Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

I attended an Intel "AI day" in London back in about 2018, before they bought Habana and had all of their focus on Nervana (mentioned in the article) and Saffron - which I've basically never heard mention of again since that day. seems a shame; while the AI accelerators have obvious utility, it was Saffron which sounded like it might be a game-changer.

A competing research team in France almost cracked the same problem - but their funding agency said Un Oeuf is Un Oeuf.

That's the kind of pun the guillotine was invented for.

C'mon, les œufs faire.

You should be ashamed and feel bad for that

It's the traditional appreciative answer to a terrible pun, and it's a great tradition!

From the inside, RTO feels more like a way to reclaim leverage from highly paid technical employees who have become too uppity. Summoning us back to the office is about putting us in our place - but in the social hierarchy, not physically.

I genuinely wonder if that is actually the case. Our team ( fairly technical team within a non-technical type company ) repeatedly ( edit: and successfully) pushed back against any kind of RTO ( I personally sent rather non-corporate email asking why the RTO calls if they can't even get enough desks for rotation ). I am sure bosses hate being questioned, but I don't see anyone begging to do my job. In other words, something has got to give.

I don't know what is going to happen exactly. I feel the push from bigger corps will give smaller one a "permission" to do it as well, but I know I am already doing what I can to make sure I am ready. Last time the company tried to call me back in specifically, I was lucky enough to secure current position and was able to tell them no.

That said, even today, I know I would not be able to get my job back there and I didn't burn bridges in any conventional way ( unless you consider saying no to RTO burning a bridge ).

Fun times ahead.

The uppity, highly paid technical employee has recreated our SaaS offering on his laptop and it is now effectively free for self-hosting.

VP of Sales has left nine voicemails, would you like to play them now?

"Buncha fuckin' nerds, don't they know I got an MBA from Hahvad?"

Most of my consulting clients do barely any work on Fridays anyway and so wouldn't mind me reducing to 4 days at all.

When it comes time to write Python 4, please just let these guys handle it.

Any article which seeks to explore the problems of northern England and doesn't mention the weather is fundamentally incomplete.

I've lived in every part of England, but being in the north west for the last decade has highlighted how much our mental health can be damaged by constant grey skies and rain. A population predisposed to feeling hopeless naturally leads to a less vibrant economy.

The diagram of the northern "urban" centre also fails to point out the Peak District, though you can detect it by noticing what looks like an obvious gap in the middle of the circle. In the middle of the London circle is, of course, the centre of London, world-famous capital city of the United Kingdom, seat of power of its government and monarchy. In the middle of the Northern circle? Some mountains and the occasional picturesque little village...

(The weather might also be a factor here too. The elevated regions are much colder, snowier and windier, causing problems with transport. Getting between Sheffield and Manchester at this time of year can be a painful business.)

In my comparisons with the Netherlands I explore this in detail. The centre of the Netherlands' main urban region is a six metre below sea level swamp that the Dutch never have and never will build on and which is just as much of an obstacle to agglomeration as the Pennines. So I really don't think this matters.

As for the weather, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Denmark are hardly renowned for their fantastic weather and they're all doing much better than North England. Meanwhile Southern Spain, Southern Italy, and Greece are lovely places but not doing well economically. I don't think the weather is a good excuse for Northern underperformance.

The bad weather places you mention have largely uniform bad weather, which is not true of England - the south east is noticeably warmer and drier than the north west.

Weather is of course only a contributing factor, just like the historical influences.

Factor in the ability to escape bad weather, much easier to do in UK than Denmark .

I have observed a strange/alarming behaviour when I carry a notebook - because friends and family don't typically have one, they find it intriguing and so will sometimes absentmindedly snoop through what I've written if I leave it unattended. The same thing just doesn't happen with a ReMarkable (and even if it did, you can set a PIN code).

> and so will sometimes absentmindedly snoop through what I've written if I leave it unattended

I'm glad I'm not the only one who experienced that! Such a fascinating experience, though really quite upsetting at the time. Doesn't happen now with my PIN-locked e-ink device.

I have a solid sheet of grey clouds over my head for what feels like 300 days of the year - would happily take some of that variability!

Education comes in many forms. School taught me about long division and the battle of Hastings, but weekends away with my family taught me about societal norms.

We hear lots of complaints these days about how mal-adjusted so many children are, but is there any wonder? They are whisked from after school clubs to private sports activities, then off to bed (or homework) once their mandatory activities are done. Some of this is because parents are terrified of being considered neglectful by under-stimulating their child - but then children never learn to just exist in the presence of events which are more important than themselves.