While the four hottest days on record have occurred in the last seven years, with one of them just reaching 40 degrees, it's a bit of a stretch to say that the "UK now routinely sees 40C summer peaks".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's also a bit of a stretch to claim that there are "long stretches above 30C". Last year was considerably above average with 14 days, which came in two or three periods at least (I don't remember, but it wasn't one go). It certainly feels hotter than that, especially with buildings that are insulated for winter and don't have A/C or if you're down on the Tube.

https://www.extremeweatherwatc...

I do agree with you though, that person did write a lot of drivel!

I know software estimation for even small to medium projects can be bad, but what is it about government projects that makes it so hard? Low balled estimates to win contracts? Lack of appropriate project management experience and oversight?

If you think that is bad, see the estimates to restore the Palace of Westminster (UK's Victorian parliamentary building): £15-40 billion and up to 60 years. I saw somewhere that they expected the costs to balloon by 40-60% before VAT and inflation. It's currently costing nearly £1.5/week just in maintenance.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk...

Wasn't Crossrail something like 30% over budget and several years late? Maybe that's not bad for the construction industry ;)

How do you do that?

You can run x86 builds of Windows in Parallels on Apple Silicon? I didn't know that. I didn't think that was possible because it just offers virtualisation, not emulation. I thought you had to let Windows on Arm do the emulation to run x86 Windows apps. Also, isn't Parallels just a wrapper around Apple's virtualisation framework these days anyway?

Adobe Premiere Pro was a launch day application for Apple Silicon. That doesn't happen by accident with Apple's level of secrecy. Apple made sure the ecosystem was seeded with flagship products that worked well.

Anybody doing special hand optimisation for Arm processors has probably spent years optimising for Intel chipsets as well, so you can't really call bullshit on that.

Indeed, Apple have popped up and offered us some advice to improveme our SIMD optimisations that we'd done for Arm/NEON, and found an extra 10% speedup. Those optimisations are good for all Arm systems though, whether they're on-prem Ampere Altras or Amazon Graviton instances. And believe me, we've spent years tuning threading, writing better C or C++ code and hand writing Intel assembly or utilising compiler intrinsics coupled with some expensive profiling tools to find the code hotspots. In most cases, the Arm optimisations were done quickly because the hard work had already been done.

The Amazon Graviton instances are now getting pretty with higher numbers of cores. I don't have recent benchmarks, but Graviton = v3, they were always cheaper than the Intel and AMD machines, but very performant.

And the Russian people continue to endure despite their quality of life falling through the floor, runaway inflation, an inability to buy foreign goods and services, an inability to travel freely, and having to deal with an infinite number of flight delays for those who can still afford to travel to other countries.

I'm struggling to understand who still supports any of this. It's not enough to be a vatnik anymore; you have to be a literally insane vatnik.

Perhaps because it's not as bad as some media commentators think? The BBC's Steve Rosenberg has some of the best reports I've seen from Russia. They've had high inflation for all the years I've had teams there (2014). Hardware isn't really a problem to acquire. In fact, I got a decent and current MacBook Pro for one of me team members whose price include Russian VAT was less than the US list price sans sales tax. It didn't come with the standard Apple warranty, but the devices are pretty reliable these days anyway. Russian supply chains have realigned through China. Cars? Maybe a different story. Services also tend to be an issue, for example Visual Studio online activation doesn't work anymore and CLion can only be updated with a private VPN connected. Some websites also actively block Russian connections, on top of filtering by the Russian government.

As for travel, my colleagues have been on holiday in Japan and other countries in SE Asia and non-EU Europe. We sent one team member to Brazil - she got a Visa card from a former Soviet republic so she could use Uber while there. We're bringing some others over for team meetings in EU in a few months. So I'm not sure why you think travel is impossible.

It's a really interesting question why people tolerate the situation. It's bit like boiling a frog I guess. And fighting the system can have major life ending repercussions.

Cynical, but also incorrect. The team members ask to switch to Teams, which they were surprised to discover has better audio quality (but we agree, the rest of the app is shitter). We also don't do much with video, just audio and screen sharing. Slack is better for collaborative screen sharing.

Slack Huddles have also been taken out for most of the past month too. Slack in general still works, but huddles see people unable to join or continuously losing their connection. It also might be ISP specific (some users can use huddles, while the majority cannot). The general consensus amongst my Russian team members is that it's mostly about Telegram and broad blocking or filtering of AWS IP address ranges. Maybe it's something else, it's hard to say.

The UK has reliable rainfall data from the 1860's (165 years), and less reliable records going back further. But compared with 1,200 years, you have the right magnitude.

Right. Ultimately the only way to fix this is strengthen privacy laws and enforcement. The tech bros have a lot of influence; their brown nosing and corruption was really on display when the orange manbaby came back to power.

The enemy are companies making money of your data; business models championed by the likes of Google and Facebook. You could argue that they're just exploiting weak privacy laws and enforcement. The FBI aren't at fault for accessing publicly/commercially available data, unless there's some American law that forbids even this. Stop giving your data to companies. Stop supporting these businesses that don't respect you, your data or your privacy.

The printing on the keyboard is minor. The UK and US English keyboards are physically different:: e.g. just look at the enter key, which are orientated completely differently.

It was already building for Arm platforms. Iâ(TM)m sure they have NEON optimisations somewhere in there.