I keep all my clocks on UTC now. I can't be bothered to change them twice a year.

Yeah mate that's frankly nuts.

Firstly, you have to go to effort to stop you phones and laptops changing their times automatically. Secondly, your clocks are now mismatched from literally everyone around you half the time. 95% of the point of clocks is to synchronise things with other people. That's why we got the concept of centralized time in the first place.

Scotland only has six hours of daylight in the winter - so you're either going to work in the dark or coming home in the dark.

Or both! I'm further south (London) and in the depths of winter I was going to school before sunrise and would often/usually arrive home after sunset. And work is usually longer hours than school.

That actually seems worse than the alternative. If everyone's going to be shuffling times around, just sort it out centrally rather than having a month of incredibly vexing minor synchronisation errors.

Or, you know pick hours for when it makes most sense when there's least sun (winter) and just leave it there?

Not getting any sunlight until past 10.00 AM is so annoying,

Well not getting any sun past 4:30 in the afternoon is also so annoying. I live at the same latitude: the number of hours of sunlight is too short and all you are doing is shuffling it around.

and the cost of road maintenance because rush hours is when everywhere, there is still ice on the roads, will be prohibitive.

You what?

People complaining have simply no clue how it is to have DST in the winter, and can't imagine.

Or maybe people just don't agree with you? Or maybe you also didn't read the article title? The plan was to KEEP DST, so winter is unchanged.

Despite electing a communist mayor in their largest city,

Gosh a Mayor who isn't a drooling right wing nutjob actually representing what people, not coprs want? He must be out to sap and impurify your precious bodily fluid.

As a distant observer, I also like his style. Arseholes tried to block a bike lane, so he made it twice as big. Noice.

Good question. Their POWER series of CPUs were not insignificant in capability, their chip designers were clearly technically sophisticated, and GPUs are just specialised vector processors with a few extra bells and whistles - stuff IBM is extremely familiar with.

It would not have been difficult to release a GPU or other LLM-specific processor to go along with the POWER11. They'd been working on the POWER11 for 4 years, they knew in 2020 that LLMs had a strong potential to be significant for Big Data processing - an area you use big iron for, they're not rank amateurs, they have plenty of reserve, they could have assembled an emergency team to build a vector processor that was custom-designed for just LLM work, and released an LLM processor card that could run circles around nVidia.

They didn't. Because, as has happened before, their management is simply too stupid and too slow.

They can work, but they have major issues.

1)For at least the first 6 months, if not the first several years, it will take more time and money to teach them than they generate. Why would any company do this?

2)As a hiring manager at company B, I see you apprenticed at company A. I have no idea if that means you're qualified. I can't trust company A to tell me, they're a competitor. Schools stand as a neutral 3rd party telling me that they've completed a set curriculum and should know that much. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

3)Some fields just have a huge amount of up front learning before you can be useful at all. Apprentice plumber? You can run and fetch tools and hold things in place while you watch and learn. Apprentice electrical engineer? You have no idea what inductance is on day one. There's literally nothing you can do. So basically at this point you're hoping the company sets up a school.

If all goes as it should we'll all simply be working less in 10 years time.

That seems phenomenally unlikely. Absolutely vast changes were made to the world of work since the 1970s with the inexorable rise of computing and productivity gains have been vast. And yet the 40 hour work week has remained.

To be honest, I already am.

cool. You are not even slightly the majority in this.

What if...

Someone (say someone who was familiar with doxygen and GCC) developed number of comment types, where some stipulated preconditions that must be true for the function to run correctly, postconditions that must be true once the function has run, kernel facilities that the function definitely needs, and kernel facilities that the function definitely doesn't need. These would all be optional for any given function.

A static checker could then validate if the code meets the behaviour expected by the programmer. This is precisely what is done in SPARK, a fork of Ada for high-reliability code. Combined with existing static checker capabilities, this would greatly increase the number of bugs that could be caught with all kinds of tools, AI included.

It could ALSO build a full fine-grained mapping for any fine-grained mandatory access controls system. You'd also want includes that you could import for precompiled libraries. This would allow someone to verify if the code was making unanticipated/undesirable calls but would also make SELinux possible to develop for at the application level.

It would not be trivial. If it was trivial, it would have been done simply because it already IS done in other languages and that makes it "obvious" to anyone who has been programming for a while. However, it should not be massively complicated, simply because you can use AI as the static checker. Once it has a definite set of bounda that must be satisfied, it should be much more capable of knowing what paths would violate those bounds. Which means that the checker stage essentially is trivial today, leaving only the markup stage.

They can take their robotaxis, scooters, ebikes and everything else with them.

Nah, the dockess ebikes are really popular for good reasons.

I mean sure lots of people complain bitterly about them "taking up space" but somehow the 40% of people gifted land for free car storage in my part of London never get a mention in this whole "taking up space" argument.

Lime isn't 100% without problems, but providing effective, theft resistant, low impact point to point transport when the rest of the options are often stuck in slow moving traffic clogged by a shockingly small number of private cars works well. Our society won't yet distribute space more equitably apparently.

And not everyone is a low income disabled plumber urgently rushing their elderly fridge to hospital.

Oh yeah and even with all the dockless ebike problems, they are still vastly safer than cars.

I have been quite happy with my heavily customized FVWM desktop for about 30 years now.

Same! It's just really good.

I have not yet switched over to fvwm3. I do not anticipate much pain.

Two tier policing is alive and well in the UK.

It is: right wing protests get the ultimate in soft touch policing, especially farmers. Protestors causing similar disruption but aligned left get massively harsh sentences. This two tier policing absolutely needs to end and the police need to crack down as hard on the right as they do on the left.

That way maybe the right will stop advocating for it.

...facial recognition will alert shop owners when a compulsive buyer enters, so that he/she can be approached at once by shopping assistants.

What shopping assistants? They got rid of all of them which incidentally along with a bunch of other "cost saving" measures made shoplifting much easier.

make no mistake, this technology will be deployed against ALL offenders

Haha no. It's just deployed against random people for no discernible, preventable or transparent reason. Bugs? Yeah no shopping for you. Shitty algorithm? Say hello to the police (also no shopping for you). Etc...

at the very least, to avoid misunderstandings, users of this technology should post bonds payable to people that are falsely accused and accosted by law enforcement.

Yes. Automated slander is still slander even if you got an algorithm to do it. And accusing someone of shoplifting is 100% slander especially if it causes harm which being thrown out of a shop very much is.

Well quite. Either making an AI by copying something is copying in which case they're a bunch of criminals ready to go to prison for a thousand years according to how it works for peons, or it's not in which case the Chinese are also doing nothing wrong.

They want it both ways,

Utter fuckers.