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

Perhaps it’s that I am not an early adopter. I wait until I have good reason to update. It sucks that they make their customers unwitting beta testers, but they seem to have stuff sorted after the phone has been on the market for several months

My pixel 1 was and is fine. Pixel 3 was an excellent phone. The only bad phone I recall from Google was the Nexus 5x which was made by LG

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

Actual real world right now giant rockets include

• One that is being built under waterfall methodology. It has been being built for several years. That’s the Blue Origin New Glen heavy lift reusable rocket

• One that is being developed under an agile methodology, it flew as a subscale lander to test their engine and flight control, it has flown four full test flights, improving on each. That’s SpaceX’s Starship

We are yet to see either launch a payload to orbit

The problem is if only 10% of the population is obsoleted, that ten percent needs to find new, different, jobs.

Official stuff, sure, but not system generated email from giant companies like Microsoft

I’m amazed at how much better the official launcher is on Linux than on windows.

Windows:

• complains if your logged in account doesn’t match your game account
• Requires you to log out of one account to log into another in a not very clear or user friendly way

Linux

• No logged in account to complain about
• Lists all your accounts and lets you swap by clicking on the one you want in the accounts list

So take MS to small claims court. Get an order for them to restore your account and user name per the licence you presumably still have a copy of

I have gotten more free accounts on Minecraft than any other game. I bought it twice on Java (not counting copies I bought for family) and once on bedrock, so when they moved accounts to Microsoft and gave every Java account a bedrock account and every bedrock account a Java account, so I now have three on each version. A second (or third) account is useful for rescuing your main account in some circumstances

They need more than email verification. Some privacy minded people signed up with throwaway email, but probably have other proof of ownership

A search in Gmail (which that used) finds stuff on spam. Also Gmail won’t put a Microsoft company’s mail in spam

Funny, in Australia we have school dances and they don’t get anything like American proms, with the possible exception of girls’ debutante balls which we dress up for

That’s probably because your file is over 10MB and would be rejected by most receiving systems

If your modification makes it unroadworthy, you might not be allowed to drive it on public roads

If your modification changes its structure you may need certification that it is still roadworthy

I’m not seeing a case where you’re restricted by law from modifying the car

Software has special legal protections. You can stop it working with impunity, you can break it with impunity, you cannot legally defeat security on the software. Corey Doctorow calls the software protections “felony contempt of business model”

Tesla allow you to opt out of all connectivity

It means you would have no maps, no driver assist, no Internet radio

Anyway if you buy a car it is yours. The worst you can do is break the contact for whatever services are provided by the connectivity. You are allowed to modify a car however you like

Tesla don’t support CD. You’d need to rip those to mp3 and keep them on your phone to play over Bluetooth

You can get the artifact with no problems at all by telling shadow to wait in camp

As a rule when talking to management you love the place you work, 5 years? You’ll be there in ten

I mean unless you have complaints you really feel you need to raise

They won’t tell you if they’re planning on firing you. You take the mandatory notice you must give as a target and never give more notice than that.

When I was a primary school kid we didn’t have gifted and talented classes. Kids who were ahead of the class could continue doing more and more advanced maths, move onto the next year’s work, though in 6th grade the problems only went up to advanced 6th grade. I don’t know what you would do if you were smart but unsatisfied with maths, I guess you’d be disruptive.