They’re trying to praise the Machine God, little do they know the Omnissiah considers abominable intelligence a deadly sin.

I’ve noticed pretty much zero disruption on Firefox with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock despite Google’s best efforts. Every time I thought I’d eventually be paying Google the Danegeld to avoid the firehose of spam I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

It would be a step in the right direction but the Tories would salivate at the idea of turning this election into a Brexit election. I suspect we’ve not heard the last of this and we’ll start re-aligning various policies with Europe on a case-by-case basis once the Tories are wandering the political wilderness, it’s the obvious thing for an incoming government to boost their economic credibility.

The old low pressure sodium lights we had in the UK were great on this front. They were about as efficient as LEDs as well but the bulbs got too expensive to make, so the last factory making them in Europe closed down and they mostly disappeared quite quickly.

I reckon they should switch street lights over to monochromatic yellow LEDs, they’d look the same as the old lights and not affect insect populations so much. They’re good for astronomers too as the light is only one wavelength.

It depends on the artistic and technological intent I think. Valve (tube) amplifiers are inferior to any modern amplifier in every way you could actually measure with an oscilloscope yet people still build them and valves are still produced they same way they were in the 1950s because the imperfections they produce in the sound can sound pleasant, which is down to psychoacoustic factors which have subjective as well as objective components. A photo that looks exactly like what we’d see naturally is one potential goal but it’s not the only one in my opinion.

I’m currently working in medtech, I don’t want to dox myself because the company is quite niche but it involves using machine learning to diagnose a particular disease much earlier when it’s more treatable. I’m managed by an experienced senior engineer who’s probably forgotten more about about the profession than I know and the workload is reasonable and well compensated. Yeah it’s a startup so you temper your expectations in terms of long-term job security but there’s definitely good companies out there, don’t get me wrong there’s a lot about the industry and the broader socioeconomic context it exists in that’s awful but there’s a lot of good opportunities too. I could bitch about the ecosystem for hours but at the end of the day I’m a bit of a drama queen, I’m well paid for interesting work and you can’t say fairer than that.

There’s certainly much more than adtech, you could actually exclude business to consumer industries entirely if you wanted and make an excellent living in the business to business sector where there’s lots of interesting problems to solve. If you’re thinking of training as a software engineer or similar and entering the industry I’d still very much recommend it if it’s something you enjoy and are good at. Give frontend a wide berth if you’re worried about framework churn too, the vast majority of my work is backend where the churn isn’t as bad and there’s always plenty of work for you if you’re decent at SQL and a couple of common languages used for that purpose.

We’re not all patent-shagging tech bros, if you want proof of this you can look at how most of the industry runs on freely shared code that’s written in enormous volumes for no other reason making the lives of programmers easier and therefore improving their productivity. If this almost anarchistic process stopped even for a month the whole thing would fall over and never get up again!

IP maximalists really screwed the pooch by inventing the term ‘piracy’ for copyright infringement, they made the act sound ten times cooler.

I’ll back you on that, Mac OS X Tiger was the prettiest OS Apple ever made in my opinion although Leopard was fantastic as well. The iPod in general and early iOS was gorgeous as well.

There’s enough astroturf on Reddit for a continent’s worth of obnoxious suburban fake lawns.