Interesting Links for 24-10-2023

[andrewducker]

1. A checklist for managers

(tags:management advice lists )

2. Excel now lets you disable its "helpful" turning of letter/number combinations into dates.

(tags:date excel GoodNews )

3. Four of the five developers for the original Mario game worked on the most recent one

(tags:Mario games development history )

4. The pandemic's true death toll (around 27m people. So far.)

(tags:Pandemic death )

5. The UK criminal justice system has now failed

(tags:UK law epicfail austerity )

6. Edinburgh University failing over sexual misconduct complaints

(tags:Edinburgh university abuse sex )

7. UK Government using AI to decide on benefits and driving licences

(tags:ai OhForFucksSake law government uk )

8. 'Failure to act' on suicide website linked to 50 UK deaths

(tags:suicide uk web )

Comments

[nancylebov]

5. How did the UK come to be so short on barristers?

[andrewducker]

Government paying very low levels for each court case, leaving many of them to leave for corporate jobs instead.

[naath]

8. let people make choices you don'h like dammit

[andrewducker]

There are irrevocable choices people can make which seem vital for what turn out to be temporary reasons.

I'm on board with euthenasia. I'm not on board with people who are suffering from depression being encouraged to kill themselves without being offered help first.

[naath]

well that would b e nice if anyone could actually help, there is no money or time, so you can be poor and miserable, b ut you must be alive, that is all that matters, and I am sick of it

[andrewducker]

Yes, I agree that that's a shit state, and I'm not at all happy about that.

[zz]

amen. censorship *and* denying people the right to end their own lives is 2 human rights violations.

[naath]

well quite, but think of the chiiiiildren (I aw, all the children stuck with awful parents, but of course the parental lobby has all the power)

[errolwi]

2. Is a bit half-arsed. Only changes what happens (or doesn't) on importing a non-Excel file, so will still change stuff if you are manually entering. The date one is the one that I am leaving on, leaving leading zeroes and never converting to scientific notation suits much more useful for me. Bank Account numbers in NZ mainlt start with a zero, and they are stored as simple numbers in our finance system.

[channelpenguin]

I have had a financial fraud case where I am a victim have many many postponements, so that with prosecution started in 2017, we will just about get sentencing on the dude in December this year. We will get at least some money back, but of course all the delays mean that it is years more of non-investment and inflationary losses (which of course we won't). Some other victims are elderly and it was retirement money. :-(.

[andrewducker]

So rubbish. Justice should be swift (but not unreasonably so).

[hairyears]

Excel date conversions have been a known bug for a quarter of a century, and the largest corporate users have tried to raise the issue with Microsoft repeatedly...

And they haven't fixed it now:

The feature does not support disabling these conversions during macro execution.

...And that's half of the automated bulk database imports, right there.

The other half is database drivers that read spreadsheets directly into database tables and queries, and SSIS (SQL Server's data import toolkit); there's no mention of the 'fix' for that, and the high-profile Excel errors in genetics are set in stone during bulk data imports.


Beyond that, there is no mention of Microsoft's failure to follow the ASCII standard for CSV data files; and I'm not convinced that anyone in Redmond actually knows what happens out of sight in Excel's idiosyncratic implementation of copy-and-paste.

[andrewducker]

Yikes. That's a real shame.