Back during covid we sent my wife’s grandparents a smart phone so they could video call. They only had a dumb brick phone.

I forget what model but it was one specifically aimed at easy of use for seniors. We had it delivered so I could set it up. Then delivered it to them ready to go.

It was impossible. Even just answering a call being touch and hold the green circle then slide it 2cm in any direction and release took nearly an hour.

My wife does social care now and a client yesterday had managed to enable audio description on his firestick. This is what i was explaining. Hold back and menu on the remote to turn it on/off. He’d probably done it by accident and now his TV is explaining everything on screen after every button press and he has no clue where to even begin to turn it off. It’s utterly incomprehensible. I’m sure they thought it was a good idea to have a way to turn it on that doesn’t need you to see the screen.

Yesterday describing how to do a thing to my wife over the phone “The menu button” “There is no menu button” “It’s a hamburger icon” “What?” “3 lines” “How is that a menu?”

I accidentally saw a youtube ad today. It was a fake product with ai video and voice over. Complete scam. It was several minutes unskippable so i assume that’s expensive. They must be hoping to scam a lot of people. I had no idea it had gotten so bad.

I worked on new SCADA for a water company across all theirs sites. Previously they were a mismatch of different systems and all airgapped.

They standardised everything and put them all on VPN. Suddenly you could access the secure water treatment works with 24/7 security guards and the control room was a bunker, from the unmanned rural sewage works with a portacabin for the server, the key hidden under a brick, and wifi for the PLCs.

The sewage works had always operated like that because it was deemed low risk. No one considered the VPN changed the threat model.

Yeah but then someone has to actually read it to grade it

We’ve all done that at some point.

That sinking feeling when your quick update doesn’t return immediately.

Good to get into the habit of wrapping your queries in a begin transaction/rollback until you verify the result 😁

Yeah, it’s insane what it costs. We spend about $20k/month and that’s after a big oush to reduce costs.

I’m sure that’s tiny compared to many but like I said we’re only about 20 employees.

It’s pervasive as well, all those SasS products are probably running on AWS or one of the other big ones and so their cloud bill is baked into the prices. You end up paying them a dozen different ways.

I work for a really small company (20 people) that uses AWS. We discussed moving off and concluded it would be a multi year effort. I can’t even imagine how much work this would involve

I the clearest indication of this is that we have not seen any products to displace existing market leaders.

A UK plate is 2 letters, 2 numbers, 3 letters. That’s over a billion combinations.

Yeah i have to use W11 for work and the brand new Dell XPS, upper mid range, they gave me compared to my 2017 i3 with linux and all this is true.

About the half the time i boot it and the network just doesn’t connect. Wired or WiFi. Have to unplug the dock and reconnect it. DNS will drop for 10s at random.

There’s times my laptop shows it age like i was bulk processing a load of photos, just resizing, and it took several minutes when the newer cpu was probably several seconds but that’s the hardware, not the software.

My lesson in this came really early in my career. One of our execs was selling vapourware. Just promising our product, that we hadn’t made yet, could do literally anything. Then he insisted we build it on this platform he must have had shares in the way he pushed it, only it was also vapourware and didn’t do half the things it said it did.

He found it utterly inconceivable that a company would sell a product that didn’t do what it said despite doing the exact same thing himself. He was completely delusional.

A better example for me is driving, we don’t let children drive, millions of children have access to cars, there’s no age gate on the ignition.

Ultimately its the parents that stop kids driving.

Ban kids from using it. Then treat it like a public health problem and educate everybody on the problems, how to identify misinformation, keep themselves safe etc. And require the companies to provide the tools parents can use to protect their own kids. Parental controls exist but i feel they aren’t widely used because it’s difficult and complicated.

I’d go further and start regulating the use of algorithmic feeds for everybody but that’s probably harder to achieve.

It’s been truly terrible. When i first tried it, you didn’t get a tooltip showing the actual URL of links before you click them, you know, the thing literally every mandatory phishing training I’ve had to do for the past 20 years.

My understanding is that evaporative cooling is cheaper so it’s not a closed system. Constantly use new fresh, cold water and you don’t need something to cool down the hot water. Just dump it and let it evaporate or whatever.

Also when a human takes remote control, does that person have a driving licence valid in the place they are driving. Because last i heard they were in Indonesia or something. Presumably a taxi drivers licence as they are carrying passing passengers.

In 2014 I set up GitLab for my then employer. It had to be something self hosted because of client requirements. I was apparently the only one in a company of about 200 that knew anything about Linux.

Wasn’t too bad, just keeping it up to date etc. When I left in 2016 I’d just upgraded the server to ubuntu 16.04. It’s probably still running that now. I know someone who is still there and they’ve said GitLab itself hasn’t been updated since I left.

I set up a VPS as a VPN server just for me. There’s sites have definitely done this. Reddit for one. I get cloudflare captchas a lot as well.

You might be already paying a premium for a Skyscanner’s cut. I’d suggest find the flight on Skyscanner and then go directly to that airline’s website to see what the price is there.

I just tried it and got 723 on Skyscanner and 547 for the same ticket direct from airline.

No. Its had external library support for quite a while now