timellis-smith

4 ms·

1.
by timellis-smith 2y ago
I found my dad's Psion 5mx in a drawer the other day. They were really fantastic devices
2.
by timellis-smith 2y ago
Colour me a bit cynical but we use plastic massively in healthcare and food industries precisely because it is non toxic. Given the massive prevalence of plastic on just about all our food, if it was really such a threat I would expect life
3.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
I seem to remember I was on the FBI watch list for subscribing to Linux Journal back in the day.
4.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
Strange, I live in the North of England and that has hardly been my experience of late. Most trains have been at least 1 or 2 minutes late.
5.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
For me this is also a major failure of poor competition policy. If Google's smart home system were an independent company, it would love or die by its ability to do its job. But Nest can just piggy back on Google's brand power.
6.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
Theres a really interesting graph showing rail usage under both public and private ownership in GB. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB... I'll let you draw your own co
7.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
Fracking for all it's bad press has been immensely helpful in reducing greenhouse emissions. If it weren't for natural gas we would still have massive coal fired power plants. If you look at UK emissions which have been declining
8.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
As far as I know, South Africa hasn't been involved in anything since Angola. The current military probably couldn't find enough working vehicles to even get to a conflict let alone fight one.
9.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
That doesn't matter because it's not like you can double renewables to increase redundancy (no wind is no wind no matter how many turbines you have)- you need another more expensive energy source as well.
10.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
Oh and while we're about it interconnects just increase the systemic risk of multiple regions experiencing Dunkelflaute at the same time. And it's not enough to say that this almost never happens because in a system that expects m
11.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost. When you have periods of Dunkelflaute you potentially need to have full grid redundancy either through inter-connects, other energy genera
12.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
Apologies if I misunderstood your post. If I understand you correctly now, then we are in agreement.
13.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
Because it is important. The more egalitarian countries show more differentiation across career choices than less egalitarian ones. I.e. men show a greater prefence for thing based careers and women show a greater prefence for people based
14.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
Yes, but it gets harder the more the odds get stacked against you. The school system and university system is increasingly run by females for females. Critical theories designed to dismantle the 'patriachy' both attack males and p
15.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
Very true, and we are mostly formed by our genetics, and it really helps to keep that in mind. But as parents that doesn't stop us from overly attributing everything bad that our kids do to our own bad parenting.
16.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
>> You must believe deep down in your core that ordering a human being to do something is a sign you must introspect about your failure as a manager, and commit to fixing the problem. >This also just seems like new-age guilt inject
17.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
Or really worrying. I wonder what this is doing to economic productivity.
18.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
I'm a principal engineer in a consultancy and can fully associate with this viewpoint. The org wide work but not org wide alignment rings very true and it occupies much of my free work time trying to solve.
19.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
WordPerfect 6 for Dos was my favourite word processor. Vim keybindings would make WP pretty incredible.
20.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
The IMF are notoriously bearish on the UK economy. As the article notes the IMF have already upgraded their outlook for the UK economy once.
21.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
I agree with you on this. And yes, rising living standards will hopefully make people care more about their environment. I also agree with you on the individual level with increasingly larger cars etc..
22.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
You do know that global land use for agriculture has peaked and certainly in the UK energy usage peaked in 2005. All this while the world is greening. Most of the developed world too has declining birth rates. So I would hardly call it an e
23.
by timellis-smith 3y ago
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/overlook...
24.
by timellis-smith 4y ago
How much of the global greening is occurring naturally due to increased co2? https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
25.
by timellis-smith 4y ago
It may be that energy prices are ultimately the limiting factor in the advancement of ai.
26.
by timellis-smith 4y ago
As an allegory. I've on occasion been in very cold water (cutting ropes from propellors of boats and stand-up paddle boarding). While my core body temperature is still below normal, I've found myself incapable of going back into t
27.
by timellis-smith 4y ago
I remember reading Malcom Gladwell describing how the time of year that you were born affected the chances of you ending up as a professional sportsmen. Yet schools never seem to take into account the different development rates of girls vs
28.
by timellis-smith 4y ago
See the Employment equity act, BEE, BBBEE in South Africa
29.
by timellis-smith 4y ago
cyncism or skepticism?
30.
by timellis-smith 4y ago
Or perhaps its just because Borris had just been elected with a majority to do so and the promise to get it done. Not exciting at that point would arguably have been far more cynical.

More ›