My workplace which now uses scaled agile used to be waterfall. We have an enormous system to take care of and there’s loads of specialised knowledge, so we were pretty well siloed

So obviously when the sales people sold agile to the organisation they also sold the idea that a programmer is a programmer, designer a designer, tester a tester; no need for specialists, so in 2015 they spun up 50-odd agile teams in about six trains, one for each major system (where the used to be seven silos in one of those systems) grabbed one senior designer and programmer from each major project to put in an “expert” team

And told the rest of us we were working on the whole of our giant system. Where we had trouble understanding how part of it worked, we could talk to one of the experts

Now nine years later those experts have mostly retired, we have lost so much institutional knowledge and if someone runs into a wall you need to hope that someone wrote a knowledge transfer document or a wiki for that bit of the system

30% of jobs are going if self driving is achieved. Low pay jobs are here to stay for a while as they’re too expensive to automate. The current LLM stuff seems to obsolete low productivity people but still need the skilled writers or programmers to come up with new stuff or do the correct detail work the LLM sucks at.

Some management is going to royally screw up by firing junior programmers since the senior programmers can get all the work done with the help of copilot

But they’ll forget that they will in future need new senior programmers to herd the LLMs

Perhaps it’s that I am not an early adopter. I wait until I have good reason to update. It sucks that they make their customers unwitting beta testers, but they seem to have stuff sorted after the phone has been on the market for several months

My pixel 1 was and is fine. Pixel 3 was an excellent phone. The only bad phone I recall from Google was the Nexus 5x which was made by LG

I take it you missed the recent fourth integrated flight test, in which the ship soft landed on the ocean near Australia as planned and the booster soft landed on the ocean near the launch site as planned

Their failure in that flight was expected. They hoped thermal tiles sealing the hinge for the aerodynamic surfaces would seal those against plasma during reentry. They didn’t. Had they, it would have been much cheaper than sealing those more thoroughly. The ship landed regardless of that failure

Disliking Musk is fair, but SpaceX is doing good stuff

Actual real world right now giant rockets include

• One that is being built under waterfall methodology. It has been being built for several years. That’s the Blue Origin New Glen heavy lift reusable rocket

• One that is being developed under an agile methodology, it flew as a subscale lander to test their engine and flight control, it has flown four full test flights, improving on each. That’s SpaceX’s Starship

We are yet to see either launch a payload to orbit

The problem is if only 10% of the population is obsoleted, that ten percent needs to find new, different, jobs.

There are so many advances in game systems since the Palladium system I use, so I have stolen shamelessly to make combat last less than 1 game session rather than the two or three under standard rules

The universe is good, the rules are ancient

I do have a shelf of books though for Rifts, TMNT, after the bomb

I was fat, not anymore; hay fever, gone; gout, gone

I cut out all plant based food and substituted fatty meat and eggs

Beware though that reference ranges are averages of the population the testing lab sees and only sick people get their blood checked.

Yeah Baldur’s gate 3 and hell divers are both doing terribly

Minecraft is pretty unique, or was until its imitators appeared and is the most popular game (or is it second to Tetris?)

I think release then fix became common as soon as internet distribution became practical

Back when everything was on physical media the releases were more polished

I hear about people getting Minecraft on game pass. Those people don’t play Minecraft like I play Minecraft

If they die, other companies will buy that IP

They’re fun when you’re winning, the votes tell who’s winning

People here describe them as tankies, which I take as meaning a person who thinks the Soviets did communism right

I prefer old commies. They wanted a local revolution and only liked the USSR in that they were the best source of money for funding such revolutions

In comparison I eat almost only beef and eggs. Occasionally chicken and lamb. That had all my blood work in order, though it took 2 years to go from obese to the top of normal the blood work got good in only a couple of weeks

That’s a tad selfish.

Official stuff, sure, but not system generated email from giant companies like Microsoft

They aren’t allowed to pay donors in Australia. There are worries that payment would attract people who shouldn’t donate and incentivise them to lie on the qualification form