Interesting Links for 07-03-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Scotland is finally getting more district heating (not far from Edinburgh)

(tags:scotland heating waste )

2. "My Robotic Doppelganger Is The Grim Face of Journalism's Future!"

(tags:journalism ai fraud )

3. Sweden's adoption of the Gregorian calendar was a farce

(tags:sweden calendars history )

4. Robot ships: Huge remote controlled vessels are setting sail

(tags:robots ships )

5. Edinburgh bus tracker system will not have live bus times until the summer

(tags:edinburgh buses )

6. Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug

(tags:leadership management business development )

Comments

[bens_dad]

3. Switzerland doesn't seem to have been much better. Each area did it in one go, but the last communes switched 230 years after the first cantons.

4. The Netscape co-founder Jim Clark's yacht Hyperion was remote-controlled, and at the time it was the tallest sloop in the world. You could hoist the main-sail (and any others) from anywhere in the world. My recollection is that theoretically it required an onboard crew of zero.

[channelpenguin]

Zero CREW, perhaps. Ship's engineer plus minions ... absolutely!!

I have done a lot of sailing and my father was a ship's engineer before he retired.

LOTS of stuff goes wrong and wears out at sea, it is a harsh place...

[bens_dad]

On Thu, 7 Mar 2024, channelpenguin - DW Comment wrote:

[calimac]

3) And Finland not only went through all of that, but then got to live under both calendars at once for 90 years.

6) Devout relief that I never worked for a for-profit corporation.

[redbird]

3) Both humans looking at old documents, and computers programmed to handle pre-1901 dates, are likely to reject 30 February 1712 as an error. The human is more likely to assume that the hand-written document should say February 20, 28, or 29, and "correct" it; a computer program would be more likely to reject the "impossible" input. Various stuff online about "falsehoods programmers believe about dates" is more likely to remind people that their code has to handle ordinary leap years, or that 1900 wasn't a leap year and 2000 was, than to get into the missing calendar dates when different places adopted the Gregorian calendar.

[lovelyangel]

I loved the Leadership article! It pushed all my buttons and reminded me of all the rants I've had in the office about my company's and my department's lack of real leadership. And the corporate "leadership team" brought in expensive outside consultants to develop strategy and reorganization (read: layoffs), and it was clear the consultants and corporate "leaders" had zero clue as to who was valuable, who had knowledge, and who was working on what. I'm sharing the article with my co-workers.

[channelpenguin]

The link in it to the "big essay" about Pivotal Software made me realise how lucky I have been in the majority of my recent jobs, in that we do have very similar attitudes within our organisation (although at the other sub-contractors for our client on my current project, it's a different story...). We don't have managers, there's one level between me and the strategic management, and though we have Lead Devs (I'm one) we're about to retitle that (not sure to what).

I have survived 30+ years by pretty much ignoring any management except my direct team leads and deciding that it's THEM I work "for" (though it's always been "with". They have been, with ONE exception (inexperienced), fantastic. At least in my permie roles. But if course you meet them in the hiring process so you can reject a job if you don't like them.

I've also bombed a pair programming interview, because I got too caught up in "performance" and trying to solve the issue "by myself". My own fault, I guess I was doing a lot of interviews of the other style at the time. I absolutely understand why I bombed.

I would probably have failed the Pivotal interview though - they mention "raw input speed" and my typing speed is APPALLING and I can't touch type.

Robot ships

[anna_wing]

How robot ships and their owners would deal with physical hijacking, remote hacking and armed attacks, who has legal responsibility and liability for accidents or terrorist incident using a hijacked or hacked ship, and what happens if you lose the connection with HQ or the satellite, are some other basic questions that need to be answered. There are still ports in the world that need ships to be brought in manually.