Notices by Quixoticgeek (quixoticgeek@social.v.st), page 2

From the no shit sherlock school of research. Being poor is exhausting and debilitating. It's amazing the difference even small amounts of money can have on someone's mental health.

So of course, having enough money to be able to put a small amount of it aside is going to make you feel a lot better than being worried that you might not be able to afford food this week.

Poverty costs the UK £78Bn a year. Maybe we should use some of that to lift people out of poverty

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy08nnxr14po

@BethanyBlack eek. Hope you're ok. Get well soon!

@BethanyBlack Purchased. Thanks!

@BethanyBlack oops. Hope it's an easy fix. Thanks

@BethanyBlack Is this a UK only thing? that page doesn't load for me in .nl :(

Bicycles are incredibly efficient. But velomobiles take it to another level. The rider of this velo just did 400km in 16 hours and 15 minutes. Am impressive feat.

@dalias @markwaypoint the problem with e velos is that velo riders get enough hassle from police who think they are running illegal electric motors to be going as fast as they are. If you have a motor fitted. Even if it definitely cuts out at 25kph. The burden of proof to show it wasn't working when you passed the cops at 50kph is hard.

@dalias @markwaypoint doing 25kph in a velo is so easy, it's not worth the hassle of the ebike gubbins.

@goatsarah you're an artist! Nicely done.

Please forgive me that my #Florespondance has been so sparse of late. Much has got in the way of enjoying nature. Today I managed to escape to the woods for an afternoon to spend some time with the blue bells. Hadn't realised how much I enjoy a woodland carpeted with bluebells, and the occasional wild garlic. I returned to home feeling refreshed, and happy.

May these blue bells bring a smile to your #BloomScrolling too.

@goatsarah exactly. I used to go back every 6 months, and the change was gradual enough to not notice it as much. But COVID meant I couldn't go for 3 years. It just broke the cycle of the boiling frog.

In a way I feel survivors guilt for having managed to escape.

@goatsarah having just returned to the continent after a weekend in the UK. You sum up what I experienced exceedingly accurately.

It's heart breaking to watch.

Am starting to think strange women laying in ponds distributing swords, might not be as bad a system of government as previously believed...

We need to talk about data centres.

For the 2nd or 3rd time this week I've seen someone comment on a new data centre build with a stat about how 80% of data is never accessed. Then they talk about the energy and cooling used in modern DCs.

The reality is that data storage is actually incredibly efficient, and uses fuck all power. A hard disk is less than 10w and stores multiple users data.

Storing data, our photos, our memories, our history. Is not the problem.

What is? 1/n

"oh good, $partners flight has taken off safely"
*Pause*
"It's ok, it's an airbus"

Any fediverse people who are at #CfgMgmtCamp fancy meeting during this afternoon coffee break at 1545 ? Meet near the coffee area ?

Fedi help me, as search is failing. Someone recently tooted about the .run tld existing, and how when searching for a filename in a web browser, it too them to a somefile.run website which was a malware hell hole.

Now I can't find it. Anyone remember it ?

The postoffice horizon scandal in the UK has put the spotlight on the coding practices of Fujitsu.

With the publishing of some code snippets, several people who have looked at it have replied "Wow, are they paid by the line of code?"

Which, while often meant as a joke, has some basis in history, and it opens up the discussion, of how do you incentivise programmers and how do you judge their achievements for the basis of bonues?

It's thread time.

1/n

In the past shortly after programming went from being considered women's work, to being considered men's work (see my thread about thread, and how weaving changed from women's to men's work). Management found themselves with the problem of how to judge the performance of their programmers. You can judge a brick layers performance by the number of bricks layed, a rivet maker by the number of rivets. What's the output of a programmer? It's line's of code.

2/n

So for a short time you'd get people paid based on the number of lines of code written. Thus rather than a one line for loop such as for(i=0; i<10; i++) dosomething();, you right out do something() ten times, thus your lines of code output is higher, your pay higher. Everyone's happy. Right?

Ye gods no, you end up with write once code that's a fucking nightmare to debug.

Fortunately such practices didn't last very long. Generally.

But the problem remains. How do you judge performance?

3/n