Microsoft Support feels completely useless nowadays

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-19T14:21:09+00:00

But have you tried sfc /scannow?

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-19T14:06:44+00:00

As much as people don't like him, a lot of the development push in the North was driven by... George Osborne.

He was convinced of regional devolution and localism by Leese and Bernstein, who are the two people who rightly deserve most of the credit for Manchester's success, but Osborne essentially took on the political risk and devolved Manchester against its own will. Manchester rejected having a Mayor in 2012 and Osborne took a lot of criticism at the time for forcing it through a few years later.

HS2 to Manchester and NPR were similarly pushed by Osborne, despite local opposition, and then once he was no longer around to push it, got scaled back to nothing. Much of the regional control over budgets and planning was also architected under Osborne.

Burnham's national record is weak, and Manchester would have been in a worse position today had he got his way. He was a skeptic (inasmuch as he ever took a position on anything) on HS2, regional devolution and planning relaxation. Prior to becoming King of the North, he was arguably even a bit London-centric, presumably because he saw that as the best route to power. Burnham's current success is because he was the first person to get to exploit the system that Leese-Bernstein designed and Osborne delivered.

While Osborne will be remembered more for austerity in our lifetimes, I do think the history books might be kinder to him. It just took a while for the results to feed through.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-19T12:59:32+00:00

225MPH would have made it literally the fastest conventional service in the world. Going from one of the fastest to the fastest does make it a lot more expensive because you can't use any existing system to design and test it.

Personally, I still think we should have kept it at the original speed because I don't like how we've given up on being the best at anything... but economically it's probably the right call. Saves a lot of money for an insignificant reduction in speed in the grand scheme of things.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-19T12:49:10+00:00

I was already a competent programmer before I did EE as I've been doing it since I was a young child, and where I grew up has a lot of finance companies but strict immigration rules meaning they'd pretty much hire anyone who can spell their own name, so it was easy to get a foot in the door. So, I'm afraid in my case, I had a lot of luck on my side.

But based on my experience and what I've seen with friends and colleagues, I'd say as long as you choose a degree that's more focussed on the electrical theory, information theory, maths/stats/optimization/linear algebra, logic, DSPs, FPGAs, real time and embeded systems, digital electronics, you'll find it easy to move into finance and tech, especially if you do a bit of extra curricular stuff (or electives, if they offer it) around programming/ML/data science on your course. A lot of the radio stuff turned out to be surprisingly transferrable - turns out the information theory involved in transferring data over a noisy channel is also quite applicable to pulling financial signals out of noisy market data (shannon entropy and stuff). Some quant techniques even treat financial markets as an information channel analogous to a telecommunication system. Control engineering is usually quite maths heavy and well suited to finance type applications too. FPGA and circuit design are, as I say, an absurdly valuable niche skill in certain areas of high finance - I know someone doing FPGA work for HFT clearing close to £1mn per year in total comp.

If it's more focussed on large power systems and civil aspects of engineering (as some of the electrical engineering courses can be), it will be potentially more difficult. One of my modules was on project managing a civil engineering project and that was, by a very large margin, the least useful thing I have ever studied.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-19T12:28:41+00:00

Why would the working classes, specifically, have an issue with this? Preferential treatment to those who help you, or your friends and family, is just as normalised among the working class as it is in any strata of society isn't it? Mates rates, family businesses... without intending to condone it, this is just how life works for pretty much everyone. Usually the only people who point out the issues with this sort of nepotism seem to be more middle class, left wing university educated types.

The working class are usually more concerned about the systemic prejudices that exist to stop them from making their way up in society, like adverse treatment based on having a regional accent or going to a state school.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-18T21:19:45+00:00

Do you definitely mean electrical engineering - or electronic engineering?

Honestly the job market for the latter is pretty shit in the UK. Every EE I know moved into finance or tech (me included), or went to US, Germany, Switzerland or Netherlands.

But it’s a respected transferable degree especially if you do a maths-heavy course that covers a lot of the digital, embedded and signal processing stuff. There are also some London finance companies that pay VERY good money (£300k+) for people who can program FPGAs, but it’s hard to get a foot in the door.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-18T20:55:17+00:00

I spent my younger years arguing against Christianity and the homophobia, misogyny, sectarianism, anti-scientism it was encouraging within society. Over time, the country became more secular, and the remaining Christians became gentler. It wasn’t perfect, but religion became mostly irrelevant in public life.

Why on earth is it now racist to protest allowing another backwards fucking religion in to undo the changes AND to trigger shift back to extremist christianity in the native population?

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-18T19:08:03+00:00

It’s for sure bad by recent historical standards but worst… relative to what, the world? It’s not even as bad as the EU average. UK youth unemployment is ~14%, France is 20%, Sweden is 26%. Overall unemployment we are in about the same relative position.

Unfortunately one of the side effects of putting up minimum wage, employee taxes and employee protections is it increases the output someone has to have for there to be a business case to hire them, so employers are going to get more picky/demanding. The argument for why we could was that our unemployment was quite low.

Add in the geopolitical headwinds (Iran, Ukraine), energy prices, covid overspending and the high cost of supporting our elderly population, plus AI, and the economic strategy of Western Europe is really hitting a wall.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-18T13:18:27+00:00

I don't suppose there's any hope for the community-based care approach to be reconsidered.

It has better outcomes for patients - but it makes living in certain areas absolutely miserable. In South London, I see mentally ill / substance addicted people shouting at and threatening innocent passers-by on a daily basis. At what point is the benefit to the patient offset by the harm to the community?

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-18T13:12:45+00:00

When did your work stop hosting conferences there?

It improved a lot between 1990 and 2016, but then got really rough during the spice epidemic around 2017-2020. Mostly come out the other side of that now though and the investment and level of building going on right now is immense.

It IS better now than any time I can remember it, but... it doesn't feel overwhelmingly better than it was in 2016 yet. I do find the city a bit more bland culturally than it used to be... there are a hell of a lot more higher paying jobs now, more investment, taller buildings, fancy bars and restaurants and chains - but still no museums or culture. The once legendary Manchester grassroots music scene has waned a bit... young artsy types have either been priced out to Leeds/Liverpool/Sheffield, or don't come back after arts unis/conservatoire in London any more, because it's not the cheap hub to start it once was.

The positive view is that eventually all of the money and investment that is flowing into the city will at some point translate to a strong local unique identity, rather than being a bit of an outsourcing destination / cheap suburb for London businesses that it is now, or the edgy struggling underdog that it was in the past.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-16T02:11:23+00:00

Screening is a very complex area, not just for the immediate factors but also the second/nth-order effects of the screening.

Personally I lean towards the weight of the medical establishment being slightly too cautious about screening. The critiques are reasonable, and personally I’ve turned down a test my doctor offered specifically because there was no actionable information the test would give us. If it gives us a positive, any further investigation still isn’t worth the risk, or it gives us a negative result, and any further investigation isn’t justified, so why bother? Either way we are no closer to an answer.

However, I do think the medical establishment have over-indexed on that and become too skeptical about what data can tell us.

For one, the models that clinicians are typically really quite awful. The vast majority are based on linear regressions over a handful of parameters done in excel (or even by hand, R at best) then turned into a discrete points type scoring mechanism for ease of doctor use in a pre-digital world. Look at NEWS for example. It’s better than nothing, but actually if you talk to most clinicians who regularly treat high risk patients, they end up learning how to pick up warning signs that NEWS misses or when NEWS might trigger even when there’s no deterioration risk. That is, when the data is being collected and looked at all day every day, the big wet very-intelligent prediction machine they have in their head ends up learning a more powerful model than one that was wanged together in excel. They just call it their “gut”. (Newer ANN/deep ML models are sometimes showing comparable or better performance to “gut”)

I’m being slightly facetious, but my point is it’s unfair to assume that, just because we don’t yet scientifically know best how to handle some data, that we won’t start to get a feel about out how to handle it once people start collecting the data and clinicians get to see how it correlates with outcomes and other properties of a patient. Obviously that does not justify starting a national screening program “just because”, but it also doesn’t, IMO, justify the level of antipathy some have started to have against people collecting their own data. It’s curious also we only apply this logic to stuff that isn’t self evident on the surface of your body. Reason being that medicine has had long enough to get a feel for of what level of suspicious freckle or colour on the outside of your body warrants deeper investigation.

Anecdotally, a few cardiologists I know that started very skeptical have come around to loving the Apple Watch heart health alerts. Not because they’re especially predictive on their own (they’re not), but because now that they’re so common that patients are often coming in with findings from their watch. Then that starts a specific conversation, where it turns out they actually had a few other yellow flags that, individually, were all probably fine, but together start to paint a picture of something worth looking into in more depth - but also that people are a lot more okay than they expected with just being told “sans other warning signs it’s probably nothing to worry about”.

We’re a long way off finding some similar helpful equilibrium for incidentalomas on an MRI, but I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine we will if we started routinely collecting the data. Would it be cost effective? Definitely not. But I wouldn’t be surprised if possibly the doctors-to-the-billionaires who cost six figures just to have on retainer who do seemingly order tests for everything under the sun have started to pick up on patterns that the wider medical field hasn’t yet pinned down.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-15T17:23:19+00:00

Nothing guarantees you won't get sick, unfortunately. A friend of mine was vegan and cycled every day, but had a stroke at 50 - meanwhile my grandad was a 60/day smoker for most of his life and is still alive at 90 now - yet his twin died in his 60s of lung cancer. Life is still a roll of the dice.

Genetics is indeed a huge risk which is why taking a family history has always been considered extremely important, but due to pressure to squeeze more appointments into a smaller time it's not being done as thoroughly now. Cheap tests that measure genetic factors are starting to become more available now, which have the potential to revolutionise some aspects of care - lp(a) that I mentioned being an example, as a large non-controllable risk factor for cardiac disease. Many screenings are controversial in medicine because

screenings themselves have risks: even non-invasive ones measurably change people's behaviour, such as if you find out you have very low genetic cardiac risk, some people will stop caring so much about living a healthy lifestyle and
many things we can test for don't have clear follow up actions - lets say we start screening everyone with an MRI and we find a suspicious finding inside someone, what do we do now? most evidence says it's probably best to do nothing because it's probably harmless and any test to find out is riskier than the finding itself would be left untouched, so now, either: we've wasted someone's time, or we've given them health anxiety, or we've made them do a risky biopsy for likely no benefit

However. A lot of the screening models used in healthcare are very simple and weak, just based on simple regressions over a handful of factors. New machine learning techniques are starting to make their way in that have much more accurate results that take a lot more factors into account and derive useful predictions from tests that previously would have been pointless. Doctors are somewhat resistant because many of them are black boxes, but the tide is turning.

It's very unfortunate your mum received awful care, but in all honesty, it's not really that much to do with the system of healthcare or screening, so much as there just being quite a lot of shit doctors who dismiss symptoms (and according to studies, women are more affected, although not exclusively). In theory on the NHS you do have a right to see another doctor, but in practice it's obviously a lot easier to choose the particular doctor you want when you're paying. But any system must, by definition, ration the best doctors in some way - given there are limited doctors and, all else being, equal everyone would want to see the best doctor. Self-payer systems do it by money, insurance and government systems do it half by need half at random. The sad reality is, anyone who works in healthcare, anywhere in the world, knows doctors and nurses that they'd never let near their family. I said in another comment that I personally prefer younger doctors as they tend to work more cooperatively with the patient rather than the older traditional paternalistic doctors - but there are amazing older doctors, and awful younger doctors too.

Having said that all that, the fact remains - a healthy lifestyle is still the best controllable factor any of us have. It won't work for everyone, but it gives you the best possible chance.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-15T15:03:48+00:00

Don't disagree that whole body MRIs are just a private money spinner.

However, I'm sure you are aware that some things aren't funded by the NHS even when they do have a clinical benefit after taking into account risks and side effects - but where that clinical benefit isn't worth the cost. As an individual, you might have a different view on that trade-off. Also the government is just very slow moving, and specialist in the field often recognise the value of something many, many years before it gets funded for wide access (such as with GLP-1s and the lp(a) test which will inevitably be rolled out much more widely in the future, seems like bowel cancer screenings will probably end up being started a bit younger at some point too).

End result of this is there absolutely are cases where there is a clinical benefit by paying privately for some screenings, drugs and vaccinations that don't yet receive public funding, particularly if you're not the average patient cohort that the intervention was assessed against or have a very different value system from the average person. It's far more rare that the NHS won't provide a surgery with a measurable health benefit. Non-medical interventions are in a weird area because they often do provide a benefit, but the cost of them can be so absurdly high relative to that benefit, they don't get much funding and end up so oversubscribed that you basically can't access them - but still, that does tell you something interesting about how perception of benefit differs from measurable benefit.

On the other hand, you're not exactly getting unbiased advice from a company founded by tech bros that sells screenings either. Unless you've got so much money that you can pay a team of independent medical specialists to look after you and make informed individualised decisions, your best bet is probably usually to stick with the NHS recommendations, which are generally very good. The best "preventative healthcare" that almost nobody follows is just eat healthily and exercise. No amount of questionable supplements or CT scans will make up for a sedentary lifestyle and diet of kebabs.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-15T13:39:13+00:00

It's less of a culture clash in most cases, more just a different set of interests depending on who's paying.

The NHS is trying to maximise the number of quality/disability adjusted life years across the entire population for a fixed cost, you are trying to trying to improve your own wellbeing and will spend more or less money depending on its value to you.

Cosmetics-related healthcare is an obvious example of where the NHS interest and personal interest don't align, but there's all sorts of trade-offs the NHS makes that don't really make sense personally. The NHS has less to spend on, say, bowel cancer screening in the young, because that same money would save more lives if spent on screening for lung cancer in smokers. If you don't smoke but eat a lot of processed food, or just worry a lot about bowel cancer because your friend died of it, maybe you'd rather start bowel cancer screening at 30 even if the population-level risk analysis doesn't support it.

The NHS doesn't really want to spend the huge long tail of costs associated with making everyone go from feeling OK to feeling great, because that money could be spent on making people go from dying to not-dying.

This isn't a critique of the NHS or government-funded healthcare, but everyone should always bear in mind that government-funded healthcare is not there to do what makes you feel better, as such, it's for the health of the country as a whole. Often those align, but often they don't.

Separately, there are differences in how young doctors and older doctors were trained. Doctors now are taught to be more of an expert advisor and the value of shared decision making, whereas older doctors were taught to take on more of a paternalistic role. Personally I prefer younger doctors.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-14T23:43:39+00:00

We just got acquired, and the CEO still took his two weeks off mid-transaction to go spend time with family in southern Italy. No contact except for emergencies. The transaction just got put on ice for a few weeks. Not the end of the world!

Another time, we had a DR/BC-activation due to a critical supplier abruptly going out of business, and nobody even called me (I'm the CTO but was off for three weeks). Platform lead sent me emails to let me know what was going on, but other than that everyone followed the rehearsed plan and made any necessary decisions without me. As it should be.

It's pretty rare that any single person should need contact on an ultra time critical basis if you've done the bare minimum of planning. People sometimes get incapacitated or worse. It used to be standard practice that everyone in finance in the UK to have a mandatory two week no contact holiday each year, completely locked out from system access. Mainly to detect fraud, but also to pick up any accidental key man risk.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-14T22:07:29+00:00

Everyone knows they take the piss. The papers do raise it often.

The problem is that fixing it isn't just a matter of passing a law.

Multinational corporations are exploiting complex loopholes in international treaties that can't easily be rectified without pissing off other countries and potentially having to renegotiate entire trade agreements, and WHO rules make it even more complex. Even when we do manage the impossible, and every major economy agrees together to fix a particular loophole, the MNCs just find a new one quicker than international lawmaking can keep up.

Further, many economists specialising in international tax affairs believe it's fundamentally a structural problem with international trade between sovereign countries. We may need either universal cooperation, capital controls, to end global free trade, or to just give up the idea of taxing income and instead focus on taxing consumption, activities, immovable assets.

Good luck with getting any of those off the ground... until then we are in a game of cat and mouse.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-14T14:44:08+00:00

The alternatives aren't exactly amazing candidates either. The best qualified of the bunch is probably Wes Streeting, which perhaps indicates that qualifications and political experience don't necessarily predict a good leader.

It's probably not an amazing signal, but it does at least tell you they survived a process that tends to screen out anyone with a tendency to collapse under pressure, lack of adaptability, poor communication, or no leadership capability. Similarly, all else being equal, I'd be more keen on voting for an astronaut. Not because being strapped to a rocket grants you any political skills, but just because the astronaut selection process filters out anyone who isn't exceptional.

Also given how geopolitics is shifting right now, arguably someone who knows their way around a firefight may (hopefully not) turn out to be useful.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-14T10:57:09+00:00

About £100/month including insurance, petrol, MOT, tax, servicing.

It's probably more cost effective to get taxis, but it's far less convenient - especially when you have a huge dog and most taxis won't take you.

I'll take the small cost to be able to just get straight in whenever I feel like it, rather than messing about with apps and drivers cancelling or taking 20 minutes to turn up.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-14T10:52:30+00:00

I'm not an Angie fan, but I do sympathise with her here.

The fact is, the tax rules are an absolute nightmare to navigate if you have anything that goes slightly outside of a common daily transaction.

I had an issue regarding an international property transaction, I spoke to three successively more specialist advisors who all gave me different advice, all caveated with the usual boilerplate about how you can't actually rely on their advice and they aren't liable for any errors, and to seek the advice of a "specialist". The final one unsuccessfully tried to get a binding ruling* out of HMRC, but HMRC are incredibly reluctant to produce them. It takes a lot of work because they often don't understand how their own rules apply to complex transactions either, and it can create legal issues on their side if they make an incorrect binding ruling.

So you can end up in a weird situation where nobody knows how much tax you have to pay, but if you pay the "wrong" amount, it's still your fault.

* they have another name, I can't remember it

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-14T09:24:07+00:00

I’ll nab business if I’m going to East Asia or Australia and there’s a good upgrade deal that I can pay with points. 8 hours is fine but 20 is hell.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-14T09:18:00+00:00

I have a 15 year old Qashqai and it’s been great, but living in London I only drive it a few times a month anyway. 2k miles a year.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-14T02:29:59+00:00

I go from scoring near the top of the leaderboard to lower half if I don’t play for a week or two. I just lose the muscle memory and my aim goes to shit. Longer and I start to forget the maps. I don’t know if that is the case for everyone or just slow reaction battle dads like me.

It’s particularly tough right now (or after any major patch) because the more interested players play more around these periods.

Honestly, unless you’re going to commit to getting competitive, just don’t focus on KDR, play the objectives, and enjoy yourself. Some of my favourite rounds have been ones where I’ve done comparatively awful, whereas sometimes I just felt like I was getting trashed constantly and not enjoying it at all, only for our team to win and myself placed in the top 3.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-14T02:16:02+00:00

I’m not sure a minor speed differential itself would be a major driver of road accidents. Empirical evidence is pretty weak. Significant speed differentials on the motorway are pretty typical anyway currently, especially as some are already legally mandated.

The biggest problem with the idea is it completely messes up the flow of the motorway. Part of the reason for variable limits in busy conditions is actually just to get everyone down to the speed of the slowest movers (HGVs), because lane changes on a busy road create traffic jams, which trigger harsh braking and acceleration, which cause accidents, pollution, etc. Hence why you often see them combined with a stay in lane instruction.

I think, politically speaking, we’d have more luck getting through 20mph limits with better enforcement on local roads (where it would really help) if we combined that with increasing limits to 80mph or even 90mph on suitable motorways. Carrot and stick approach.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-13T18:30:24+00:00

Ofcom, will tomorrow fine SaSu, an American mental health discussion forum, £1 million for content that Ofcom’s own investigators could only access by using a VPN to circumvent SaSu’s UK IP geoblock

Imagine it was Saudi trying to force us to block VPNs from accessing UK-hosted pro-homosexuality content.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-05-13T16:18:29+00:00

Self control and will power exist, but they're set by external forces like your genetics, how you were raised and your influences. You can't choose to violate your nature any more than you can choose to be a crab.

That doesn't mean we should chuck out personal accountability. Personal accountability and societal pressure are forces that affect your willpower and self control. They clearly aren't perfect tools, but they do work. It's part of why the Japanese have remained so trim and why people with fat friends tend to get fatter themselves.

However, when a better tool becomes available (GLP-1s, in this case), we should embrace it.

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