Would have taken permanent BST in a heartbeat. There's little so depressing as getting out of work into the dark for months at a time, IMHO.
I remember being vaguely on board with the a radical proposal that did the rounds about 20 years ago there - Single winter, Double summer. Keep changing the clocks but shift the whole thing an hour later so we got lighter evenings.
Yes, I do think I could be an electrician, because I have an understanding of how electricity works, and I’m pretty good on the tools.
Obviously there would be some retraining and a period as an apprentice, and honestly I’m not sure I could afford that, but if we downsized the house maybe.
But mostly I’m posting here because this article is a pile of crap.
It uses pre-AI figures to try to assure us that post-AI the trades will still pay less than jobs for college graduates. That’s the whole point, duh, that things are changing.
Residential electric stuff is more about fire prevention, prevention of shocks/electrocution, less about how electricity works: junction boxes, wire gauge sizing, cable protection with metal nail plates, anti-short bushings, clamping cables, etc.
For someone like you, you can learn common codes in two weeks. However, this profession is gated by 2000 to 8000 hrs of apprenticeship.
Controls, PLC programming for industrial automation, etc is where you can shine. However, I don't like work with high voltage circuits, even the latter are controlled by low voltage control circuits.
Even in home appliances (washer, dryer, oven, dishwasher, heatpumps, dish washer, etc), we see a lot of control circuits (PCB boards, step down transformers, VFD etc).
Here in Australia too. Can’t do anything until you’ve done a multi-year apprenticeship, even change a plug or a light fitting, or on the plumbing side you can’t change a tap.
Same in the 90s (born 78). The Berlin wall came down, Russia seemed to be on a path to real democracy, the US still had a pretty awesome reputation around the world, social progress was being made. It was a pretty good time to be alive.
Maybe it was just something about the South of England though eh?
That's where I came across them in around 03/04, though the company was moving away from them at the time. Two intel processors somehow kept in lockstep, allowing either one (or its RAM) to fail and be replaced with no interruption to the system.
the originals ran like 3 'cpu groups' or whatever they called it...
all instructions ran on all 3 and the results were compared - one of the cool things done with this was taking faulty 'cpu groups' out of service without down time
'Aerospace' usually covers 'space'. The shuttle used 5 IBM AP-101 flight computers (4 synch'ed voters for the core avionics software, 1 for independently written backup software). The AP-101 was designed to be a hi-rel computer for military use, so it's very much 'hardened' (including EMP protections), but not internally redundant. They were not cheap. Ken Shiriff has several articles about the hardware: https://www.righto.com/2026/03/ibm-4-pi-computer-history.htm...
I dived into one or two of the skills there and some of it feels very cargo-culty. In a similar vein to the article, the models have improved markedly now and I’m not convinced that “You are an experienced senior software engineer and an expert reviewer, here are five pages of instructions on how to do a review” style prompts are massively useful any more.
I get great review results (as good or better than colleagues using superpowers or even adversarial review skills) just by asking Claude to review a PR and spit out results in order of severity.
Because Trump's best bro, Putin, and his good friends in the Israeli government find themselves inconvenienced by it.
The US isn't subject to it, as it didn't sign up, but he's probably also worried that Americans who are accused of war crimes and then travel to countries which are signatories may find themselves arrested and tried.
Would have taken permanent BST in a heartbeat. There's little so depressing as getting out of work into the dark for months at a time, IMHO.
I remember being vaguely on board with the a radical proposal that did the rounds about 20 years ago there - Single winter, Double summer. Keep changing the clocks but shift the whole thing an hour later so we got lighter evenings.
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