Oh, I missed that. Interesting non-answer regarding AI, seems almost obvious by now they don't even consider it a concept in the real world. Back when I lived in Sweden the politicians were already pretty disconnected from the average person, but in regards AI they seem to be intentionally avoiding it and sleeping on it?
> Hello, Sweden (and Europe) is facing three almost existential risks over the coming term of office that we have never really had to take a position on to the same extent before. The climate. A new UN report from last week has shown that El Niño will probably contribute to between 3 and 4 degrees of warming in addition to last year's heat wave. I live abroad and we had 44 degrees warm for a couple of days this summer (2025). It was also over 30 degrees in Norrbotten for over 3 weeks. Unbearable. How do you prioritize this against the many other budget items? How should we now prepare for what will inevitably lead to an IPCC 3-4 degree scenario?
> AI. AI development is just going faster and faster. At my workplace, we have already replaced many employees with AI-driven processes. We buy all our computing capacity from the US and China. There are no European alternatives and it is not possible to buy Swedish. What do you want to do to, at the European level, prevent us from ending up in the AI lap of the US and China in 5 years? Where should we buy chips from when all manufacturing takes place in Taiwan, Korea, China and the US? We risk a situation where Swedish office workers are rarely replaced with US AI tokens. Surely this must be an initiative at EU level?
> American foreign policy. Trump's second term has been tumultuous, to say the least. We were probably as close to the brink of war in Europe (Greenland) as there is in living memory. Trade agreements are being torn up, sticks are being put in the works for Gripen agreements, etc. Even when he is gone, the illusion of America as a close ally has probably finally been broken in the eyes of many Swedes, myself included. What do you want to do to reduce Sweden's and the EU's dependence on foreign superpowers?
Answer:
> There is a lot in this. A completely unique geopolitical time - both militarily and economically - presents a small country like Sweden with important choices. NATO was one of them. We are now cooperating with all our neighbors around the Baltic Sea, for example our own defense build-up, another example, the largest since the 50s. And all the new free trade agreements when the United States messes up world trade.
> The climate is also one of these, and what the EU is now doing together is the single most important thing, in parallel with Swedish fossil-free energy. We can make ourselves completely national energy independent with the new Swedish nuclear power programme. German energy policy, I think, proves why this is needed, in addition to the wars in the Middle East.
> EU: no single EU issue is more important than our support for Ukraine and increasing European competitiveness in relation to both the US and China. And it starts with the internal market - where 70 percent of all Swedish goods exports end up. If it can be as good for services including digital services, it would be good for both the EU and Sweden. But I am genuinely concerned that Europe is lagging behind.
> last China: we will have an intense autumn regarding a common European response against China to get "level playing fields" when it comes to trade. Today's situation is not sustainable. even extremely free trade-friendly countries like Sweden see this. we should not have protectionism but the same opportunities for the EU in China as for China in the EU. We are not there now.
This is an excellent book and its lessons saved my bacon many times!
As it happens I have a hardcopy of this book (along with "Seeking SRE" and the "SRE Workbook") that I am giving away (because of a move). If you want a hardcopy then email me your UK address I will be happy to post them to your for free.
I tried putting them on the street in a little box but surprisingly none of my neighbours grabbed any of my software books. :)
> EVs are just so much more fun and satisfying to drive. Even a mediocre EV these days will do 0-60 in 5s.
I always thought there’s a lot more to driving satisfaction and “fun” than slamming that pedal in a straight line. But most drivers will settle for 0-60 because it’s “accessible” fun, everyone can slam the pedal (and sadly this is so visible in daily traffic). There are very few EVs that manage to mask their weight in a corner.
This is demonstrably untrue. We have PHEVs and it absolutely would not have made sense to buy EVs instead. If you don't have a long commute and can stay within the EV-only range, but take regular trips that are beyond the range of any EV, then a PHEV absolutely makes more sense. We could not have bought an EV of the same size for the cost of our PHEVs, and being able to tank up on trips is extremely valuable.
> Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.
Would you indulge me and see if this one chart might change your mind? It includes each of your data points.
The journal articles the chart is based on are referenced in light grey on the side, if you prefer to view the same data in a peer reviewed article format with a more serious font.
My father was a printer his entire life. I went with him to work one day when I was around 12 years old. He loaded up a box of, what seemed to me a random selection of flyers, booklets and other printed goods in his car, and together we drove to the National Archives (in Sweden).
He explained to me that every media artifact of cultural significance would be stored there in three (I believe) copies for future generations to enjoy, or researchers, or historians.
I was given a tour by an archivist there and this became a core memory of mine.
I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years?
The discussion around the matter of Stop Killing Games always devolves to one around free labour or around infringing the rights of the creator, but at some point, when a game, or a film, or a book is no longer monetised, makers of cultural works should be obliged to archive and ensure that our shared cultural heritage and identity is preserved for the future.
Film makers, authors, printers, ad agencies, music producers, and many others are already obliged to do this in many countries.
Why should video game producers be exempt?
It's just better for all of us, and our children, if these works of art are preserved, and that at an insignificant effort and cost, compared to the cost of developing it.
> I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years?
The worst thing, at least to me, is that the worst case scenario, as long as the devs don't go out of their way to kill a game permanently, is still not all that bad.
There's emulation, there's virtual machines, there's dicking about with config files, and there's just buying the old hardware outright. Even old, obscure and fiddly games can be played if you put in the effort. Even the old and obscure will very often be out there on the web, and even if it isn't, you can eventually get hold of a physical copy (and then make a good example and make it available yourself!).
But the moment there's a clown server dependency involved, that's it. You've lost before you've even begun. Sometimes a miracle happens, or someone dedicates their entire life to restoring that one game, and we thank them, for they are doing capital G God's work. But preservation can't depend on miracles.
I think in the AI age, it might not be so bad. There's a small online game that I played years ago that I checked in on 2 days ago to see if it was still running, it was with a handful of people playing it. So I downloaded the client to pop in. It had aged really poorly so I thought, fuck it, let's see if Codex can reverse engineer the client, maybe I can build another one. I let it cook and came back an hour later to check on it. It had pulled out all the assets, a bunch of enums for different game states and animations, etc, and had started doing network protocol reverse engineering by building a bare bones client and pointing it at localhost. It had figured out how to authenticate and was already figuring out how to decode the game state from raw packets. I shut it down so my IP wouldn't get banned, but I was floored it was able to do that much in an hour.
Games in general are a very difficult thing to preserve because of how they are often "on-going" things rather than definitive objects like books or films. Minecraft has gone through 27 major version updates, most of which having had in the range of 3-10 sub-versions. So that's potentially ~100 versions, just for Java edition. Should all of those be archived? Or just the final version, when it one day arrives? At this point, the Minecraft from 2014 and from 2026 are completely different games. And at least for Minecraft, there's mostly just stuff added. What about games in which major features regularly get removed, like Fortnite? There, the "last" version will lack many of the games most famous attributes.
Maybe we should just accept that big online games are more like cultural happenings than media objects. In the future, you simply might not be able to play Fortnite, in the same way you can never visit Woodstock again. It's just something you had to be at.
> So that's potentially ~100 versions, just for Java edition. Should all of those be archived?
Minecraft is a great example here, because the answer it brings to the table is yes. You can play any version of Minecraft (barring some really early versions that are lost to time) natively in the launcher. Yes, even the stupid sub-versions. If Minecraft can do it just fine, I see little reason other games can't (barring licencing issues, ugh).
> What about games in which major features regularly get removed, like Fortnite?
Give the option to revert back. Provide the relevant files so someone can do it by themselves. Be a decent human being.
> Maybe we should just accept that big online games are more like cultural happenings than media objects.
Fuck off. You had to be there for WoW Classic too. Doesn't mean we can't still have it. There are WoW Classic server up right now, with people playing it. Not that that has much to do with Blizzard (they caved only after illicit Classic servers became stupid popular, and it's not like setting up those servers was an easy feat).
I don't think there are any major problems with the current system except the length of copyright. If copyright got reduced to 20 years after the creation of the work I think that we would have a more dynamic economy. Old games could have their servers reverse-engineered (in 5 years this will undoubtedly be incredibly easy unless AI hits a wall for no reason). Companies would have to work on something new - no more 50 years of a franchise. Enough resting on the laurels!
I run a company that have done over 200 similar studies for various NGOs and international organisations.
In the general case, with some exceptions, we have found that two types of interventions stand above all others in terms of long term positive economic impact:
1. Infrastructure projects - like building roads
2. Gender projects - projects furthering women's rights in some way
These projects are long-term sticky and do not rely on continuous funding. A paved road will remain paved even after the funding is gone, and will have a positive impact on the community for many decades. Roads allow children to go to school in neighbouring villages, and people to sell their goods in a market, use a bike or other vehicle where they otherwise would not be able to.
Working with local governments to improving the attitudes towards girls and women often has a major impact on the economic output of a community both because more people can contribute, but also because the types of products and services become more diverse. This type of project is also sticky, once attitudes or structural barriers disappear they don't tend to come back.
Education or sanitation initiatives can be hit or miss, where, once funding dries up, all that is left is a non functioning latrine or empty school building.
I did an analysis of reconstruction spending in Afghanistan sometime around 2010, just looking at what money was spent where and what the impacts were. Infrastructure spending was the only thing that had any measurable return. Building roads in a given region reduced violence.
i have friends who did NGO aid work in Africa and they said their work developing potable water sources was often undone. build a village a clean watersource, a small dam or a well, and the rival next village over would get jealous, and some night they'd come over and destroy it. this was a couple decades ago.
Dumb question but are there NGOs that also hand them AK-47 and show them how to defend themselves? You can't give people infrastructure in a place with no effective government and expect them to defend it with pleasant words. If you have nice things you have to also have a plan to defend nice things by the sword, if you do not you're actually inviting terrible things to happen. A lot of these NGO seem to focus on holistic approach, education, female empowerment but that's worth exactly 0 (actually, less than zero) if your community cannot defend itself and the next bumfuck warlord can just stroll into your now rather interesting town and rape everyone, off the men, and take all the shit.
Also I don't understand why, but your comment defaults to collapsed. That is a shame as it's highly relevant.
That combined with the fact that there is no culture of maintaining things at a community level. People from first world countries come in and build bridges/wells/etc and then they break down due to misuse or just age and there is no effort to maintain them, due to the ingrained culture that's taught from birth.
The USA has spent billions of dollars in the last century on trying to help African countries, but all it's realistically really led to is just more people in need in Africa. What happens to all those people that have become dependant on the aid when the US economy crumbles and there is no more money to send overseas?
Western people suggesting Africa is an un-helpable backwater has been common for decades. Bill Gates likes to talk about all the progress made, in fact.
I don't know if you've seen the USA in the past few decades but there's no culture of maintaining things at a community level here either. We've got infrastructure crumbling all over the place.
In the US it's not potholes at issue, it's major bridges on crucial transport corridors being well past their use by dates and not being funded to replace / upgrade / maintain etc.
You're correct that this inability to upkeep infrastructure is in stark contrast to those many places about the globe that have never had electricity or water delivered to home dwellings.
Such places typically get by generation to generation and look after what they do have .. and are often removed as communities from what outsiders seeking local community resources see as necessary to support the take over of local community and imposition of third party extraction.
You're correct that China hires US PMC's to secure the take over of generational land rights and build roads to export "water" in the form of agricultural products, etc. You're correct that local communities see unsecured roads as a resource of good gravel, etc to be used.
Bad idea. Unneeded infrastructure isn't cheap to maintain. It would have to be a bike trail and it's still of limited usefulness when the internet exists and there is no infrastructure to maintain vehicles.
What Africa needs is sustained investment. That will drive people to leave villages, but Western investors (and governments) are as short sighted as they can possibly be.
To invest, you literally have to come in with a security team / truckload of weapons or someone is paid (Wagner / Chinese government) to do it. The invested operation has to be vertically integrated with hand-picked assets, human resources, and supply chain. Very difficult situation to do in a way where the general populace benefits. In cases like Zimbabwe where farmers came in and did sustained investment, it did work having the tribal populace as helping hands but as soon as the reigns were handed over they immediately gutted everything and it went to shit followed by hyperinflation and mass starvation.
Very difficult problem that no one has really figured out. Kenya and Rwanda some of the more interesting leading edges in sub-saharan mainland africa as far as economics are looking.
Not OP, but I would personally say that it starts with improving behaviour through laws.
Once people stop becoming role models for poor behaviour then attitudes improve as the population sees them as equals.
See racial equality for similar examples. This is why the Conservative movements want to make sure they crack down on trans-rights early. If they let rules come in, then acceptance becomes mainstream.
“Gender projects” change cultural norms, and don’t have ongoing variable costs. They just need to be funded long enough for the effects to be percolated throughout the community and become sticky.
Education projects require ongoing variable costs such as teachers, books, resources, etc. Even if the results are effective in the short term, once funding dries up for the variable costs the community can’t sustain the ongoing investment and as the parent says, all you have left are the fixed cost artifacts like schoolhouses but no funding to sustain the variable costs necessary to utilize it as a schoolhouse.
Investing in women is much more effective because they are usually more attached to their community and can’t up and leave nearly as easily (both because they are the primary ones taking care of their own families)
It seems to be the combination of both #1, #2 plus every tech bro billionaires attempts to "make the world a better place". An urban population full of disconnected people too mentally and financially worn out to procreate paradoxically appears to be our definition of success. What are we succeeding at? That, I haven't worked out.
We’ve also learned this lesson the hard way. These are now the clauses we require in every project we do:
- Payment is due X days after receipt of invoice, or immediately after the consultant has addressed any quality issues, whichever is sooner
- Late payment shall incur interest at 8% above the BoE base rate and a late fee of 100 GBP as per the UK Late Payment Legislation. Partial payments on invoices shall apply to late fees, interest, and then principal, in that order.
- In the event of a late payment the invoice for the next deliverable shall immediately fall due.
- The consultant shall be entitled to shift deadlines on deliverables in the event of a late payment as a result of any work disruption, without incurring any liability.
- Payment shall be made in X currency, or an exchange rate at X date on Oanda.com shall apply.
- The client is responsible for any bank fees incurred by their, or any intermediary bank. In the event of a SWIFT transaction it shall be made with the OUR payment code.
- The jurisdiction in the event of a conflict shall be England and Wales. Neither party shall be bound by arbitration.
- The client and consultant shall both indemnify the other up to the total value of the contract and shall not under any circumstance be liable beyond X GBP.
We also no longer share downloadable links of our deliverables until they are paid up. They get a view/comment only link for reports/data etc.
We’ve found that clients that aren’t willing to accept these terms won’t pay you either way.
We determine the net days on the invoice based on the credit rating of the client. Ironically, the good clients pay within 2-3 days normally, and the difficult ones are very “long tail”. About 1% of contracts tend to fully or partially default on their payments.
We’re in a particularly credit poor industry but our average delay due to late payment is 23 days. Those clients where we stop delivery pay on average 11 days sooner than those contracts where we don’t stop delivery.
This is based on around 2,000 invoices sent over the last 5 years.
Oh and another lesson! Ensuring that each deliverable invoice is small enough that it falls under the simplified claims procedure (in the UK it’s 10,000 pounds) greatly simplifies collection.
It costs something like 80 quid to file for recovery in court and in our experience invoices are immediately paid up when a “Letter before action” is sent.
You burn the relationship, but arguably you probably don’t want it anyway.
I believe this is what we call small claims court in the United States. The threshold varies by state, but it is a very effective way to deal with recalcitrant companies both large and small.
And another lesson: If it looks like a complete catastrofuck the minute you walk in the door, walk straight back out again. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
This isn't arbitrary peanut-gallerying, I've walked away from several jobs that weren't anywhere near as bad as the one in TFA because I couldn't see any way forward that wasn't going to end in disaster. One of them at least, I'm fairly certain, would have ended up in criminal prosecution.
I'm a consultant rather than a contractor, but the "shitshow" projects are amongst my favourites. They offer the chance to make a clear positive impact, which can be hugely rewarding.
From my pov, green flags for a good "bad" project mostly come from the attitude of leadership - especially if they already recognise there's a problem, and that some form of cultural change may be needed rather than expecting a purely technical solution.
On the other hand, if they seem reluctant to consider root causes, or if there's any sense that they're seeking to cover up problems or shift blame, then those are pretty clear red flags. Quick fixes tend to fall apart, and aren't really satisfying for anyone.
Hard to put into a list, it was just the equivalent of a code smell. Some random examples:
- Fly out to the initial discussion, talk to their architect, some guy they imported from France in an otherwise entirely non-French company a long way from France (not bashing French folks here but just wondering where they dug this guy up). They've read about scalability and told him to come up with a design for that, which is distributed stateless everything (this was years before microservices and CRUD and whatnot). Except that they don't have the resources to build the stateless distributed everything so they're getting all the downsides of stateless distributed everything without getting the scalability that it's supposed to provide. You know its bad when one of the nontechnical sales guys that you're having a few drinks with after work can give you a breakdown if why it won't work.
- Parachute in for the first date, they've hired a bunch of kids straight out of college who are all hacking away at whatever they've been assigned to. So I'm walking around chatting to all of them, asking what they're doing and how long they think it'll take. Most of the time the answer is "oh, probably about two weeks". At the same time I'm running a mental Gantt chart for all the components and figure out that even if they meet their wildly, ludicrously unrealistic time estimates it's going to take them at least two years to get the product out the door. Some of their two-week timelines I estimate would take an absolute minimum of six months work, but probably a lot longer. Or a few days if they use the existing open-source tool that does the same thing, but they're going to do it better so they don't need to use any existing code.
- Site visit, the office manager screws up the travel arrangements, screws up the accom, the developers clock in at exactly 9am and down tools on the minute at 5pm so it's tumbleweeds in the office at 17:00:01, the mgt. is in a separate set of offices on the other side of the building and don't talk to the devs, over lunch the devs are talking about how much longer they'll stay before they start sending out resumes.
- The possibly-criminal one, I'll use an analogy to avoid identifying the actual job but lets say you've been brought in to develop an automated pen-testing toolkit. Not just a vulnerability scanner but something that then exploits the vulnerability. "You don't think that this could perhaps be misused by the people that commissioned it?". "Oh, we were so enthusiastic about the job that we never even thought about that".
You may have noticed a common theme here, talking to the techies and/or taking them out for lunch/drinks. So if there's one takeaway, it's do that. That's how you'll find out whether it's an organisation you want to get involved with or not.
Does small claims work for b2b? I thought it was only for people. I've had a small (~£400) business invoice that I've chased a few times and now I'm waiting for the yearly interest to mount up to around the 5 year mark just out of spite
This is the sort of economics that small companies face when working with large companies, particularly when physical things/CAPEX are involved. Large companies expect net 30/60 terms to pay you. That's much simpler for their accounting/purchasing department. This bureaucracy occasionally necessitates nudging, especially if the intermediary you're dealing with didn't set up the invoice request on time in whichever SAP/Salesforce/Oracle system they use.
This is usually the same the other way; many vendors will give business clients net 30. That's nice if you're a small company and need to plan ahead. But occasionally, because you're considered small (liability), some vendors will want the money up-front. So unless you're very careful with cashflow, you end up in situations where your main sources of income (big contracts) are coming in after you need to spend money on a widget to fulfill deliverables.
Depending on the situation, the contract can demand the client purchase/ship things and work doesn't start until you have them in hand. This is usually the best route as you now have an out, and it's not an unreasonable request, but it doesn't always pan out that way!
I took "good client" to mean, "is easy to work with/communicates well/knows what they want", not just "pays on time". The inverse being, the ones who don't pay on time were already a pain in the ass to work with.
I think OP needed "emergency service is cash up front".
In a different domain, this is the painful lesson of almost anyone who tries to help people in a bind -- you can try to help, but yours is unlikely to be the advice that sets them straight, so you shouldn't get too invested with unproven or, especially, proven unreliable actors.
This brilliantly captures what I see from YouTubers who do off-road vehicle recovery. People are super nice until the bill comes, then you learn “only release the vehicle on payment.”
It's worth keeping in mind that the only practical "saving" for the OP will result in not doing the job at all, since this client most likely doesn't actually have the money and never will.
It should be, oh, short-term rush job in a foreign country for a sketchy client? That is most definitely cash up front time. Oh, you can't afford that? Sucks to be you, not going to do it.
> - Late payment shall incur interest at 8% above the BoE base rate and a late fee of 100 GBP as per the UK Late Payment Legislation. Partial payments on invoices shall apply to late fees, interest, and then principal, in that order.
As I understand it, from our lawyer, is that this exact wording is automatically enforceable in UK courts and easiest in the event of a dispute. It’s also generally internationally accepted.
I've always wondered, in cases like this where 8%+2% (for example) can either mean 10% or 8.16%, why doesn't the contract just give a fictional example of how the maths would work out?
reply