I don’t think we should conclude that a tech columnist who regularly shits on EU tech policy really intends to attack the EU writ large. If he sounds like he’s generalising to the “whole thing,” I’m pretty sure he understands most readers know he’s not talking about the entire EU experiment. Just the backward tech regulation.
Oh no, John criticizes at large. He complains that the EU itself is too obtuse, that the way they enact laws is obtuse, that the nomination process for officials is obtuse.
No. He criticizes quite specific things that show how completely clueless he is, as it is immediately pointed out both by people in the comments and his blogger/influencer/programmer friends.
He really is unique in how consistently wrong and clueless he keeps on being.
I introduced this to my old company years ago and called it Big Block of Cheese Day after the West Wing episode [1]. We mostly focused on very minor bugs that affected a tiny bit of our user base in edgey edge cases but littered our error logs. (This was years ago at a, back then, relatively immature tech company.)
Ugh. Reminds me that some time ago Siri stopped responding to “turn off my TV.” Now I have to remember to say “turn off my Apple TV.” (Which with the magic of HDMI CEC turns off my entire system.) Given how groggy I am when I want to turn off the TV, I often forget.
Meta note: don’t see many blog posts as detailed as OP with seemingly mundane details. It assumes almost nothing of the user. So many posts would just say “install this QGIS plugin” with no mention of the pip calls, etc.
Not sure if this comes from search engine optimisation or years of experience consulting to clients that know nothing :)
Anyway, good work Mark. Another of your posts I’ll bookmark.
Went to Japan for the first time in August (…don’t recommend…the heat is intense…) and instead of spending days in Kyoto and Osaka, we spent a few days in Otsu on Lake Biwa.
Highlights:
- The freshwater beach was delightful (Biwako Omi-Maiko Nakahama)
- There’s a public onsen that’s not listed on the official onsen association’s site (which only lists resorts you have to book long in advance and pay lots for): Spa Resort Ogoto Agaryanse. It has strip mall vibes from the outside but is a great local onsen on the inside.
- If you’re an American and want to experience cultural appropriation: take a cruise on the Michigan paddle boat
And, of course, it’s close enough to Kyoto that you can bop in and out.
Love MkDocs* even for non-Python. But, wasn’t aware it could auto-generate from code comments like pdoc? I’d assume one would use pdoc for the API section of a hot mkdocs layout.
> Next time I'll see such a response, I probably will quit on the spot; this is unbelievably cruel.
Let me guess: you’d quit but your résumé’s out of date because you, like me, procrastinate updating it?
(Sounds like a manager trying to manage you out; make things miserable enough for you that you’ll quit without having to go through the redundancy process…)
> Sounds like a manager trying to manage you out; make things miserable enough for you that you’ll quit without having to go through the redundancy process…
Dammit, now I have to live the rest of my life thinking about that this might be a thing that's actually happening.
Evil techniques managers use: Isolate the IC. Put IC on a legacy or deprecated work stream. Don’t give IC anything that could increase their longevity. Work politically to get others with you on an empathetic level, such that they understand this person is a drag, in some way that doesn’t make you look frustrated or a poor leader. As a manager, you control popular opinion without the IC even knowing. Micromanage the IC. This is a sure-fire way of ruining any IC.
While what the manager should do is: let the IC do their job, encourage them, foster their growth, and be positive about them to coworkers and others.
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