Basically, Google are shadow-banning me till they get caught. I think this should be illegal.

This is the reason I personally will not touch any Google services. And in business, I excise Google services as a priority. If a company cannot handle email in a civil manner, it certainly can't be trusted with anything of importance.

It took centuries for the written word to acquire spaces between words, and then the US decided to jam them back together again.

Curious why folk are using two hyphens "--" instead of en-dash.

I don't think the article was written by an LLM, but I'm convinced it was LLM-enabled. Which is a pity, because the author seems to have some interesting things to say. But that's the problem with leaning on an LLM: you lose your own voice, and good writing is centred around voice.

https://bsky.app/profile/robertsaunders.bsky.social/post/3la...

He starts out by noting that the economy as an idea is very recent invention. And yet it tops the list of voters concerns.

"If you had told Mr Gladstone that "the economy has grown this year", he would not have understood what those words meant."

(William Gladstone was the British Prime Minister, on and off, between 1868 and 1894. He is considered to be one of the great British PMs.)

"Gladstone was the most financially literate statesman of the 19th Century. But the idea of something called "the economy", which could "grow" or "shrink", did not exist."

"It (THE economy) first appeared in a major manifesto in 1950 and didn't get its own section until 1955. That's also when terms like "economic growth" appeared in Parliament."

“What we now call "economics" was usually termed "political economy”. "Economy" was not a technocratic exercise, but a moral and political arena."

"… it subordinated a moral and political judgment (what is "good economy?") to a blunter question: how do we make "the" economy bigger? In reality, economic choices were still moral and political. But they were cast as technocratic questions about "competence" and know-how."

"(and) … it turned "the economy" into a "thing", to be weighed against other, different "things": such as "the environment" or "saving lives". And it encouraged a tendency to make "growth" the goal, without asking what was growing, why and to whose benefit."

I recommend reading the whole thread if you are interested to learn how we got here.

And looking forward?

"Recognising that our concepts are historically specific - that they have been different in the past and might be different in the future - helps us to imagine other ways of talking and thinking in the present. In an age of so many economic challenges, we surely need more of that."

Obviously the Marseille “dialect” is recognisable, but otherwise, travelling throughout France, and even the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, I could understand folk.

Remember kids: Marketing is a psychopathy.

I vouched for it, so it should be visible now.

But be warned, it gets progressively harder, along with the concepts, so unless you're conversant with tensors, at some point you will have to put on your thinking cap.

The reviews on Goodreads – including my own – are worth reading to get a flavour: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/202104095-vector

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39704194

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Eventually, after working on, say, half a dozen code bases, you'll start to understand intuitively what good code is, providing you get lucky enough to find a good code base, or a code base with a significant amount of good code.

It's a long old journey, but once you have the skill, it never goes away. It's like learning a musical instrument or a foreign language. (By which I mean you can read as many books as you like about it, but without application, you haven't yet begun. Nevertheless, read the books.)

Warning: most developers never attain this skill, but almost all of them believe – truly believe – that they write good code; just as everyone thinks they are a good – nay excellent – driver.

Warning: no one writes good code. Good code becomes good through iteration, just as good writing becomes good by iteration/editing. The reason for this is obvious; but if you don't know why, then you haven't done enough yet.

Warning: everyone has biases. Learn to recognise yours and when you are applying them. Learn to ignore them and see things through a different lens. Explore with an open mind.

Iterating to good code is one of the most satisfying things you can do with software development.

A couple of links to get you going, but there's a lot of data out there on this:

https://archive.is/20180106184835/https://www.ft.com/content...

https://archive.ph/20120802230107/http://www.independent.ie/...

It's also an object lesson on how money is created out of thin air.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#Publish...

² https://www.anycount.com/word-count-of-books/harry-potter-wo...

I have two Apple machines. One is old and stuck on Catalina – three iterations behind the current macOS [Catalina -> Big Sur -> Monterey -> Ventura] – so for a long while I kept both on Catalina to avoid issues. Sadly, the older machine died a few weeks ago, so I decided to update the other machine to Monterey (because Ventura is still in the teething-troubles phase).

Now I get about 9 Mbps here, so I started the upgrade before bed, and left it overnight to do its thing. Next day I was presented with the garish boot Monterey boot-screen and logged in.

That’s it. This is a boring story.

There were a few small cosmetic differences, but otherwise everything was just as it was before. No clicks required. No dark patterns. Dare I say: it just worked.

There’s no reason Microsoft, or any other company, can’t do this. It’s simply respecting the user/customer.

I left the Microsoft universe about a decade ago simply because it felt too stressful. Nothing was concrete. It felt like the sand was always shifting beneath you. I have no love of Apple – I’ll move if they start playing games – but for now, they do most things – far from everything – well, and I never feel disrespected, even if my wallet is somewhat lighter every now and then.