Tangential but when reading books like Lord of the Rings with songs periodically written in the text, I’ve always enjoyed trying to sing the songs out loud and set a melody for them that feels appropriate for the universe. It really makes the songs come alive.
Your comment is past tense - does that mean they’ve stopped doing this? Please, Lord. I had to set my ATV to go to screensaver in a ridiculously short amount of time to preempt the YouTube one.
It was in place for a couple of days, tops, before they reverted it. The backlash was immense and immediate. And with good reason: in addition to the obvious reasons why it sucked, the YouTube screensavers just looked terrible. I couldn't believe how bad they were.
I love Valve games and I love that they are spending their resources in areas I care about and that feel underserved by other companies, but I don't think the moral comparison is so clear cut. They were also pioneers in micro-transactions, loot crates, software distribution tax, and turning Counter-Strike skins into a speculative frenzy.
I have to admit, I never got into micro-transactions and loot craetes. I did play CS, but never cared about skins and focused on head shots - I am ignorant in this aspect.
It’s not about the table element, it’s about the API to construct and manipulate that element with a columns and rows interface which is largely superseded by general DOM manipulation.
I remember there being posts that explicitly discouraged using IDs directly, but I'm not sure of tge reasons anymore. Maybe browser incompatibilities or unclear scoping and confusion with other variables?
It works everywhere (it’s now specified in https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/nav-history-apis.html...), but it’s brittle. It can break by adding colliding properties to window deliberately or by accidental global leak (… including things like setting in dev tools), by browser defining new globals, by some 'name' attribute conflict.
I feel like I could very easily write this list in the opposite direction.
1. I'll just fix it – as a junior you can get away with not working on something unless you're told to. As a senior you're expected to take ownership. Cut through organisational malaise. See a thorny bug not being solved because it sits slightly across team boundaries? Fix it.
2. Working nights and weekends – as a junior you can expect to just turn up during your work hours and nobody will bat an eyelid. As a senior sometimes you'll have to make sacrifices. Stay on late to deal with that incident. Monitor a vendor migration over the weekend.
3. Asking a lot of questions – as a junior you can get away with being shy and avoidant. As a senior you're going to need to push through the discomfort and ask the important questions, challenge people, and have gotten over your fear of looking stupid to ensure you always have the right information.
4. Being "Extra" Helpful – as a junior you can very much just focus on your project work. As a senior you're expected to find impact beyond what is given to you in JIRA tickets. You need to review other PRs, manage other projects, unblock team members questions. Your job is beyond just closing tickets now.
5. Loud enthusiasm – as a junior you are not likely to have the political capital to get your org to take a risk on a new framework, language, tool. As a senior you are expected to have the experience to be able to take those risks when they are appropriate for the situation.
It's true though that you need be thoughtful about whether your behaviour is what is valued in your job. Regardless of seniority, different managers, different companies can value traits that other companies punish, and visa versa. You can really suffer if you're not aware of what it is your managers actually want from you.
A senior engineer has knowledge and experience. A staff engineer has discernment.
In an ideal world, people should be promoted to staff and above when they demonstrate that discernment. We should always be unafraid to share our perspectives, but staff engineering is about knowing when to get involved, when to watch, when to ignore, and when to actively look away.
As “Sr. Staff”, I see my job as knowing when to exercise authority far more than merely exercising it.
From your comment, the resulting impression is that staff engineers aren't needed. They're a luxury that is diminishing in value every single day with AI filling the gap.
> In designing the digital ID scheme, the government will ensure that it works for those who aren’t able to use a smartphone, with inclusion at the heart of its design.
What of people like me who are able to use a smartphone but are unwilling to?
It's not just the elderly and homeless as mentioned on the page, but also those with religious objections, members of the digital disconnection movement, those concerned about electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and so on.
Should there a right to an offline life for the simple reason that you want live offline? A right which is protected in a few other places in Europe, at least to some extent when it concerns government services.
I guess we'll have to wait for specifics. Unfortunately "it will have inclusion at its core" doesn't really say much.
They are considering enabling its use for more than just work, so what happens when my grandma forgets to charge her phone before her doctors' appointment?
What happens if you want to give teenagers a dumb phone because you as a parent decide a smartphone isn't appropriate, but they need the ID for the NHS too?
It's not for lack of trying that traditional, "database driven" cross-border payments are costly and unreliable. SWIFT have thrown technology at this problem: GPI, Swift Go, ISO20022, etc.
Unfortunately the ecosystem has an extremely weak technical culture. Banks rarely follow the standards as written – your perfectly crafted API payment may be re-keyed by a low-paid human operator on a slow, buggy UI written a decade ago.
I could believe that the developer experience and technical standards of the participants is where the value lies right now.
The one thing I'm not sure on is to what extent those ecosystems depend on reduced regulatory scrutiny compared to banks.
I wouldn't really say trust is a solved problem in cross-border transfers. Why only today I've seen transactions where:
- an intermediary credited another institution only to realise later they didn't have the money, and have to beg pretty-please to return the payment over a SWIFT message (there is no guarantee here, at best there is "market practice" which is basically just manners, but for banks)
- an intermediary failing to credit the next institution because of a processing error, but when inquired from remitter claiming they had in fact credited it
Many of these cases are very expensive to resolve. Far more expensive than the value of the payments in question. And for that reason they are often left unresolved.
Now I don't know if I'm convinced on stablecoin remittance, I find many of the counter-arguments extremely compelling, but some days I sure do think gee it would be nice if everyone was transacting on a shared public ledger and I could have some certainty of the status of a transaction.
> an intermediary credited another institution only to realise later they didn't have the money, and have to beg pretty-please to return the payment over a SWIFT message (there is no guarantee here, at best there is "market practice" which is basically just manners, but for banks)
But this situation is not made any better by a blockchain - there's still no way to reverse a transaction except asking nicely and hoping the other party obliges, right?
I was only disputing parent assertion that trust is a solved problem and that banks don't "need" a solution.
I haven't the foggiest if stablecoins solve these problems any better. In theory I think all participants having visibility into the ledger would at least answer the problem of "where actually is the money", but I'm not even sure of that though because of fiat on/off ramps, custodial arrangements, roll-ups that might happen off chain, etc.
I don't know if you could use smart contracts to encode a recall/dispute resolution process into transactions but that's very hand-wavey and possibly collapses under scrutiny!
All in I've no idea if crypto helps us here but I do think we have a long way to go either way.
Can you give more details on this? Why is it that the existing banking system cannot do this kind of foreign remittance? E.g. correspondent banking via Swift?
Is it high fees, is it overly burdensome sanctions/AML checks, something else?
Not OP, but we have contractors in Nigeria, and paying them via regular bank transfer is nearly impossible. For example many banks will outright refuse to make SWIFT transactions to Nigerian accounts.
This is just one example of a few factors that lead to a sort of isolation from international banking.
>many banks will outright refuse to make SWIFT transactions to Nigerian accounts
The flipside of this is crypto turbocharging online scammers.
"The industry in Cambodia now generates more than $12.5 billion annually – half of the country's GDP, according to the United States Institute for Peace."
"The criminal gangs entice trafficking victims with fake job offers posted on social media and then force them to financially exploit people online including through fake romances or “pig-butchering” schemes in which the scammer builds trust with a victim before stealing their money, Amnesty said."
The scammers will make friends with someone online, persuade them to deposit increasingly large amounts into a "crypto trading platform", then finally run with the money.
Crypto has created an alternative financial system with many fewer rules. This can either be good or bad depending on the circumstances.
I think it has the potential to be a good thing in the long run. In the short run, however, people need to learn to instinctively distrust crypto as a scam. Especially if the situation involves a friendly attractive lady you've been chatting with online who's really good at trading cryptocurrency and wants to share her secrets with you.
It's high fees, burdensome sanctions/AML checks (especially if the said country has been recently or is still on a GAFI list), plus the suboptimization of the core banking systems regarding international transfers, that make the whole things happen in weeks (or sometimes never happen if the end beneficiary doesn't start pinging, emailing or phoning its bank every now and then). The whole unreliability/unpredictability of the thing makes it undesirable for regular operations.
Maybe it’s a cultural difference but to me that is just normal friendliness and ice-breaking. I’m quite happy for my manager to ask how am I and to have a 2 minute chat about life outside work before diving into the 1:1.
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