* Posts by Robert Grant

2223 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2006

AI to fix UK Civil Service's bureaucratic bungling, deputy PM bets

Robert Grant

Re: Computers say Yes,..... Resistance is Futile and Puerile and Self-Destructive

First question: who architected this very expensive, licence-heavy FOIA IT infrastructure when flat files are almost free to host?

Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff

Robert Grant

> "All corporations tend towards the IRS (HMRC -- UK) business model. All collections, no product....."

Of course - those organisations are what you get if your product is "we don't lock you in a box for not paying us".

Elon Musk can't wriggle out of SEC Twitter fraud inquiry

Robert Grant

> however you believe we can do 4 things, it's just the 5th one that is a problem

It might be a problem - anything can be a problem to someone - but it seems not on the same scale of things as the others. I don't think 5 is a problem if anyone does it. I think it's particularly distracting when large, unnatural steps forward can be made in multiple areas.

Robert Grant

Can we just pause car electrification, non-Soyuz rockets, internet anywhere, and missions to Mars and focus on the investors who saw a tweet and wanted a quick buck?

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

Robert Grant

How did they change things from how they were before?

Gaia-X project doesn't have a future, claims Nextcloud boss

Robert Grant

> How did this go from lofty goal to discarded concept?

Even simple goals need a lot of hard work, and hard work needs money to pay for it. And the best way to get money is to make something people want more than what they have today, so they pay you for it.

IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?

Robert Grant
Coat

Re: qualities HR doesn't like

Hah. good point :)

Robert Grant

Re: qualities HR doesn't like

First they throw half the applicants in the bin, as they don't want to hire unlucky people.

Robert Grant

Re: My AI's better than your AI

I've not experienced that level of law fee pain, but even conveyancing seems like something ripe for disruption. Why do I wait for searches that could be presented as part of an automated house-buying process?

Google exec: Microsoft Teams concession 'too little, too late'

Robert Grant

Re: Hmmmm

This is whataboutism. In this area - corporate IT - Microsoft has a position and stance that is very close to anticompetitive. The only thing holding it back is how bad Teams is.

SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God, and not kill, commit adultery, steal, curse...

Robert Grant

Wow.

> not murder, steal, nor sleep with their colleagues' spouses

Well clearly I'm not welcome here!

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Robert Grant

Re: Summary of the UK's future climate/energy strategy

> Euro 6 (2014) for diesel cars

Er no - it's September 2015 for diesel. 2014 was for tyres.

I agree that most middle class people will have a newer diesel car, and it's only the diesel plebs who will have to pay.

Robert Grant

Re: John Bull presents Little Englander Nuclear

I didn't vote for Brexit, but there's no reason why the UK can't trade with its nearest neighbours, just as other countries trade with the EU. Being in the EU and trade aren't the same things.

Uncle Sam accuses SpaceX of not considering asylees and refugees for employment

Robert Grant

Meanwhile, from NASA

> Other than extremely rare exceptions, you must be a U.S. citizen in order to work for NASA as a civil service employee.

Ref: https://www.nasa.gov/careers/working-with-nasa

Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama

Robert Grant

Things start to break when there are two sources of truth. Why not update the licence wording instead?

Robert Grant

> Lawyers do not understand "spirit" at all. Especially when they are royally paid not to.

I don't like this outcome, but how can a lawyer divine the spirit of something? What if two people disagree on the spirit?

Robert Grant

Or perhaps there's a need for a new GPL.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Robert Grant
Coat

You'd have no chance if you had to pee in a fabricated bottle. Got to be plastic.

Ariane 5 to take final flight, leaving Europe without its own heavy-lift rocket

Robert Grant

Re: But wait! There's more...

> Using taxpayers money to create jobs is an efficient use of it.

No, taking less tax so people spend more directly is an efficient use of it. Having people decide on a whim what jobs should or shouldn't exist to buy votes is the exact opposite of efficient.

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

Robert Grant

This is all entirely unsurprising, and why no one should want the government to handle any more things than the bare minimum...

But...

I will say this: the less time businesses have to spend on fake activity like tax affairs, and the more time they can spend on doing useful things for their customers, the better off we'll all be. So the estimates on the benefits might be under-egging it.

FTC pulls emergency brake on Microsoft's marriage to Activision Blizzard

Robert Grant

If MS were canny, they'd have done the Bethesda titles for the Playstation as well, but done a bad job of it, so the MS platforms were the premiere experience. Glad they didn't, but it's surprising that wasn't their move.

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

Robert Grant

Re: If a tiny typo brings down half of Brazil, perhaps we’re the nuts

The systems aren't monoliths at all, but the configuration application is. And DNS, which is often the culprit for cloud outages.

Microsoft's big bet on helium-3 fusion explained

Robert Grant

Re: Fake

No need to not do both. And fusion would make the electric car charging actually cleaner, not just carbon credits cleaner.

Robert Grant

I've no idea if this will work, but I think it's a good idea. Investments backing moonshots is what's got us electric cars, much cheaper rocketry, Starlink, etc etc.

MariaDB CEO: People who want things free also want to have very nice vacations

Robert Grant

Re: consult

> Hasn't happened in the history of capitalism

Hasn't happened in history. Starvation is overwhelmingly more a feature of non-capitalist societies.

Robert Grant

> the same people who want things free also want to have very nice vacations.

This is a good way to put it. "Things should be zero cost, but also everyone should be well paid" is definitely an idea validated by years of low interest rates. I hope they find a way, as it would be nice if it were zero cost for as many people as possible, but the transition between paid and free can become very tricky.

Who loves programming robots? Who wishes it was easier? Here comes Flowstate

Robert Grant

> Our mission is in short to democratize access to robotics

The hard bit in this task is the robots, not the software.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Robert Grant

This stuff is the middle class version of everyone down the pub watching football and knowing more than the manager does about football. Except even they don't pretend to know the manager's secret motivations and emotions.

GitHub code search redesign can't find many fans

Robert Grant

I found it really annoying that the search would bring back results from multiple branches. I generally didn't want that.

Average Adobe staffer makes $170k a year, and 185 of them = 1 CEO

Robert Grant

Re: leaving the Bay area

The problem is it's all concentrated in one place. It's fine to have people arriving in a location with money - they will slightly push up house prices, but not disastrously so, and they will spend their money locally as well. The issue is the concentration of many companies all bidding for the same pool of developers, who get wealthy off the competition, and are all wanting to buy houses in the same place.

Robert Grant

'm talking about how the productivity benefits of additional tools and automation should not all accrue to the worker who can do more for the same effort, which seems to be a common trope.

Robert Grant

> Unless the CEO is personally computerising or other automating the work, it doesn't matter what the nature of the work is.

No, quite the opposite. The CEO is overall in charge of the success of the company, which, as I said, includes funding, specification and operation of the automation.

As to why compensation exists the way it does: it's because it can do. Why does a Silicon Valley engineer get compensated $500k when they couldn't work in the office without someone cleaning the toilets for $15k/year? The same forces that drive a compensation level of $500k drive the CEO's salary as well.

Robert Grant

It isn't purely related to performance. Nothing is. But it is generally, and eventually. If you have a better measure, you should definitely tell me it so I can make long term bets on the stock market. Otherwise - perfect is the enemy of good and all that.

Robert Grant

Hard to say if it's fair or not.

As an example of cases where it might be: if loads more work is computerised or otherwise automated, then the same level of worker effort will produce the company way more money. The difference is the funding, specification and operation of that automation.

Robert Grant

> Just once I'd love to see a CEO salary that was tied to actual company performance.

This is "total compensation", not salary. Almost all of it is stock options, whose price will be related to company performance.

Great Graph Database Debate: Abandoning the relational model is 'reinventing the wheel'

Robert Grant

Re: Re. "the same use cases"

Yep. Anything graph-related, e.g. a social network, or a large-scale representation of things that relate somehow (e.g. if you're Amazon and want to query across all your networked devices, or an IoT provider wanting to query all your devices in the field and how they relate in a mesh) it works.

I will say at least Neo4J is also quite good for exploratory work, but that's more because it doesn't enforce schemas and has a nice visualisation technology, than anything to do with it using graphs.

Robert Grant

It depends on what "the same use cases" is.

Graph databases are an optimisation: they're amazing at queries like "count all my friends of friends of friends" but they are bad at queries like "give me the mean of all the ages of people in this database". Unsurprisingly, they're good at graph-like traversal but bad at relational operations.

Relational databases are pretty good at everything, but not the best at many things. Choosing them is not the premature optimisation choice, which is good.

Atomic energy body proposes fusion framework to manage British energy grids

Robert Grant

Re: Nice

Clarkson's Farm is utterly compelling television. Speaking as someone who was never a Top Gear fan. (Well, maybe James May.)

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

Robert Grant

Re: Creepy

I don't know what I think of the quoted text, but what you're saying in no way follows from it says.

Robert Grant

Re: Cat ... bag ...

Sure, but single-issue voting isn't great. This isn't a private service like Netflix where you can just cancel it if you don't like it. It's essentially a binary decision: which of two parties do you like based on their claimed stance on ten thousand issues?

Tesla's self-driving code may ignore stop signs, act unsafe. Patch coming ... soon

Robert Grant

Re: Safer than a human driver?

It depends on how much time there is to react. If it's 0.5s it's too late. If it's 10s that's an eternity in driving. That's all that determines "too late".

Robert Grant

Re: Safer than a human driver?

To my understanding it hands over with a lot of time to spare. Has that changed?

There's no place like... KDE: Plasma 5.27 is out and GNOME 44 hits beta

Robert Grant

I think HDMI signals if it's using the source, although I could be wrong.

Most Londoners would quit before they give up working from home

Robert Grant

Here in Oxford had the same: the East side of Oxford, Headington, massively rose in price as people who work in west London thought it was better to buy in Headington and drive into London than live in London.

Robert Grant

The expensive places will move as proximity to employer stops being the main driver of desirability. They will probably drop a bit in price as people will value different things.

Robert Grant

I've seen the opposite: graduates who would've loved a bit of a social life from work not able to integrate, and struggling silently at work because they aren't just sitting next to their team lead able to ask questions.

Codebreakers decipher Mary, Queen of Scots' secret letters 436 years after her execution

Robert Grant

The bureaucracy must expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

Datadog allegedly asked developer to kill open source data export tool

Robert Grant

While I will wholeheartedly endorse DataDog's platform from a technical perspective, dealing with their sales org (in 2021, anyway) left a bad taste in the mouth. It's not surprising other parts of their business are similar.

What is Google doing with its open source teams?

Robert Grant

Re: You thought that?

They've been villified a lot, despite in my mind being the most engineering-friendly cloud platform, and doing loads of good stuff like open sourcing VP8, starting Kubernetes, making AlphaFold, making Go, running Android, etc. They're obviously not perfect, but I think this is to be expected based on the commentary they get in the media.

Microsoft to enterprises: Patch your Exchange servers

Robert Grant

Re: Alternatively..

Or buying into the Google ecosystem, which is even less under your control. Although probably has fewer bugs.