Do you have the same opinion of labour-saving inventions that were created before you were born, or is it just future ones that are evil?

I did not have a voice to inventions created before I was an adult. I have one now. And in fact, we have lessons from very similar technologies on how this would play out (internet + social media), so we can't say "how could we have known?!".

Zurich is third behind Dublin (definitely for tax reasons) and London.

The site doesn’t make it clear, but it’s not available worldwide. The App Store doesn’t tell you where exactly it is available, but it’s not in the UK.

This surprised me seeing as one of the example images shows Europe, including the south coast of Britain.

From website's FAQ:

Acme is currently available in the United States (including Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico) and Canada.

In Canada it's $35/yr and I don't see any indication of the 2-week trial that's mentioned on their website. Probably can still cancel within two weeks, but it simply has a Subscribe button before you can do anything.

They fortunately fixed the repeating feature in iOS 18.3. Though it does seem a bit ridiculous that something like this is tied to the entire OS version.

Oh, nice - thanks! So it was a bug afterall.

Do you mean “difficult to overstate”?

“Difficult to understate” would mean he has little to no social capital.

I bet this is the same guy who draws markings on the pavement to tell dognappers where to strike!

“In Paris, you can buy a beer in McDonalds” ~ Vincent Vega

https://youtu.be/6Pkq_eBHXJ4

I spent several hours earlier this year helping a colleague debug a protobuf deserialisation error, where I noticed that the first byte was a varint-encoded length of the rest of the data! He did eventually get things working, though I never followed up on the root cause.

I can’t wait to get back from vacation to ask if it was this.

In general, people often forget that if your target is a ratio, you can attack the numerator or the denominator. Often the latter is the easier to manipulate.

Even if it's not a ratio. When any metric becomes a target it will be gamed.

My organization tracks how many tickets we have had open for 30 days or more. So my team started to close tickets after 30 days and let them reopen automatically.

Lower death rate in hospitals by sending sick people to hospice! https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctors-say-hca-h...

Meanwhile that's not necessarily a bad outcome. In theory it makes the data better by focusing on deaths that might or might not have been preventable, rather than making every hospital look responsible for inevitable deaths.

Of course the actual behavior in the article is highly disturbing.

They weren’t scammed, they willingly chose to engage in scummy behaviour with a company that enables such scummy behaviour.

...and have published a 'disheartening' invoice dated 31st Oct 2022 - then work with the company for another ten months. Apparently content to be on the "dirty side of the Internet" and doing something that made them think "Something didn't seem right."

All very odd.