poisonwomb's comments

poisonwomb | 7 months ago | on: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

I think the governance stuff might push it over the top for a lot of organisations; it's pretty well integrated with IAM providers not only for structured/modelled data but also workspaces for the data sciencey stuff. Pretty much everything has permissions associated with it. When you have a big data engineering/science push off the back of the AI hype I think it appeals to the cheque writers to have something centralised and controlled.

Aside from that I do get the feeling that most small and medium sized companies have been oversold on it - they don't really have enough data to leverage a lot of the features and they don't really have the skill a lot of the time to avoid shooting themselves in the foot. It's possible for a reporting analyst upskilling to learn the programming skill to not create a tangled web of christmas lights but not probable in most situations. There seems to be a whole cottage industry of consultancies now that purport to get you up and running with limited actual success.

At least it's an incentive for companies to get their data in order and standardise on one place and a set of processes.

In terms of actual development the notebook IDE feels like big old turd to use tho and it feels slow in general if you're at all used to local dev. People do kinda like these web based tools tho. Can't trust people all the time! There's VS code and PyCharm extensions but my team work mainly with notebooks at the moment for good or ill and the experience there is absolute flaky dogshit.

I think it's possible to make some good stuff with it and it's paying my bills at the moment, but I think a lot of the adoption may be doomed to failure lol

poisonwomb | 7 months ago | on: LibreOffice says Microsoft Office exploits you, offers free ODF migration guide

You know, I did kind of think that until I sat down to use it and realised compared to MS office it’s like a glass of ice water in hell.

I do actually think on Mac if you just use the minimal toolbar buttons and the menu bar buttons it looks pretty presentable. Not good but not the worst. And on Linux/GTK it actually looks super nice

poisonwomb | 9 months ago | on: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

Yeah I’m interested in this as well. There’s something about the way time machine works over SMB that is absolutely unfashionably dog-slow. I suspect SMB performance on mac is just not very good in general tbf

poisonwomb | 1 year ago | on: No One Lives Forever (NOLF) Revival Edition

My understanding of this is that no one will actually confess to owning the IP, so this project also serves the purpose of baiting someone to actually come forward and submit a takedown notice as that would presumably reveal who owns it

poisonwomb | 1 year ago | on: My washing machine refreshed my thinking on software estimation

Men will write a blog post about software development rather than hire a skilled plumber lmao.

I think the moral of the story here is make sure you hire a software developer to code your application rather than rely on the guy who’s read some blog posts about excel formulas

poisonwomb | 1 year ago | on: UK's hardware talent is being wasted

The UK as a society doesn’t care about anything related to industrial production because it is ideologically opposed to anything resembling an industrial working class.

Skilled jobs are anathema to the ethos of the people in charge of the UK’s industrial policy - who have never held a skilled job in their life - as they would prefer everyone to be a backbiting, striving social climber like them, either moving money around of gumming up the system with endless bureaucracy.

This trend is exhibited in many of the ‘developed’ economies but it is particularly strong in the UK, a country fooling itself with delusions of grandeur while, like Wilde’s picture, its foundations gnarl and ossify and crumble, like dust into the dustpan of history. Next…

poisonwomb | 1 year ago | on: 89% of 2024 sexual offences in England went unsolve

Police funding was cut significantly after the financial crisis and is only just being restored to pre-GFC levels: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/perfor...

The number of reported sexual offences has increased by double digits over the last reporting period, and did the same in the last one: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...

There are a variety of factors at play behind the rise in reports, including high profile cases such as the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, in addition to massive coverage of historic sexual abuse by public figures like Jimmy Savile. There have been multiple high profile campaigns for women’s safety encouraging them to come forward and report cases of sexualised violence.

So despite the police force certainly allocating more resources to deal with these cases, the increase outstrips this. In addition, sexualised violence is notoriously difficult to prosecute beyond a reasonable doubt due to the ‘he said she said’ nature of a lot of the evidence and the delay in many of the victims coming forward.

Your point about immigration has a simple answer; it’s not a factor. This talking point serves to take very real social problems the country faces and use them to score political points by distorting the facts.

Case in point the grooming gangs scandal which was painted as a Pakistani muslim problem when it turns out Asians are UNDERrepresented and whites are actually OVERrepresented in the actual figures (88% of offences were committed by whites with them making up 83% of the population, south asians committed 7% of offences while making up 9% of the population)

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2025/01/the-gr...

Educate yourself and stop using my country’s problems to further your political agenda.

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