• 228 Posts
  • 372 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Exactly. Many were historians and Christians.

    They already had the previous example of the sale of indulgences within the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Even American colonial revolutionaries were offered pardons by King George III to stop fighting.

    Commenter below cites the fact that the expectation was that the congress would step in if popular sentiment was outraged by this sort of thing, but this state of affairs was foreseeable.

    They ended up with a powerful executive even though they believed previous kings had too much power. e.g. “His Excellency” George Washington refused the title of King.

    Also of note is that there were relatively few voters and they were privileged and generally well educated and informed members of the public. White men with land.




  • What’s up with cashiers in coffee shops not listening when they ask for my order?

    I wait for them to ask, I announce it loudly and clearly. They interrupt. I confirm. I go on to item two. They confirm. I confirm.

    Then, they apologise and try to guess item one again. They get it wrong. I correct them. They’ve got it.

    Oh yeah, what was item two? Yes, that’s right.

    Also, what’s the deal with not waiting even for a split second between me saying “flat white” and “with two sugars”?

    I understand that coffee shops are loud and hectic, and I might have to repeat myself once in a while, but damn Melbourne, every time?


  • The bespoke short-lived solutions angle is an interesting one, to be sure.

    I wonder how many orgs will back themselves into a corner thinking their product will be short lived but it ends up hanging out for a while, as you mentioned.

    Honestly this feels like an extension of this Agile/Scrum madness we’ve been dealing with since the mid-2000’s. Instead of the next quarter, we’re only building things with a view of the next two weeks.

    Now it’s measured in hours, and even then we can give a prompt to an LLM and have a half working thing to throw away after it converts that PDF to a CSV.

    I worry about the craftsmanship leaving this field. Engineers used to push back and for good reason.