The HAMBOTVER of the 2000s!

It’s an awful decision!

I’ve seen a similar design fail at a veterinary kennels - super Gucci, super nice, super high tech… but useless because a deep scarlet was used as a kennel floor paint. For the sickest of dogs (in the health sense, not busting 900’s in a doggy daycare halfpipe) - one of the first signs of serious illness is blood being left from one or more orifices in the kennel after a set amount of time. The nature of the floor meant that this couldn’t be seen at first glance.

Same thing with black latex gloves - they might make you feel like you’re about to pull of a diamond heist, it they’re a bit shit for medicinal use as a medic or first responder can’t check for (or otherwise notice) hidden blood or leakage during an initial survey.

Interesting stuff if you ever get to work beside those sorts of folks.

A shitpost duel awaits.

The winner gets seven statues on all continents, each facing a finely-calibrated direction - the intersection of their gazes meet at a point where the secret to humanity is buried.

The loser gets a year using the upside-downternet, six months on ISDN, or a week on MySpace as the only communication method with the outside world.

Intelligence is domain specific.

I need this on a plaque above my desk phone. It’s perfect.

Yes, but also no.

The Civil Service runs on menial tasks, the public sector could trim down by - and I’m pulling a figure out of thin air here - at least 20% if a lot of the superfluous admin grade jobs were automated or trained on.

That said, nobody can hallucinate and produce wildly neutral and self-defeating policies quite like the civil service. That’s something we’ll intuitively beat AI at for centuries yet.

I mean, it sucks yes, but there has to be an acceptance that if you continue to use Meta products in the knowledge that Meta will rip you off for every shred of data that they can, then there’s not really a defence of ignorance any more.

Meta are absolutely a cunty company, but it’s not as if that’s not common knowledge any more.

It will only stay as the default messaging platform for as long as people bury their heads in the sand as tradeoff for convenience.

Don’t

simple really

Obligatory:

Well, they’ve got a point.

I’m surprised they didn’t put the boot in to the UK’s shameful abstention too.

Disgraceful.

Brilliant! Even funnier that it was the QM that done goofed!

I always knew procurement across the UK public sector was wasteful, but I never knew quite how wasteful until I started working alongside various bodies.

This was just one of the more egregious - and more entertaining - examples.

Another story from the workplace probably worthy of a “who, me?” segment on el reg:

An old admin grade at one of my last workplaces was… unique, in her approach to her workload. In the times that we haven’t had an admin assistant in post, the workload gets shared out amongst the team so the job still gets done, but it’s primarily menial and trivial stuff. It’s not difficult, but the way the civil service works, sometimes a ten second job takes ten minutes. It wasn’t that she was particularly awful - just a bit useless and had all the critical thinking skills of a common housebrick. Anything that needed a decision made became someone else’s job.

Someone went in to to see her wanting another AA battery, to replace one in the clock to stop people from losing their minds having done a few hours in the office, but still only seeing half past nine on the clock. There’s none left in the store cupboard, so she logs on to the ordering system, and realises that they come in nondescript “units”, rather than the SKU style setup you see on most retailer sites. So, she goes for 10 - thinking ten packs would be enough for a while.

A week later, a lorry pulls up at the office, with a pallet for delivery. Nobody’s expecting this, and we can’t lift it off the lorry for it being too heavy, and we had to get a neighbouring unit’s forklift driver to pop it off the lorry for us and leave it at our side door, probably for a pack of fags and a coffee. We opens it up, and hurrah, our batteries are here!

All ten thousand of them.

Turns out, a “unit” in this branch of the civil service is “per thousand”, so we literally had nearly a tonne of batteries on a pallet outside. We tried phoning the distribution centre, and they’re clearly not giving a fuck about something as low value as this, and certainly aren’t sending a truck to get them - this was now an “us” problem.

One of the lads pulls out a stick of batteries, goes back into the office, comes back ashen faced…

“Boys, the clock needs AAA batteries”

We had a slowly dwindling mountain of AA batteries for about three months, literally people taking strips of batteries home at Christmas to put in toys, people bringing in old Game Boys or Game Gears just to try them out with a supply of new batteries, and a Sky Digital remote control with a now perpetually infinite lifespan.

God bless the civil service.

A few public sector organisations have had a compromise, where you get an hourly rate and a phone to be on-call. It’s something daft like two pounds per hour, but it does work out to be an extra £100 or £150 a month before tax with attendance expenses paid if you needed to get onsite.

There was probably a compensation arrangement too but I just took off the time that I worked at my convenience - generally the following day in the morning for a lie-in.

I suppose you could always ignore after-hours calls from work - boss or otherwise - but the fallout would unfortunately have been pretty predictable.

Good news all round. Fuck doing work outside the paid window. Unless it’s a dire personal emergency for one of my staff, then fine - but damn right I’m taking a half hour flyer one day in the week.

Euronews has done what The Independent did in the UK - went from being a brilliant source of news, to being a bit of a shambles. I used to watch the Euronews channel pretty much daily until they pivoted to a magazine show style of output. The website is just as bad.

A shame really.

COBOL has entered the chat

e: good for legacy employment though. A relative of mine is a Z80 programmer by trade, and he can effectively walk into a job because the talent pool is so small now. Granted - the wages are never great but never poor, and the role is maintenance and troubleshooting rather than being on the leading edge of development - but it’s a job for life.

Awesome, I think I may go back to a language myself. Thanks for checking it out and letting us know!

Anecdotally, a friend who’s pretty handy at languages uses more Memrise than Duolingo now. Similar sort of setup, but with a different style of delivery - more visual cues and a better repetition approach.

It was quite lenient with my error-prone French.

That said, Duo is well known for A/B testing so no doubt we were just using different feature sets.