Interesting Links for 20-12-2023

[andrewducker]

1. A tech guru is waging a war on major media outlets across three continents, hiring a “media assassin” law firm to kill stories connecting him to “hacks-for-hire” controversy.

(tags:Technology hacking india censorship )

2. Animation vs. Physics

(tags:physics animation video )

3. Baby It’s Cold Outside discourse is the same as Macbeth discourse.

(tags:shakespeare funny )

4. NHS dentistry as we know it 'gone for good'

(tags:UK NHS teeth OhForFucksSake )

5. Why MAs at Oxford had to swear an oath against a man who'd been dead for over 500 years.

(tags:history university uk oxford murder viaPatrickHadfield )

6. New income tax band for people in Scotland earning over £75,000

(tags:scotland income tax )

7. Teams are more creative when they're sitting next to each other

(tags:creativity teams work psychology )

8. Iceland volcano erupts leaving 2.5-mile crack (with live video)

(tags:iceland volcano )

9. Tom Bombadil and The Ring, a Christmas story

(tags:Christmas lotr fanfic )

10. Lord of the Rings fan fiction writer tries to sue Amazon/Tolkien, gets countersued into a smoking crater

(tags:copyright fanfic EpicStupidity lotr Tolkien )

11. A series of charts showing how awful the Conservatives are for the economy

(tags:UK economy conservatives Labour )

12. Tory attempts to ban social transitioning in schools held up by lack of evidence showing it causes any problems

(tags:LGBT law schools UK )

Comments

[dewline]

1. So Rajat Khare considers himself self-appointed royalty, hm?

4. Meanwhile, in Canada, we're starting to get the ball rolling on a national dental care programme.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-dental-care-plan-benefit-1.7055975

6. We used to have ten levels of federal income tax. Nowadays, it's at five, I think...

8. Yikes!

12. The cruelty is the goal here, of course...

[andrewducker]

I'm glad Canada is getting on top of this!

[calimac]

1) You mean it isn't Elon Musk? There's somebody else like him?

2) This was amusing for about four minutes.

4) This is due to the Tories cutting NHS funding, yes?

5) I'm reminded of Sleeper, where the people of the future show the time-traveler a photo and say "This man was evidently so evil that he was erased from history and now we have no idea who he was." The time-traveler says sorry, he can't help. It's Richard Nixon.

10) He's not a fan fiction writer; he tried to have his book published professionally. That's why he got in trouble. He should have just changed all the names, like Dennis McKiernan did. The sorriest part is his pathetic belief that Tolkien would have approved. The monstrous self-regard of people who think an author will be interested in amateur sequels to their work, let alone clasp the amateurs to their bosom, is really quite startling. Tolkien's actual opinion may be found in a letter from 1966 to his secretary about a similar situation: "impertinent contribution to my troubles ... young ass ... such tripe."

[andrewducker]

There are regularly large numbers of people who try to drag Neil Gaiman into fanfic, despite his regular statements that he cannot do so for legal reasons, and does not want to for personal reasons. I have no objection to people writing their own versions of things, but leave the author out of it! And for goodness sake, don't try and make money out of works still in copyright (I can only imagine that you are hoping to not see what happens when The Hobbit and LOTR fall out of copyright.)

[calimac]

I do. But I haven't seen any additional desecrations of Mickey Mouse since he fell out of copyright, so perhaps nothing can be worse than what's already happened legitimately. Which is worse, Jackson which distorted Tolkien, or Amazon which is totally unrelated to Tolkien but pretends it is, I can hardly say.

Fan fiction was OK when it was printed in small-circulation fanzines. People who wanted could read it where it could be enjoyed inoffensively, and those who didn't want didn't have it waved in front of them. But the internet changed things. Posting on the open internet is tantamount to publishing.

[rmc28]

1. is interesting, especially the pattern in there about colocated teams having more equal distribution in the brainstorming phase, but remote teams consisting of a lot of people implementing a senior person's idea. Wondering if there's a cause/effect mixup there.

[channelpenguin]

I wondered the exact same thing.

[coth]

Can't you make the headline for 11 "A series of charts showing how awful the Conseratives are for people?"

[andrewducker]

Bit late, but yes.

[bens_dad]

7 Hmm. Doesn't seems to discuss whether they sit together - whether they are in the same town seems to be as close as the paper gets.

I was at the other end of the building from the rest of my team and once the one colleague I co-programmed (two people, one keyboard) with passed away, I didn't feel part of the team.

To my mind a team is a group of footballers sharing a pitch.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, this article has a little bit of truth, but is mostly misleading. (Which is par for the course when it comes to BI, I've found.)

From experience, my observation is that the point is correct -- teams produce better results if they are co-located. But only if they are truly co-located: that is, the team all share one big office. With permanent desks. And walls around that office, so that you're not distracted by all the other teams.

That is the "pit" environment that I worked in for several years around 2000, and while it was far from a panacea, it was by far the most productive environment I've ever been involved with. I did it at two companies, and we produced absolute magic. High-energy, high-communication, high-collaboration. (And an introvert's nightmare -- the downsides are quite real.)

You'll note, though, that that is nearly the exact opposite of the hotel-desked open-floorplan monstrosity that the bean-counters have now mandated at most companies (and are now imposing RTO mandates for): that is about the most counter-productive environment I can imagine, far worse than what my all-remote team does. (Making heavy use of Slack and Huddles to communicate near-constantly, which works quite nicely.)

I could believe that the main point -- idea-generation tends to centralize a bit more in all-remote teams -- but I doubt that's destiny, just something to be aware of and control for when managing an all-remote group.