I’m currently working in medtech, I don’t want to dox myself because the company is quite niche but it involves using machine learning to diagnose a particular disease much earlier when it’s more treatable. I’m managed by an experienced senior engineer who’s probably forgotten more about about the profession than I know and the workload is reasonable and well compensated. Yeah it’s a startup so you temper your expectations in terms of long-term job security but there’s definitely good companies out there, don’t get me wrong there’s a lot about the industry and the broader socioeconomic context it exists in that’s awful but there’s a lot of good opportunities too. I could bitch about the ecosystem for hours but at the end of the day I’m a bit of a drama queen, I’m well paid for interesting work and you can’t say fairer than that.

There’s certainly much more than adtech, you could actually exclude business to consumer industries entirely if you wanted and make an excellent living in the business to business sector where there’s lots of interesting problems to solve. If you’re thinking of training as a software engineer or similar and entering the industry I’d still very much recommend it if it’s something you enjoy and are good at. Give frontend a wide berth if you’re worried about framework churn too, the vast majority of my work is backend where the churn isn’t as bad and there’s always plenty of work for you if you’re decent at SQL and a couple of common languages used for that purpose.

We’re not all patent-shagging tech bros, if you want proof of this you can look at how most of the industry runs on freely shared code that’s written in enormous volumes for no other reason making the lives of programmers easier and therefore improving their productivity. If this almost anarchistic process stopped even for a month the whole thing would fall over and never get up again!

IP maximalists really screwed the pooch by inventing the term ‘piracy’ for copyright infringement, they made the act sound ten times cooler.

I’ll back you on that, Mac OS X Tiger was the prettiest OS Apple ever made in my opinion although Leopard was fantastic as well. The iPod in general and early iOS was gorgeous as well.

There’s nothing wrong with speculation as long as everyone knows that’s what going on.

Take the work of Julian Jaynes for example; it’s fringe, it’s speculative, but he’s asking questions that nobody else asked before and that in itself is worthwhile because it can pave the way for better questions which are falsifiable.

I lived in rural Wales for a while so I know this feeling. Growing up in England I thought I knew about rain before but on the Cambrian Coast it rains sideways.

Good for them, doesn’t change the fact I find driving at 20 mph very frustrating compared to 30 mph for that reason.

I think this policy will fail to be honest; while I’m not in Wales any more Oxford where I live now is a supposed ‘cycling city’ with most roads at 20 mph and honestly I hate being on the road there either in a car or on a bike; I get the bus in even though it’s often flaky. Driving you’re sat between second and third gear the whole time so you’re either revving too hard and wasting petrol or the car naturally speeds up so you’re spending a lot of attention on not getting fined rather than keeping it on the road, and when you’re cycling the cars that do keep to 20 mph linger beside you for what feels subjectively a lot longer when they overtake which isn’t fun either and the tiny bike lines make you feel vulnerable to traffic. I had a lot of near misses when I did it regularly and Oxford is a very small city, the idea of cycling somewhere like Cardiff would be terrifying to me.

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Yeah the guitar amp and vintage HiFi markets keep a few types (mostly power triodes and pentodes but also preamp valves and even a couple of rectifiers) in production, largely in the former Eastern Bloc. There’s a few people on YouTube making their own too.

I’m so far from an expert it’s not even funny but I’m a hobbyist for old valve (tube on the other side of the Atlantic) electronics. You need an industrial base to make semiconductors but if you can do flamework with glass and build a good enough pump that opens the door to amplifiers, radio, telecommunications, and even crude computers which in turn opens the door to a lot of creature comforts and social improvement that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

Vintage audio is the best, I’m planning on building a Mullard 5-10 hifi valve amp from the 1950s in the relatively near future as my second valve project (a micro-power valve AM radio transmitter is my current work in progress). The parts are spendy especially the transformers but valve/tube stuff is just so cool and the fact you can just build a 70 year old design using datasheets of the same vintage and have it work just as well now is so refreshing to my programmer brain that’s used to stuff going out of date when you blink. Also I’m a magpie for glass and glowing things.

The downside is of course that the voltages involved tend to be rather unpleasant, the 5-10 design calls for 250 volts off the top of my head and some amps use 500+. Also they’re unspeakably inefficient by modern standards, it’s essentially a statement of ‘I’m putting rule of cool over sensible cost-sensitive engineering and you’re going to love it’ which I’m very here for.

Where I’m from if you’re out on bail or not (and what conditions are attached) is up to the court or the police depending on where you’re currently at in the justice system, you don’t pay anything regardless of your wealth.

I prefer this system as the reasons whether or not someone ought to be bailed don’t really have a lot to do with wealth usually so it seems unfair to make it a factor, but I can certainly see the reasoning to put a number on it as I suspect it does dissuade people breaking their bail conditions.

Scared people for the most part. While I’m not American myself I grew up in an adjacent (Calvinistic Baptist) worldview and I cannot emphasise enough how much fear plays a role in that worldview. It’s pretty much a socially transmissible anxiety disorder in my experience, the evangelical worldview is ironically very well evolved to spread from one person to another because it directly hijacks your scepticism by upping the stakes too high for your brain to process it properly. You’re not allowed to express the fear though because that would be evidence you’re not really saved.

I’m not making excuses for them at all, I mean I’m very aggressively pro-LGBT rights and I grew up in that world so it’s definitely possible to escape it. What I am saying though in the spirit of ‘know your enemy’ is that in many cases these people from age five upwards will have been taught they are utterly disgusting in the eyes of god and deserve after they die to forever be tortured gruesomely beyond the power of English words to express because they were born human and are therefore guilty of original sin. These people see themselves as having been measured by the supreme creator of the universe and been found personally, individually beneath contempt. The only way you can escape your completely just fate of being eternally consciously tortured is if God predestined you to be saved and you’re one of the limited few that Jesus’s sacrifice actually applied to, in this world most of humanity exists only to be burned for the glory of God and if you ever fall away from the worldview you were never saved to begin with.

Again, I’m in no way excusing their bigotry which I loathe especially deeply having seen it at closer quarters than most. This is what we’re dealing with though from a purely practical point of view, if you or I are wrong then we’re just wrong but if these people are wrong then they will suffer a fate many times worse than death. This is why encounters with evangelicals are really intense for the most part, and why they’re so needlessly horrible from a secular perspective. While they’d never admit it in a million years the ideology is pretty trauma-driven for many of its adherents whether it’s the fear of hell, fear of losing their entire community even though they don’t believe any more, fear of rejection over some stupid theological difference (this lot make the revolutionary left look broad-church by comparison when it comes to factionalism) or any of the other fears that sound completely insane outside of that community but subjectively are very real.

An older tradition is to use the birthstone of the person you’re proposing too which is really endearing in my opinion.

Microsoft literally used to make it part of their OEM agreement that manufacturers couldn’t bundle their machines with anything but Windows, you’ve paid for it in the form of reduced competition in the OS market.

The other half of this scam is the piss-poor public transport in a lot of countries, here in the UK if you’re not a Londoner the government could not care any less about carrots only sticks to get people out of cars.

I’d buy a nice house somewhere a bit wild and in the middle of nowhere on the south coast of either England or Wales, something old with character and a big garden with a good pub nearby. I’d also buy a classic wooden sailing yacht and put enough funds aside to maintain her as well as kitting her out for serious passage-making. When I’d done that I’d figure out how much money I need to make work optional for the rest of my life and how much would keep my family comfortable in an emergency, as well as a small ‘shit hits the fan’ fund kept in something you don’t need electricity to access like gold just in case. I’d then donate the rest to charity, the bulk to enviromentalist lobby groups and charities directly helping people (the RNLI comes to mind for example) but also to a few niche causes like keeping the ailing pirate radio ship Ross Revenge afloat and starting a breeding programme to save the highly endangered otterhound. I’d also like to have a few documentaries made, and I’d drop a few content creators I like some donations too.

Honestly all I really want to do is go sailing and not have to deal with the rat race, I don’t want to live an oligarch’s lifestyle and I definitely don’t want the sort of attention and arseache that money would bring you. That money would be far more effectively used for good in the hands of others so I’d end up donating the majority of it, I suspect on the order of 80% of it at least.

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Yeah it’s such a shameless cash grab, I know corporations mug us off every day but it’s disrespectful when they’re so desperate about it.

Yeah IP lawyers ruining my music collection is why I started keeping my music offline for the first time in over a decade.