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Sanguinaire's comments

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: For the first time in history, St Andrews outranks Oxbridge

"College" in the UK education system already has a definition; it is the place you go from 16 to 18, studying a narrower curriculum than regular school prior to 16. You will also hear references to "sixth form college", which is the same 16-18 education but delivered at the same physical school as under-16 teaching.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

I lived in Luton for a year and commuted in to London. Yes, it is certainly more affordable; but only because the NHS covers the cost of dealing with your stab wounds.

For non-UK people: yes of course I'm joking, however Luton is the home of both a large immigrant population and the "English Defence League", the closest thing we have to the KKK.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

There is/was a UK government "Help to Buy" scheme aimed at people who can only afford a 5% deposit, where the gov basically took part of the equity and then charged you rent on the portion you don't own. Never seemed like a good idea to me; just skews purchases to more expensive areas (ie London) and leaves the taxpayer with an even bigger share of the risk in the event of a house price crash. The only upside is political - the government gets to say they are helping first-time buyers.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

Once you factor in long contracts, the people who are desperate to go back to the office, and greater space requirements for proper social distancing - they pretty much do need to pay for those existing offices. Hopefully things will re-equilibriate, but I'd guess that will take another 2 years at least.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Unity patents ECS

The patent system is just not fit for purpose. Even for pharmaceuticals and other long-development-cycle products in the real world it has been corrupted beyond reason; I worked on battery materials for a while and even though there was plenty of prior art, a couple of players had basically patented every metal oxide possible under the guise of a cathode material, even though most of them would be utterly useless. Until there is some penalty for such time-wasting chancers, nothing will change. The software world makes it even worse by removing the already low bar for a proof of existence or actual benefit.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Scotland Joins the Growing Global Movement Towards a Four-Day Workweek

Options are problematic because you end up with a competitive/tragedy-of-the-commons situation, where no-one really ends up having the option at all if they want an appealing job or competitive salary.

Using national-level regulation to define a "new normal" isn't what I would choose by preference, but I just don't see anything else working without side-effects undoing all of the potential advantages to employees.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: OpenAI Sold its Soul for $1B

Not in the field, so genuine question: what is the evidence/theory to support the notion that deep learning is at all a reasonable route towards AGI? As I understand, this is nothing like how actual neurons work - and since they are the only "hardware" which has ever demonstrated general intelligence hoping for AGI from current computational neural networks feel like a stretch, at best.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: Scotland Joins the Growing Global Movement Towards a Four-Day Workweek

In short, more suitable staffing and scoping. Hopefully I don't need to explain the arbitrary nature of the 40-hour week.

A lot of people like the idea of flexibility along with these reduced hours, but I'd actually prefer if we went to a uniform 3-day weekend with Friday off. This would have the benefit of aligning the definition of the weekend in the middle East with that in Europe and the US.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: EU states looking for MS Teams/O365 alternatives

I would extend this by saying that most of the people in the US earning mid 6 figures as developers are doing even less good for society than those managers. The market set those salaries high because the negligible marginal cost of reproduction in the software industry is a lure for capital, not because it produces things we actually need.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: EU states looking for MS Teams/O365 alternatives

I agree that LibreOffice is basically a non-starter in this competition, but I also think you are over-selling the MS support experience - most of the information online to help with Word/Excel is rudimentary garbage cluttering up the search space.

We need a set of stand-alone Office alternatives which are fully cross-platform (so, Electron), backwards compatible with Excel spreadsheets and also offering more advanced no-code functionality, and for the Word/PowerPoint equivalents something with the power of LaTeX but an easy to use WYSIWYG fall-back.

Is that really so much to ask?...

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition (2019)

From the cloud provider perspective, number 7 is by far the most important but the article really under-sells it.

Cloud providers don't hunt around for SaaS products to rip off; they are approached by customers who are unhappy with the status quo. There could be any number of things the customer dislikes about your VC-floated company - pricing structure, dealing with your sales people, risk of you getting bought by another cloud provider and taken off the market, etc.

Don't blame big companies when your value proposition is wafer thin and your customers are required to be fellow tech bros in order to want to deal with you.

Sanguinaire | 4 years ago | on: How the pandemic has affected people’s perspective on travelling to work

Again, depends heavily on the industry. Also, I'm not entirely sure this is a good thing; I see a lot of "Twitter famous" people fawning over each other at the moment in something resembling a white-collar version of the US tipping culture, but I don't think that kind of behaviour should be allowed to take root more than it already has. One of the other positives we should be taking from a remote-first culture is greater appreciation for the practices of other cultures (since they are now so much more accessible). I hope we're not sliding towards a world where American fake niceness dominates and more reserved modes of interaction are sidelined.
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