i've been moving around in the past couple of years, and working at the same time. whilst my current setup isn't the best i could have (more on this later), i try to have the basics that allow me for a better posture, starting with avoiding using the laptop on the couch or bed.
i put my laptop on top of a box - some people use books for this - so the top of the screen is more or less at eye level, and i distance it somewhat (an arm's length) from my eyes/face. i use a trackball (logitech m575) and, because i don't use the laptop's keyboard, i have a bluetooth keyboard (logitech mx mini). try to get a decent chair - one that you feel comfortable in for fairly long periods of time and allows you to sit fairly up straight, comfortably. i favour using a desk or table that's not either too low or too tall, allowing me to rest my arms on it gently and with enough depth that i can rest the arms from my elbows.
i have a ergodox that is, unfortunately, packed a way at the moment. i regret not bring it with me as it'd improve my "ergonomics" immensely.
if you can't get a decent table/desk consider getting something that sits on top of your low kitchen one to get it to a decent height.
they are the norm but not on the tech world. in my 10+ years working in europe (tech) i've never once met someone that was part of a union. i've had this discussion with my manager recently and you can see that people are starting to become aware (of unions) and see the need, after years of feeling untouchable. it's still very early though.
what i've seen with the nhs is doctors avoiding care/exams in order to save ££ (i suspect as guidance from above). i've heard these takes on public schools but they failed to explain what's actually bad about them. could you provide more detail?
as for the sw contract industry, the way i see it more like closing a loophole where contractors were essentially working as permanent employees but ended up paying less taxes. outside ir35 contracts are a thing and the fact that there's less of those is probably an indicator that they were indeed used as a loophole.
However, without support this isn't going to last.
Private schools have the veneer of betterness because they are rich and have massive selection bias. For places like west sussex, there are an unusually high number of _shit_ private schools (the key is value added in the league tables)
Your kids likely to do better in a private school. Hard to say all public schools are bad, there are just fewer good ones and it depends where you live.
It's like you either play a public/grammar school lottery or pay your dues.
A few years ago, primary age students going into high school from my home village were going to be split between two secondary (or high) schools, as not every student could be accounted for in the closer school.
The closer school was a decent high school in an affluent town across from my village. Decent teachers, grades, no drama.
The other was a poorer high school in a rough and downtrodden town. The town has higher crime, including crime which reaches students (anti-social/troubled kids, more bullying, even cases of knives being brought into school).
This is a classic pattern in the UK. Well off/decent towns within spitting distance of formerly well-off towns which used to be industrially important and are now in stagnation, with poor job prospects, crime, anti-social behaviour, poor maintenance, nothing to do, and nothing to help.
Worse average grades, worse teachers (due to high turnover from teachers being pushed out by bullying), more potential to get in trouble, and worse life potential.
Not sure how this should be worded to not be construed in a funny way, but the kids from my village would have been the only white kids in the school in the rougher town, so you can imagine how that may amplify the effect the school would have on them.
Unsurprisingly, parents protested and many sold up and moved in order to avoid the "bad school" in question and get into a better school catchment area.
If you know West Yorkshire, you probably know exactly which towns I'm talking about. Such is the reputation of both towns and their respective schools.
exactly! they have so many other services they could try and improve by deploying something like this (e.g. tax services, id card services, etc) but instead they choose to do this dumb thing. this is clearly meant for headline grabs, to try and come off as a modern government but they're clearly clueless, especially taking into account the many issues the country's health helpline - saúde 24 - has faced in the past. furthermore, i'm curious as to how they trained this on things like accents. i would have no problem betting that they haven't even considered it, and have mainly trained this on pt-br data.
> For me gamification turns some things into a slog.
same for me. i admit it still feels nice to "watch the number go up", mostly on content platforms with a social component to it (hn, reddit, stackoverflow) as you feel whatever you've said has either been useful to, or at least resonated with someone. as social creatures it's only normal to seek some sort of validation.
i think the only gamification set of features i've fallen for in the recent years has been duolingo, which has me practicing every day, even if just for 3-5 minutes. the way they've done it is quite interesting as they have what i'd call different levels of gamification you can buy into. the most basic one being your daily streak but then you have stuff like daily quests, monthly badges, league standings, friend quests and probably more stuff i can't remember now.
the article does cover quite a few examples and i like how the author hints at the chance that, at times, he'd probably be better of not maintaining his streak as that alone ends up resulting in an output that's not desirable (eg. stackoverflow answers with little value). however he left out some cases where gamification is tied to a normally positive impact like step counters (ignoring the data collection).
It seems to me gamification is a feature in some situations, a bug in other situations and with no uniformity between two people.
I despise the upvote/karma bullshit when it comes to discussions. It completely changes how people think and interact. The "witty" mention from the author is so cringe to me. The average person is just not a comedian and it is really the main reason I never use Reddit. To me, Reddit is an engine of non-comedians trying to be witty and funny playing an upvote game. The worst part is I imagine many are like the unfunny person who thinks they are funny because people fake laugh at their jokes because otherwise the interaction is just uncomfortable given the volume of bad jokes from the non-comedian. It all becomes self reinforcing in an awful way.
That is so different than something like duolingo that is motivating just to do a little bit of work that you might otherwise would not have and keeps bad streaks from forming. I just experienced this using Anki where all of the sudden I haven't practiced my language in 2 weeks but my language of choice is not on duolingo.
I've been very skeptical of gamification ever since seeing a marketing agency constantly pitch it as a way to increase user engagement and sales. Now it's a red flag that makes me ask, "what are you trying to manipulate me in to buying or doing?" The experience has been impactful enough that even I stopped caring as much about "achievements" in actual games.
Duolingo is interesting because it shows me I'll still engage with gamification if my goals align, but all those mechanics become a bit heavy. When I want flashcards and grammar lessons, getting a game to manage pushed me away. Then, when I realized our goals didn't align due to Duolingo's ceiling, it didn't seem worth being pressed to such an uncomfortable degree. I won't let myself be mentally abused by a cartoon owl.
You are on point I think - 10-15 years ago gamification became a generally fashionable thing to pursue to drive engagement, consumption and market shit. But most of it doesn’t really work because it’s not usually implemented very well. This is what we had initially with our medical training example - the developers just slapped some trophies and achievements and expected it to just work. Of course when we started user testing we found that people agreed with the general idea but didn’t really use it and found the clutter confusing. We’re still working on having gamification because we really do just want them to feel like it is a game, but it’s no easy feat to do it well. Thankfully with hard evidence from all the user testing we have the arguments to dial it back.
anime isn't a product but more of a category. you can also track shows you watch on netflix (or anywhere else) on platforms like trakt or even imdb. though i wouldn't be surprised if netflix at some point adds (or at least beta tests) a social profile like steam and notifications like "your friend is watching X" or "your friends are watching horror, see our great selection bla bla bla".
went to see it this week. the animation might not have that novelty factor anymore (only because of the first one), but it's still amazing and i'm glad i got to see it in a cinema. i think they were able to step it up even if only a little bit, focusing in on different styles and how they use each according to the emotions they're trying to convey in any given scene.
i'm just no so sure about splitting it up into two movies. on the one hand i'm glad i get to watch one more part of the whole thing, on the other, you can't help but feel they're milking it once more, by stretching it out into another part. towards the end you could definitely feel you'd be leaving with a somewhat incomplete experience.
non-paywalled article available? anyway, just the title seems quite sensationalistic given that "it could" be worse based solely on energy consumption. imagine publishing an article titled something like "nuclear fusion could be much worse for climate"
i put my laptop on top of a box - some people use books for this - so the top of the screen is more or less at eye level, and i distance it somewhat (an arm's length) from my eyes/face. i use a trackball (logitech m575) and, because i don't use the laptop's keyboard, i have a bluetooth keyboard (logitech mx mini). try to get a decent chair - one that you feel comfortable in for fairly long periods of time and allows you to sit fairly up straight, comfortably. i favour using a desk or table that's not either too low or too tall, allowing me to rest my arms on it gently and with enough depth that i can rest the arms from my elbows.
i have a ergodox that is, unfortunately, packed a way at the moment. i regret not bring it with me as it'd improve my "ergonomics" immensely.
if you can't get a decent table/desk consider getting something that sits on top of your low kitchen one to get it to a decent height.