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Border guard was wrong. UK used passenger records from transport companies to determine when someone left the country, not face recognition.

They do however use face recognition when you take a domestic flight from an international terminal. Then they take a photo of you just before security and compare that when you board. To me this seems like an overly complex solution to a problem that would normally by solved by having a domestic section of the terminal, but I’m sure they had their reasons.


And this week it's lead to people's child benefits being stopped because they were deemed to have left the country and not returned, because their names were on passenger manifests: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/31/woman-flight...

God, a well functioning democractic society, the UK is not...


I’d say all (useful) software is modelling some domain.


Something like ten years ago Facebook messenger would by default add the user’s location to every message visible to the recipient. And even worse, unless you disabled this feature, it would give away the distance from you to all your contacts, even ones you had never even had a conversation with. In real time, so someone could easily use it to triangulate you. Meta is a very creepy company.


they even exposed it via an api, i remember building poc “friend maps” that showed where everyone was without their consent.


Oh dear, am I the only one who remembers the marauders map? I saw a bunch like you were talking about, but the Harry Potter version was exceptional.


lol thats a great idea


Agreed that it makes no sense to restrict that kind of road to 30km/h, but to be fair most cities that have moved to 30km/h would have excluded that road. Even Amsterdam left the main throughfares at 50km/h: https://www.amsterdam.nl/30-km-u-in-de-stad/


Maybe I’m missing something but then what is 30 days after Christmas? 25389?


25389 mod 365, presumably. The very fancy mainframes probably would pick the appropriate modulus based on whether it was a leap year or not.


What happens when you want to add more than 365 days to a date, then?


I believe most, if not all, European countries tax residents on worldwide employment and capital income.


> Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.

That’s because the ”priority” queue for those carriers is really a ”paid for a proper carry on”-queue. But the airlines realised that they could brand it as a priority queue to make the upcharge to bring a bag more palatable. You’re not spending €40 just to bring a bag that used to be included in the ticket, you also get to feel more important. At least the first time until you realise 2/3rds of the plane is also important.


The workaround for this, ironically, is more tech.

"Sorry, I've got like 20 lith-ions in there. I can pull them out if you'd like to see them." cue shiteating grin and grumping from the airline staff.

On the one hand I feel good about it because your dumb rules are dumb and fuck that shit. On the other hand, it's not the air steward's fault Frank Lorenzo was a lizard person puke pustule.

edit: Appropriate use of 'cue'



Thanks for the link. I'm familiar with the expression, but I can't make sense of how GP is bringing it to bear.


What kind of background check would reveal all previous employers? Where I’m from a background check usually consists of checking one or two (candidate provided) references and possibly googling their name for red flags.


Every single work backround check I ever had in the US included that. I do not think it lists all former employers ever tho, only those from the past 7 years iirc.

In fact, I got a copy of it back too, where it listed even some of the jobs I didn’t list myself because I didn’t think they were relevant (e.g., the grocery store job I had the summer before college, 5 years before the SWE position I was getting background checked for).

One time, it even had an interesting tidbit that got flagged. A former employer of mine didn’t exist anymore at the time of the background check (the company got absorbed into another international corp and then closed down all offices in the state I worked in, thus ceasing to exist both legally and physically). So the background check report mentioned there was an indication of me having worked there, but they couldn’t reach out to the company to verify my exact employment dates.


The 7 years you're referring to isn't criminal background check, which is what we generally think of when we say background check, it's credit reporting. And it's extremely unethical, in my opinion. It's outlawed in a few states.

It doesn't just show your employment for the past 7 years, it also shows your comp, your debts, your defaults, everything.


My criminal checks were on the exact same report as this one, I only ever applied for one.

It didn’t have my reported salary or debts. I know because I requested a copy of the report my employer got (which afaik is a legal requirement to provide one upon request, so it was as simple as clicking a button).

In general, I have no issues with my employer knowing my previous compensation once i am employed there. At no point in my interviews in over a decade at different companies was I ever asked what I made in terms of comp before, only what I wanted to make. And the background check only comes after the offer is already agreed upon, signed, and I already started working there. So I don’t see a problem there.


That’s just some rando googling away.

How does that have any relation to a real agency, staffed with competent experts that specialize in background checks?


The credit reporting agencies can provide a list of prior employers. And comp.


Interesting, never heard of this service being provided here (EU), not even sure it would be legal, but makes sense. Apparently they get the information from credit card/mortage applications.

The overemployed crowd is two steps ahead though: https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/10el4ll/remov...


MacOS developers have solved this problem pretty neatly:

https://support.apple.com/en-qa/guide/mac-help/mh27474/mac


This is cool!:-)

How come this is not the first “tip” on a fresh Mac?


It's very useful but it's sloooow


This is cool!

But I thought you were going to recommend pressing "fn" to switch layouts (I believe you can use either fn or ctrl+space on macOS).

I use to switch from German (for chat/documentation) and English (for coding), and it's quite instant and second nature to me.


Is there a similar trick for non-letter characters ?


Yes, for some of them, but not all.

I've not been able to find a convenient online image showing the characters you get from holding down alt while typing, it may vary by layout, but for me this lets me type:

Number row: ¡€#¢∞§¶•ªº–≠ with shift: ⁄™‹›fifl‡°·‚—±

First row: œ∑´®†¥¨^øπ“‘ with shift: Œ„‰ÂÊÁËÈØ∏”’

Home row: åß∂ƒ©˙∆˚¬…æ« with shift: ÅÍÎÏÌÓÔÒÚÆ»

Bottom row: `Ω≈ç√∫~µ≤≥÷ with shift: ŸÛÙÇ◊ıˆ˜¯˘¿

But of those, I only remember €, # (both printed on the key!), ∞, ƒ, ™, π/∏ (thanks to growing up with MacOS classic — Marathon Infinity for ∞, ƒ for folders, ™/π/∏ no idea why), and –/— (en-dash/m-dash, not sure why I learned them, but was one surprise source of compile-time errors around 2010 because they look exactly like - in a fixed-width font).


If you ever used MPW shell, a lot of those characters were part of the syntax of commands and the regular expression parser so it was common to learn to compose ∫,® ∂ etc. The debugger TMON also used them, so they just become second nature, like !@#.


Neat, did not know that. At the time MPW shell was used, it was a little bit too advanced for me — I was only as far as working my way through C For Dummies (or something like that) with a limited student edition of CodeWarrior* around the time REALbasic came out.

* Possibly bronze edition? Whatever it was, it was 68k only.


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