A plurality of the catalogued items in the museum are from Britain itself (680,000 out of 2.2 million or so) and there are as many such objects on display as there are from Asia.

Despite the memes, most of the objects in the museum that do not come from Britain were bought, not stolen, though there are some important and high profile exceptions.

I once repaired my dishwasher. It cost me about £50 for a new pump, and many hours working out how to take the dishwasher apart and put it back together again. If I treated this as work, I would have been better off buying a new dishwasher, because I would have been paid more for those hours than the cost of a new dishwasher minus a pump.

Appliances are cheap relative to wages now, and repair still takes a lot of time. That’s the simple answer.

We have to consider why we want to encourage repair: it’s not simply true that we should always prefer to repair for its own sake. We should true to minimise greenhouse gas emissions or the use of resources that can’t be reclaimed, but not to the exclusion of all else.

If we had a carbon tax for example, it would somewhat increase the price of new goods and promote repair. But such a tax would not cause people to repair everything reparable - there would still be reparable items that are not economical to repair. This is a good thing though - if the carbon tax correctly embodies the externalities of producing emissions, then the choice to not repair it is a choice to do something else with people’s time. That time could be used on other productive things - maybe working to replace dirty fossil fuel infrastructure, or working to feed or entertain people, which are all things we want.

It’s more about industrialisation making new products really cheap. Think about a pair of trousers. They’re exactly as repairable as trousers ever were, and you can still get your trousers repaired economically. But the cost of a minor repair will total about half the price of a cheap pair of trousers. So there is little point repairing trousers unless they’re expensive - you may as well buy a new pair if they’re cheap.

This isn’t because of planned obsolescence, this is because clothing used to be far, far more expensive - you can come up with various multipliers but somewhere between 10x and 100x as expensive in terms of how many days of work was needed to pay for them. This is because industrialisation means that cloth and clothes can be made with a fraction of the labour as it did centuries ago.

Sewing machines have also made repairs much more efficient, but to a far lesser degree - someone doing clothing repairs has overheads beyond the limited bit of work that is sewing up a split seam or rip, which are almost non-existent for the business producing clothes in the first place.

So, if this is the case for simple items like clothes where repair itself is more economical nowadays, how much more true is it for complex items where each repair job is completely custom?

The right tool here is tests at a level higher than machine code instructions that have been in CPUs since the 70s. Maybe TDD practice is not to test at this level, but every example of TDD sure tends to be something similar!

Either way gets me to a passing test, but I prefer the latter because it enables me to write another failing test.

But you could just write that failing test up front. TDD encourages you to pretend to know less than you do (you know that testing evenness requires more than one test, and you know the implementation requires more than some if-statements), but no-one has ever made a convincing argument to me that you get anything out of this pretence.

Tests should make changing your system easier and safer, if they don’t it is typically a sign things are being tested at the wrong level

TDD is about writing (a lot of) unit tests, which are at a low-level. Because they are a low-level design-tool, they test the low-level design. Any non-trivial change affects the low-level design of a component, because changes tend to affect code at a certain level and most of those below it to some degree.

When faced with a failing test, you make it pass as simply as possible, and then you summon all your computer science / programming experience to refactor the code into something more elegant and maintainable.

Why bother making it pass “as simply as possible” instead of summoning all that experience to write something that don’t know is stupid?

TDD doesn’t promise to drive the final implementation at the unit level

What exactly does it drive, then? Apart from writing more test code than application code, with attendant burdens when refactoring or making other changes.

I don’t want unseeded randomness in my tests, ever.

Seed the tests, and making these pass would be trivial.

As the existing reply stated, there are only ever finitely many tests.

My issue with TDD is that it pretends to drive the final implementation with tests, but what is really driving the implementation is the monkey at the keyboard thinking, “testing for evenness should be done with the modulo operation,” not exhaustive tests.

If you want to know this information, it would be stupid to just read the press release. This information is contained in a privacy policy, which is much more detailed than a press release, which never contains details like this which - let’s be honest - most people don’t give a shit about.

Persona’s privacy policy is here. It does not cover selling your data to reddit or any other company - which means that under EU and California law, doing so is not legal. It does say it will share your data among affiliates such as to “archive” it - but I don’t really see the issue with that specifically. The fact that your personal data is sitting in an Amazon S3 bucket is not of itself a problem, except if there is a problem with S3. You’re exposed to similar risks if Persona keeps all the data itself.

This is what Test Driven Development looks like

Sounds like after they became an internet sensation they’re making so much more money from larger partners that the overhead of supplying small stores is no longer worth it to them.

To be fair to me the attraction of independent shops is stuff that you can’t find in any shop in the country.

I don’t understand how regex comes into it? Sounds tricky though!

I asked an LLM to write a jq scriptlet for me today. It wasn’t even complicated, it just beat working it out/trying to craft the write string to search Stackoverflow for.

It’s a shame that you’re so quick to express skepticism but so reluctant to do any research of your own, because the facts are a bit embarrassing with the exact same trend in the USA as in the UK.

Driver safety peaks in the 60s, and only moderately worsens after then. The large increase in fatal accidents, by the way, is clearly a result of older drivers being more vulnerable in a crash - because the chart at the bottom doesn’t show any such large increase for passengers and others.

I’m interested to know if this changes your mind.

It predates the Victorians by some centuries, in fact!

You can just say “a group of X called a Y” about anything and people on the internet will believe it.

That doesn’t affect the ability of older drivers, only the number of them.

In fact, since one reason very old drivers might get more accident prone is because they stop driving as much and lose some of the skills, you would expect that, if older Americans really persist in driving more as they get older (you haven’t provided any evidence that they do) they would retain those skills and be less accident prone, not more, so would be safer, and less at need of re-tests, than their UK counterparts.

Focusing on the driving safety of the elderly is a classic example of Saliency Bias. A 20-year old kid wrecking his car is nothing unusual so you don’t remember it when thinking about safety. An 80 year old who can’t even remember which way to turn the wheel getting in a wreck is unusual and extreme, so it’s more salient. Getting stuck behind an elderly driver gives you the impression that they’re a bad and hence unsafe driver, which contributes to this.

The Israeli government has declared this comment anti-semitic and offensive.

Unfortunately they weren’t able to show how it was false.

The problem with “self-driving” tech punting you into the oncoming lane is that you may have no time to react. Reaction times are non-zero, also when reacting to your own car doing something unexpected.

Fact is that if you want to spend some money, time or political capital on improving road safety, targeting older drivers is not where you should focus your efforts. The fact that it frequently is, is due to ageism.