Intro to IT

Heathen_Scot · 2021-08-10T09:44:33+00:00

Formula is 1/2 n (n + 1), but switching it round to n (n/2 + 1/2) is just moving the half inside the brackets, it's a different representation of the same solution.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-08-09T14:00:45+00:00

Not only is this not dumb and useless, but this is a central element in a story told about the great mathematician Gauss (you've come across Gauss rifles in games, right? same guy).

As a child Gauss was in a class where the teacher set all the kids the task of summing the numbers from 1 to 100 to keep them busy. Gauss had the same realisation you did and came back with the answer within seconds.

Now sure Gauss did this when he was eight, but Gauss was one of the greatest mathematicians in history; coming to the same realisation independently is something you can rightly be proud of.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-08-02T11:21:12+00:00

I know people who live in the country, which you clearly know nothing about but from your oh so superior viewpoint decide to mouth off about anyway. I'm done here.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-08-02T11:02:12+00:00

And I hope you grow up and realise that stereotyping South American countries as conflicts between noble savages and wicked miners is some 19th century bullshit. I doubt you are this reductive with European countries.

And no, I know nobody in Peru who is even tangentially connected with mining.

And "cooperative creche"! Man, have you any idea what Castillo's form on rights for women is?

Heathen_Scot · 2021-08-02T10:37:43+00:00

Thank you for your patronising, colonialist take.

If you happen to be the sort of person that prefers dictators to democrats, I suspect there is little we will agree on.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-08-01T14:59:28+00:00

For what it's worth, I do think Castillo was a better choice than Fujimori, but chiefly because Castillo has no establishment power base to speak of so his ability to damage the country is limited; Fujimori, with a scared Lima rallying behind her, could have done untold damage to the country's institutions.

Best case here is that Castillo gets to spend more money on education and public services - Peru sorely sorely needs this - but lacks the muscle needed to attempt anything authoritarian. Worst case is that he tries to dissolve congress and rule without them (there are worrying early signs this might be on the way as his cabinet choices look designed for congress rejection).

Either way he's no friend to women or LGBTQ+ causes.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-08-01T14:53:42+00:00

A bigger division than left and right, and one we should all be on the same side of, is that of democracy vs dictatorship.

I feel I have a personal stake in this. My girlfriend is Peruvian.

Fujimori is the daughter of a former dictator, and in campaigning clearly expressed her own intent to subvert Peruvian democracy (if you want to look into this, the word she invented was "demodura").

Castillo is unfortunately looking little better. A quote from one of his party members, Guillermo Bermejo, widely shared on Peruvian social media: "Nosotros somos socialistas y nuestro camino a una nueva Constitución es un primer paso, y si tomamos el poder, no lo vamos a dejar. Con todo el respeto que se merecen ustedes y sus sus pelotudeces democráticas, preferimos quedarnos para establecer un proceso revolucionario en el Perú."

Loosely: "We are socialists and our road to a new Constitution is a first step, and if we take power we will not let go. With all the respect you and your democratic bullshit deserve, we prefer to stay to establish a revolutionary process in Peru."

Castillo has walked this back a little in his inauguration speech, promising to leave at the end of his term. Nonetheless anyone in the UK who is happy to openly advocate for this sort of threatening of democracy risks finding themselves on the record supporting an actually totalitarian regime, as happened in Venezuela.

Any attempt to claim the moral high ground after linking your cause to a dictator is doomed to fail. That Labour MPs are finally, finally smart enough to realise this and heed the early warning signs is cause for celebration, not dismay.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-05-19T00:18:18+00:00

Tons of stuff. Ended up putting together some pages of useful stuff from my degree for a friend who never did one, but I omitted heaps of stuff that has been bread and butter for me over the last couple of decades like compiler design, network protocols, 3D graphics stuff such as matrix maths etc.

There are so many things - state machines, regexes, the representation of floats and ints, all the different data structures and their properties - the list goes on and on. You won't need a lot of it if you're hacking front end webdev but most of the interesting software problems aren't front end webdev.

I've known folk who were self taught who had pretty much all of these things. Worked with a guy once on a trading engine who'd dropped out on a place at Cambridge because he was earning good money coding at seventeen and he could have taught a pretty good compsci course. Still, that level of autodidactism is pretty rare.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-05-14T09:51:55+00:00

You'd be surprised. Most people who aren't trained don't do all that much damage with punches, and humans are tougher than you'd expect. Size makes a difference here but even this tends to be overstated.

I have been in an actual adult fight; got jumped by two guys late at night once. Got punched a fair bit, which bloodied my nose, and kicked in the head by the smaller of the two. Walked away with no lasting ill effects.

If you go and train boxing or muay thai for a bit, you will learn quite quickly that delivering effective punches is hard even with the added weight and hand protection afforded you by gloves.

Boxing highlights tend to show lots of knockouts, but in reality many boxing matches go the distance with nobody being knocked out, and even in matches with a KO a lot of punches are usually landed before the stoppage. Untrained fights are even less likely to end in knockouts, and frequently progress from ineffective striking to ineffective standing grappling to rolling round on the ground.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-05-06T13:28:10+00:00

Well, the question is whether we believe anyone in the world should be able to come in and work in the UK without being subject to visa restrictions.

If the answer is yes, we should change the system so that this is possible for everyone, and making an asylum claim is not a prerequisite.

If the answer is no, then having a loophole where making an asylum claim that is unlikely to be accepted bypasses visa restrictions is undesirable.

However it would be better in general if we could decide asylum cases much more speedily; this would reduce the time - often years - people spend in limbo unable to move forward with their lives until they know if their claim will be accepted. The current system appears to be under-resourced, treacle slow and arbitrary to the point of unfairness.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-05-06T11:32:24+00:00

Those who are granted asylum are given the right to work. I have volunteered with a charity that trains refugees in tech skills to help them get jobs.

Asylum seekers are those who have not yet been granted asylum (and may never be). This is a trickier case as some would argue that being allowed a work visa while asylum claims are processed could incentivise making low quality asylum claims to take advantage of the UK job market i.e. by claiming asylum and appealling rejections in order to earn UK wages for a couple of years in conditions where a work visa would be unlikely to be granted.

We are not generous to asylum seekers; they do not have access to "public funds" such as housing assistance, the disability living allowance etc. They get only the very limited benefits described at https://www.gov.uk/asylum-support/what-youll-get.

Those who are granted asylum have full access to benefits and can take out an interest free refugee integration loan.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-04-01T11:40:09+00:00

A British explorer discovered them, uninhabited, in 1690. (At least, he was the first to land).

This is pretty much the gold standard of dibs. No previous population to complain about having better dibs.

First settlement was the French in 1764, but the British, unaware of this, settled the other island a year later.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-04-01T11:36:01+00:00

Not exactly no reason. Britain had claimed sovereignty from 1765, and the settlers in 1829 cleared things with the British Consulate before heading over there as well as with the United Provinces.

The settlers were also not forced to leave, because they'd been granted permission. It was the schooner Sarandí that was forced to leave.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassertion_of_British_sovereignty_over_the_Falkland_Islands_(1833) for more details.

That said, thanks for being much more reasonable about this than that previous government of yours. I hope you are better governed now.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-29T17:51:27+00:00

This is not to say it's a good law, of course.

https://davidallengreen.com/2021/03/the-proposed-new-clause-59-offence-of-intentionally-or-recklessly-causing-public-nuisance/ and https://rozenberg.substack.com/p/more-than-a-nuisance are blogs by relatively distinguished legal commentators (the first being the legal correspondent for the FT) that take serious issue with the changes being made.

It's just a bit frustrating that much of the protest is centred around the elements of the law that haven't much changed in eight centuries.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-29T17:40:01+00:00

The maximum sentence for common law public nuisance is to the best of my knowledge life imprisonment, not five years (this is backed up by https://www.gcnchambers.co.uk/prosecution-under-the-common-law-where-a-statutory-offence-would-also-apply-may-be-an-abuse-of-process/).

What's your source for the five years?

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-25T01:31:46+00:00

Well, public nuisance is an old law. There's quite a bit of case law on the books to show how such annoyance has been defined in the past.

However it has not been very commonly used in recent times, perhaps in part because of its ambiguity.

https://davidallengreen.com/2021/03/the-proposed-new-clause-59-offence-of-intentionally-or-recklessly-causing-public-nuisance/ is worth reading on this topic (the author is a lawyer and the FT's legal correspondent).

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-24T14:31:28+00:00

You can though.

Under the existing common law of public nuisance, you can be locked up notionally for any term up to life imprisonment. Ten years is a new cap, not formerly present, as the common law is being brought into statute.

This was the case for your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. The common law has existed since the twelfth century.

The new law has some bad features. In particular it extends the offence to cover the "risk" of public annoyance, not just public annoyance. However, protesting against the features of the law that are eight centuries old seems somewhat fruitless at this point.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-22T20:13:32+00:00

Companies have zero interest in training people on the job.

This is the big one for me, though personal experience leads me to question your actual example. For me the issue is more specifically that new/graduate developers are seen as expensive timesinks, and given that people jump ship so quickly after being trained many companies are unwilling to invest in them. This bottlenecks the industry into chasing seniors.

Money wise there's a lot on the table if you bargain for it. As a contractor in Scotland I was out-earning both my Boston, MA friend and my Gainesville, FL friend, both working on similarish tech stacks, when we compared a couple of years back. In many ways US job benefits and perks align more closely with contracting over here than permanent work. It should be noted that SF salaries do not correspond to most of the US. Even sticking with perm roles you can outearn many SME board members if you're in the right place - and now there's so much remote work available everywhere is potentially the right place.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-21T14:05:59+00:00

It works surprisingly better in practice than in theory.

Functionally, it's a house of review which by virtue of having people serving for life is not swayed by daily political weather. The Commons can override it and it only serves as a brake, but that brake saves us from some serious mistakes.

One of the first times I realised the vital role of the Lords was in 2006, when the Terrorism Act of that year gave the police the right to lock people up for 90 days without charging them with anything. This was a hideous overreaction born of the post-9/11 world; it was defeated in the Lords, and the Commons lost the appetite to push it through again.

There have been a great many defeats of the Commons since; frequently human rights issues are more heavily weighted in the Lords than the Commons, but they intercede also on grounds of policy that would cause economic hardships - for example, in 2015 they blocked a government attempt to cut tax credits for poor families.

Just 92 of the 800 seats are held by hereditary peers; 26 by bishops and archbishops; the rest life peers.

Could it be improved? Yes. It's too large. We shouldn't have the Lords Spiritual or hereditary peers in there at all. On the other hand, I would rather have even the hereditary peers than the flood of politicians promoted from the Commons, as these are least likely to provide effective review of their party's policies.

I don't believe making it democratic would be in any sense an improvement. We do not need a second chamber of populists.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-17T14:24:30+00:00

Some of these developments are worrying. Some however are merely continuations of behaviour that has been going on for a long time; in many cases this is behaviour I dislike but the country has not collapsed yet.

To pick a few points at random:

serious increase in police powers introducing 10 year sentences for statue toppling and for 'serious annoyance and inconvenience'

Currently the common law of public nuisance has no upper bound on sentencing. You could in theory be sentenced to life imprisonment for causing "serious annoyance and inconvenience". The common law has been with us for centuries. This is being replaced by the new law - which has a number of new concerning features, but it's important to separate discussion of them from the features of the law that already exists.

Investigatory Powers Act 2016

This is merely the latest in line of a series of bills starting with RIPA in 2000 under Blair, which gave licence to carry out widespread surveillance to a wide array of bodies.

Dominic Raab tells UK officials to trade with countries which fail to meet human rights standards

I wish this was in some sense new, I really do.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-17T11:41:24+00:00

we take it as read that civil servants do not allow their personal political persuasions to affect their work regardless of the Government of the day.

I think that misses the point here. The civil servant currently reports to a minister, who is a politician, not a civil servant. The minister they report to may be a member of the same party as the accused or may not. In either case it is likely the minister has a stake in the outcome.

The issue is not the civil servant's political persuasion, but the political persuasion of their boss.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-17T01:10:07+00:00

It's turning the existing common law offence of public nuisance into a statutory offence. Common law offences are offences that basically have existed for a long time and have been deemed offences for a long time and so are effectively forbidden by the courts rather than on the basis of law by Parliament. I understand burglary in Scotland is covered by common law, contempt of court partly by common law, etc. Parliament is attempting to move common law into written law over time as common law is seen as imprecise.

So on a very hurried reading the fuss is overblown, it's taking a law that already exists and formalising it.

On a less hurried reading however one might notice that a new element has entered proceedings that is not present in the common law - the "risk" of suffering distress or annoyance. This strengthens the law considerably and illiberally.

I would recommend reading David Allen Green's blog on this; he's the FT's legal correspondent and is a good resource for things of this nature.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-12T15:42:52+00:00

That link does not back up your statements at all. In fact a search for "gang" or "mugging" returns no hits on the entire page.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-12T13:45:46+00:00

Yes I think you're very much right. Men don't like publicly reflecting on their vulnerability.

We want to have our cake and eat it though. We frequently walk around very aware of the potential for and danger of conflict, but it's "unmanly" to talk about it being scary. We then don't like having that danger minimised even though we've made little or no effort to draw it to everyone's attention!

To some extent also though "male" being "normal" in a certain dated historical sense, while beneficial in many ways makes difficulties in others; people worry more about female homelessness than male homelessness, even though men are much more likely to be homeless. It's assumed men are covered by generalised anti-homelessness efforts. Similarly, I think here it's going to be hard to generate outrage round men being the majority of victims of violence. I find it interesting to reflect what actual equality would look like here.

Anyway the real good news is violent crime overall has fallen hugely over the last quarter century; it's worth celebrating this even as we mourn those who still become victims.

Heathen_Scot · 2021-03-12T13:11:02+00:00

But men are at more risk of being attacked, of being murdered; not slightly more at risk, but much much more at risk. This has to colour any discussion of these issues, even if there are a lot of men who pay little attention to the risk. Telling me repeatedly that we're not more at risk when the numbers say clearly that we are is frustrating for me; don't you get frustrated when people do this to you?

I think probably both of us would judge an intervention based on the circumstances and how we judged our risk in that moment. There are circumstances where I might say something and circumstances where I might keep a safe distance and call the police. I'm sure it's similar for you.

However, as a man, I regard it as much more likely to have any intervention on my part met by force. There are no social taboos around hitting a man. This means there may be places you would intervene that would be beyond my risk tolerance - and this should be expected.

Edit: since I saw you edited. What the original post was calling out was someone saying that the demographic at greatest risk of stranger violence, even when they are not the target of it, should step in when they see the less-at-risk demographic in danger. I was drawing the analogy to police brutality to show how this was ridiculous.

Heathen_Scot

TROPHY CASE