 was the new hotness

Me: my camera only works for one photo, then doesn’t work again until I reboot it. Then it again works only for one photo, then it gives the error “camera [number] is locked” (screenshot)

Support: that sounds like a fault. Could you reboot your phone and tell me what happens?

Me: ok. … Right I’m back. Just like for all the ten photos I took before contacting you, it worked for one photo then that same error. That makes eleven times I rebooted my phone today.

So organising a meeting for 03:30 has the problem of that not being working hours for some people, and you have to look up what working hours are in each area. What problem is that supposed to solve?

My workplace which now uses scaled agile used to be waterfall. We have an enormous system to take care of and there’s loads of specialised knowledge, so we were pretty well siloed

So obviously when the sales people sold agile to the organisation they also sold the idea that a programmer is a programmer, designer a designer, tester a tester; no need for specialists, so in 2015 they spun up 50-odd agile teams in about six trains, one for each major system (where the used to be seven silos in one of those systems) grabbed one senior designer and programmer from each major project to put in an “expert” team

And told the rest of us we were working on the whole of our giant system. Where we had trouble understanding how part of it worked, we could talk to one of the experts

Now nine years later those experts have mostly retired, we have lost so much institutional knowledge and if someone runs into a wall you need to hope that someone wrote a knowledge transfer document or a wiki for that bit of the system

30% of jobs are going if self driving is achieved. Low pay jobs are here to stay for a while as they’re too expensive to automate. The current LLM stuff seems to obsolete low productivity people but still need the skilled writers or programmers to come up with new stuff or do the correct detail work the LLM sucks at.

Some management is going to royally screw up by firing junior programmers since the senior programmers can get all the work done with the help of copilot

But they’ll forget that they will in future need new senior programmers to herd the LLMs

I take it you missed the recent fourth integrated flight test, in which the ship soft landed on the ocean near Australia as planned and the booster soft landed on the ocean near the launch site as planned

Their failure in that flight was expected. They hoped thermal tiles sealing the hinge for the aerodynamic surfaces would seal those against plasma during reentry. They didn’t. Had they, it would have been much cheaper than sealing those more thoroughly. The ship landed regardless of that failure

Disliking Musk is fair, but SpaceX is doing good stuff