In a world full of Nintendos, be Atari.

They are things that you know, that you don't know you know. For example, uncovering links between existing knowledge that uncovers something that then feels obvious.

This happens occasionally where two previously thought seperate fields of study discover a common link with each being able to explain the questions the other had struggled with.

Yup. My daughter (15y) had the perfect example this morning. She said she was thinking about shooting a person with a cannon upwards, then realizing they feel effectively zero gravity at top, and maybe this could be usefull. Then she remembered parabolic flight paths to train astronauts, realized it’s the same thing, and that she started wondering about a thing she already knew.

Lots of people know things deeply in their subconscious that they are fully ignorant of in their conscious thinking. These can manifest as gut feelings, or anxieties, and with therapy, can be identified. Things like "you should leave him", or whatever.

You make a great point. I would enjoy going back to the office if it involved a 15 minute bike ride.

Based upon the recruiters messaging me, if I gave up my remote job for one that required in-office attendance I would get an immediate 30% pay bump.

That would however, demand an hour and half commute each way and that would impact my ability to take my children to school and be involved with family meals. Back when I did have a hour commute each way it was costing me £2,800 a year in fuel, plus £2,220 in parking fees, plus about the same again for lunch out with colleagues.

So yeah, i'd get a 30-40% pay bump, but a large percentage would be consumed by additional costs with no benefit to my performance.

I did exactly the same, thinking that maybe it was invisible unicode characters or something I didn't know about.

Not forced but the tooling has been made available to those who ask. Work have provided Microsoft Copilot through Teams and Github Copilot through my IDE of choice.

I found the Microsoft Copilot to be reasonably good when given a complete context with extremely limited scope such as being provided a WSDL for a SOAP service and asked to write functions that make calls and then writing unit tests for the whole thing. This had a right way and a wrong way of doing things and it did it almost perfectly.

However, if you give it any problem that requires imagination with n+1 ways of being done it flounders and produces mostly garbage.

Compared to the Microsoft Copilot I found the Github Copilot to feel lobotomised! It failed on the aforementioned WSDL task and where Microsoft's could be asked "what inconsistencies can you see in this WSDL" and catch all of them, Github's was unable to answer beyond pointing out a spelling mistake I had already made it aware of.

I have personally tinkered with Claude, and its quite impressive.

My colleagues have had similar experiences, with some uninstalling the AI tooling out of frustration at how "useless" it is. Others, like myself, have begun using it for the grunt work; mostly as "inteligent boilerplate generator."

> However, if you give it any problem that requires imagination with n+1 ways of being done it flounders and produces mostly garbage.

I'd never thought about LLM failure modes like this, but it makes sense.

Cross too many possibility streams, instead of prompting / contexting down to one, and it vacillates between them and outputs garbage.

When you say Microsoft Copilot you mean inside Visual Studio?

Agreed, LEGO aren't like Nintendo.

I had similar many years ago in a custom paint shop. We had an expensive colorimeter that interfaced over serial with a program that ran in DOS.

When the pysical computer gave out, I replaced it with a reasonably new one but instead of using a modern OS I installed MS-DOS in order to get it up and running as reliably and quickly as possible.

If I were doing the same today, I'd likely get a new computer and install FreeDOS.

I'm pretty sure it can be done via the IIN. Services like https://binlist.net/ provide a convenient solution to identify if it's a prepaid card.

Yes. When I started working in hospitals it wasn't the case. We had an onsite laundry facility and tailor. You would obtain your uniform from the tailors, tailor made to fit, they would also repair any damaged uniform.

You would place worn uniform in a bag labeled with your name and drop if off at the laundry to collect the next day.

Then privatisation came, first they shut down the tailors and you were expected to both purchase your uniform and pay for alterations and repairs (costs you could claim back as a tax rebate if you knew how, how not being advertised.) Then they privatised the laundry, shutting down the one on site and shifting everything to a central location, by everything I mean just the bedding, you were now expected to wash your uniform at home.

The only exception I am aware of is Surgical scrubs, those were provided in sterile wraps and were to be returned to a certain laundry bin for cleaning.

You're right about the food industry, when I worked in kitchens that days uniform was provided, freshly cleaned and returned for laundering at the end of my shift.