When I was younger I lived in a large shared house, constant activity and people coming and going, music always playing, I loved it then.

Now I live in a very soundproof apartment, literally never hear anyone else (our neighbours right next door had a party until 4am with loud music, etc. We didn't hear a thing). I love this now.

As I get older I've gotten more and more sensitive to other people's noise. I find people playing bluetooth devices to be acutely, intensely, irritating. I can't just ignore it, it annoys and distracts me too much.

I've become that grumpy guy who asks people to turn their music down or wear headphones (almost always a negative experience for everyone involved). I talk to management at restaurants and pubs and ask them to turn the music down (mixed results on that one). I have taken a table at restaurants and then walked away because the music is too loud.

It is weird, because this is my reaction to the situation, so I'm responsible for it. A city is not a quiet space, and we can't really expect it to be. But at the same time, the lack of consideration for others is shocking. Walking around playing music on speaker is basically saying to everyone "f*ck you, I'm more important than all of you".

It's the subway/train/restaurant usage of phones to spool Tiktok/IG shorts with the sound on, and other noise, that I find maddeningly annoying.

But everything (in the US at least) is very loud, including restaurants. I don't understand why. It's far less likely to happen in W European capitals. As if Americans are extremely loud and love to be engulfed in constant noise. At least, the US and I'd say much of the Caribbean is like this as well.

Is it because we're old that we're bothered? Have things gotten worse? Did we or It change?

Businesses that do meet these criteria charge like wounded bulls. In part because they know that all the other businesses that the govt could turn to will also charge like wounded bulls.

I once knew someone who had to solicit 3 bids and document them to buy a $500 camera for local government. They weren't thinking "I am useless and craven", they were thinking "this is silly but I have to do it".

I was against it, but "you know, if they don't do it, they no longer give a warranty on the solution", type of bullshit. Yeah 60md of warranty? My client are a bunch of fools.

Like ONG, bribes and extracting public money is the first target.

The point is, the person wasn't trying to hedge against looking bad, they literally had to do and document this.

Also, governments are large bureaucracies, with all the process that entails. And because there's no real benefit for them in delivering quicker, but lots of risk in delivering badly, this sort of stuff happens.

Procurement for such small items can be quick and sane. It's the larger items where rules tighten and procurement portals or bidding become mandated that are problematic

So loosely I purchase items at my work from a budget that I am allocated in an organisation that is ultimately responsible to the UK government. I need to justify that the items I am ordering are reasonably priced, and the organisation would really really like to have the goods before any money goes out. That means they want to place an order, receive the goods and and invoice, and then pay the invoice. Many online shops don't want to deal with that. We have accounts set up with many companies, but not all. If I want to buy some reams of 160gsm A4 white card (for example, the other day), that whole process is going to take at least 10 minutes. Some of our suppliers don't sell exactly that. Is 240gsm ok? I've got to go back to the person who wants it (no btw, I had to go find some and take it to them for comparison). More esoteric items are going to take longer. What exactly do I want to order?

So yeah, procurement is simple when you are at home with an amazon account. The items will be here tomorrow!

edit: oh, I didn't mention the free delivery.. a box of white card doesn't get me free delivery. Is there something else I can add onto that? Ok, the order will have to wait..

Unfortunately it sounds like the process is misaligned with the intention. I doubt this mechanism actually works for efficient budgeting and even when it appears to work, it’s probably at the cost of standard quality.

This is an absurd statement that might as well come straight out of Yes Minister. Buying from PWC reflects badly on them already, let alone when their next scandal happens. Which is of course never far away [0].

I'm sure Fujitsu met similar "criteria" when selected for Horizon. How well that selection reflected on the procurement office..

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC#Litigation

Buying from PWC reflects badly on them with us, because we know tech. It does not reflect badly with other civil servants, because PWC is a highly-respected organisation.

It's very similar to "No-one got fired for buying from IBM", which was a cliche because it was true.

PwC are a well known band of crooks who always put their own enrichment well ahead of the public interest.

They were banned entirely from bidding for Australian federal government contracts, because they misused privileged information on tax policy they received from one client (the government) to advise other clients on tax avoidance strategies. It was a symptom of systemic corruption that permeates their entire business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC_tax_scandal

Strictly speaking its ISO 9001 but we do the same as you and call it ISO 9000. You forgot 27001 and 14001.

I've seen it happen time and again with startups, though. They have a great idea, perfect for a large business to use. They get a project manager or department manager excited about it, they even run a PoC successfully. And then they slap headfirst into the Procurement Wall and the whole project grinds to a halt. Three years between project approval and issuing a purchase order. And then 90 days between invoice and payment. Startups go bust waiting for these cogs to turn.

Quoted for truth. Well said.

Why accept the status que? How many working lives of tax revenue did this bs consume?

One of the many, many, arguments for not allowing organisations to get this big.

Still it does not need to be this way. Large organisations used to actually get s** done generally in budget and on time. Now we can’t even do a simple tasks without mountains of paper work and cash. I know, my partner used to work in a related industry, it’s painful to hear their stories.

Follow the processes. Document everything. Make certain the winning bidder has all the relevant certificates and insurance covers in place before agreeing to anything.

Leaving the Civil Service was one of the best work decisions I ever took.

> If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business.

You don't think that spending £4.1 million on this garbage might reflect badly on someone?

For us techies who know the tech (or even the law, in this case) this is a disaster. But for the folks in those meetings this is what they understood to be the brief.

If enough of the public gets ahold of the story so that a politician has to get up on their hind legs and issue a statement, then harsh words might be had. But otherwise, this is business as usual.

Step 1: Come up with an incredibly easy to meet standard (because you don't want anybody abandoning the process because it's too much of a hassle) that sounds like a reasonable requirement on paper (to make it easy to pitch as a basic requirement of doing business). Say, "Have a plan for the things you do".

Step 2: Add one additional requirement to your standard: "Prioritize Vendors that meet this standard".

Step 3: Obscure the hell out of the standard, (to not make the grift too obvious) and stick it behind a paywall.

Step 4: Franchise out the (nigh-impossible to fail) "approval" process to 3rd parties, who pay you for the privilege.

Step 5: Your first few "standardized" companies put pressure on their vendors and customers to get certified, so they hire consultants, who in turn pay you, who tell them "Good job, you meet the standard. But do your vendors?".

Step 6: Watch as the cash floods in.

(Optional, Step 7): Once a bunch of major companies are certified, target governments to do your marketing push for you.

Where does all this talk of standards come from?

> IV.1.8) Information about the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) The procurement is covered by the Government Procurement Agreement: Yes

Googling the UK Government Procurement Agreement got me to:

> https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-standar...

which was when I realised this was a rabbit hole and while I am positive that somewhere deep in that rabbit hole would be a requirement for all procurement suppliers to meet ISO9000 or similar, I was going to have to spend hours finding it. Hours I don't have.

You can cheerfully dismiss this opinion if you like, I don't have the data to provide you evidence.

But I also think this proves my point; if you have to spend hours just finding out what the requirements are, you probably don't meet them.

> Quality Plans

> 6.1 The Supplier shall develop, within [insert number] Working Days of the Effective Date, quality plans that ensure that all aspects of the Services are the subject of quality management systems and are consistent with BS EN ISO 9001 or any equivalent standard which is generally recognised as having replaced it ("Quality Plans").

The Short Form Contract also have optional ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials (which is, uh, an adventure on its own). But there's also an option for no certification required. It depends on the contract.

But yes, you're right. Dealing with requirements takes time and experience and you likely need a dedicated person (or team) to deal with it.

Want to use enterprise product XYZ?

Need to have at least X amount of certified employees to reach the basic layer, additional certifications for the next layers.

The kind of support tickets, documentation and trainings available depend on the certification levels, and by the way they have to be renewed every couple of years.

However it is how the ball rolls in certain industries, and rebeling against it won't win anything, better switch jobs for those anti-certifications.

Ever tried to write a quality based document describing how to create an air filled, japanese oragami balloon? (step 3 is the first big hurdle, https://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Origami-Balloon). That was his goto starter for ISO classes.

> I've been doing this for over 25 years and I think that a quality based approach to running a company is a good idea ... you?

ISO standards don't ensure this, since certification is only based on verifying documentation format. What the ISO processes do tend to do is create a small memo indicating that every dept should justify the work they are doing by writing it down and showing it to their boss. What that does to an organization is to produce a crapload of near-useless documentation and throw a large number of people into political hell. After that, the solution is always the same. They quickly move from everyone trying to coordinate down to a very small number of people (1-3) taking charge of moving dept to dept. Either the agents or the supervisors who are articulate enough to gloss over inconsistencies and gaps to form a coherent story, write the documentation.

While this may lend well to shoring up some companies' internals, in the early 2000s, ISO certification consultancy was a lucrative gig. It was chased as a stamp to markup pricing, rather than a quality tool.

In Australia we share the Poms' attitude to failure and success, and have refined it into "Tall Poppy Syndrome". In Australia, it is bad form to boast of your successes too much. You need to have some humility, some awareness of luck and privilege, give credit to others, and don't come over too egotistical, to succeed here.

Obviously in the USA the opposite is true; any failure must be explained away, talk about as much success as possible, and claim all the credit for yourself.

It resulted in a few very strange conversations. I thought most of the US potential co-founders I met were arrogant, boastful, dickheads [0]. I didn't trust that any of their claimed successes were real, I didn't believe they'd done half the things they said they'd done, and I didn't want to work with them. And I'm sure they thought I was a complete loser, incompetent and unable to succeed at anything I tried.

I occasionally hear US VCs and investors complaining about this when they visit Straya; that people here don't celebrate our success, and we're not ambitious enough. I see this as a culture gap that they're not navigating successfully.

As has been said about the US/British relationship; "two countries divided by a common language"

[0] apologies if you were one of them. I'm sure you're not really!

A practical demonstration of how reliant Europe was on Russian gas, by switching it off.

or if he's talking to us from 5 years in the future.

Ignoring the financial aspect, this all makes sense - one LLM is good, 100 is better, 1000 is better still. The whole analogy with the industrial revolution makes sense to me.

> AI firms are currently burning money as fast as possible selling a dollar for 10 cents.

The financial aspect is interesting, but we're dealing with today's numbers, and those numbers have been changing fast over the last few years. I'm a big fan of Ed Zitron's writing, and he makes some really good points, but I think condemning all creative uses of LLMs because of the finances is counterproductive. Working out how to use this technology well, despite the finances not making much sense, is still useful.

How does this make sense? LLMs are doing knowledge work so they face the same coordination problem that humans do, they're not assembly line workers. We have no reason to believe that the lessons of the mythical man month don't apply to LLMs too since the coordination costs, especially when they're touching the same piece of code, are very high.

(My writing style is very dry and to the point, you may have noticed. I looked at my post and thought, "Huh, I should try and emotionally engage with this poster, we seem like we're having a shared experience." And so I figured, heck, I'll throw in an enthusiastic interjection. When I was in college, my friends told me I had "bonsai emotions" and I suppose that still comes through in my writing style...)

I've been a professional software developer for >30 years, and this is the biggest revolution I've seen in the industry. It is going to change everything we do. There will be winners and losers, and we will make a lot of mistakes, as usual, but I'm optimistic about the outcome.

As a complete aside from the question of productivity, these coding tools have reawakened a love of programming in me. I've been coding for long enough that the nitty gritty of everyday programming just feels like a slog - decrypting compiler errors, fixing type checking issues, factoring out helper functions, whatever. With these tools, I get to think about code at a much higher level. I create designs and high level ideas and the AI does all the annoying detail work.

I'm sure there are other people for whom those tasks feel like an interesting and satisfying puzzle, but for me it's been very liberating to escape from them.

Is it possible that the code you are writing isn't good, but you don't know it because you're not an expert?

If you'd like some evidence, I literally just flipped a feature flag to change how we use queues to orchestrate workflows. The bulk of this new feature was introduced in a 1300-line PR, touching at least four different services, written in Golang and Python. It was very much AI agent driven using the flow I described. Enabling the feature worked the first time without a hiccup.

(To forestall the inevitable quibble, I am aware that very large PRs are against best practice and it's preferable to use smaller, stacked PRs. In this case for clarity purposes and atomicity of rollbacks I judged it preferable to use a single large PR.)

Eventually this compounds and gas stations start closing.

That accelerates the switch to EVs because gas becomes hard to find. Which accelerates gas station closures, and so on.

The point at which it becomes impractical to drive a gas-fuelled car is approaching. It will hit different countries at different times, but it's there. 10 years, 30 years, whatever, but it's coming.

Long before that point, a hybrid is just an EV that has to carry around a chunk of useless engine that is hard to fuel.

  Elbil: 31,78 prosent
  Diesel: 31,76 prosent
  Bensin: 23,90 prosent
  Hybrid (not plug-in): 5,38 prosent
  Plug-in hybrid: 7,18 prosent

    Electric: 31.78 percent
    Diesel: 31.76 percent
    Petrol: 23.90 percent
    Hybrid (not plug-in): 5.38 percent 
    Plug-in hybrid: 7.18 percent

In US, gas stations barely make any profit on gas, its all from the convenience store, beer, water, lottery tickets, trinkets, souvenirs, etc. Costco, HEB, Walmart, etc also have gas and can run it as a loss leader for customers to compete with Amazon. As the number of gas consumers go down, gas stations everywhere will start shutting down, except the Costco/HEB/Walmart, because gas stations can't compete with those prices.

The U.S. saw over 210,000 stations in the early 1990s, dropping to around 145,000 by 2022, and potentially as low as 115,000 by 2020, according to various data points. Some estimates suggest a potential 50% reduction in traditional stations by 2050 in some regions: https://boosterusa.com/from-the-experts/the-inevitable-death...

Gas stations are also trying to figure out how charging fits in. While people are expected to charge at home, there will still me some demand for on the road charging. This is a place that hasn't worked out yet (I personally expect people will go for a nicer meal and sit down for an hour charge - but this might be my bias)

As for what would happen with gas station when EV's dominate, what already seems to be in progress here (not due to EV's, but other factors in the market) is that the "traditional" gas station serving stale coffee, snacks, and windshield wiper fluid are on the way out, replaced by either unmanned cold stations with just the pumps, or then by major roads large full-featured mini shopping malls with groceries, half-decent restaurant (sometimes several), and other shops. I think in a future EV world the cold stations would disappear but the higher end service centers would do fine.

We're seeing ever-increasing supply chain attacks. All these bazaar projects are vulnerable to that.

It's going to take some serious funding to get the kind of oversight we actually need to secure this stuff properly.

And the clock's ticking - those maintainers from the 90's are going to retire, and we need to have some way of replacing them

The same person who vets people who approach you as a project maintainer today and offer to participate in maintaining your FOSS project.

That is to say, what I've asked about is not intended to solve security problems, just a lack of exposure / connecting interest-with-need problem.