Interesting findings on the internet

[BU508A]

https://twitter.com/RealScottRitter/sta ... 8928810163

Scott Ritter:
"The best surveillance radar in the world, working in concert with the most sophisticated anti-missile defenses in the world, were impotent in the face of the Iranian attack."

[bd139]

I disagree with him. The air base strikes were because there were no defensive measures at the bases as they were moved to civilian and higher value target defences. Also from a political perspective you need at least one missile to strike to leave a tangible threat of retaliation on the table. If they hit a military target then it's a tangible threat and of no civilian risk. There were no casualties, other than a poor Bedouin girl who was seriously injured, from the entire thing. That was a complete success.

Also lets not forget Scott Ritter's analysis skills which previously lead to the whole WMD and Iraq thing and he is associated with Russian propaganda since. Not a credible source.

[BU508A]

https://twitter.com/RealScottRitter/sta ... 8928810163

Scott Ritter:
"The best surveillance radar in the world, working in concert with the most sophisticated anti-missile defenses in the world, were impotent in the face of the Iranian attack."

Need to add this article in Wikipedia about Scott Ritter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter

And I agree with bd139: not a reliable source.
I should have checked him earlier.

[tautech]

LOL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgDa_cpgHWs

[mnementh]

mnem
Skippy Squirr still better keep the fuck outta my car from now on; I will break my foot off in his ass.

[AVGresponding]

LOL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgDa_cpgHWs

That squirrel is clearly using the feeder as a fairground ride. Would have loved to see the little bugger try to walk in a straight line afterwards

[tggzzz]

Tying in with the other comments about how yootoob vids are time vampires, what should I bump into but
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Rings true

[tggzzz]

Quiz: in message 222 in The Other Place, who wrote:
"You sound like a programmer. Only programmers fuck up taxonomies this badly." [ 1]
Message 223 locked the thread, with harsh (but justified) words for the OP.

I took one look at the first post 3 days ago, saw it contained a poll about a technical subject titled "is an X a Y", and thought of hoodoo (<= AI autocorrupt in action) videos

[1] difficult to argue about that. I saw one fintech product (never released) which was based around the hierarchy that Money is-a (subclass of) Integer. No; Money has-a Integer, or Float, or BigNum instance variable.

[MED6753]

I started reading that and got a headache. Skipped to the end and rewarded myself with a smile.

Freaking dumbass.

[bd139]

Quiz: in message 222 in The Other Place, who wrote:
"You sound like a programmer. Only programmers fuck up taxonomies this badly." [ 1]
Message 223 locked the thread, with harsh (but justified) words for the OP.

I took one look at the first post 3 days ago, saw it contained a poll about a technical subject titled "is an X a Y", and thought of hoodoo (<= AI autocorrupt in action) videos

I was a little off kilter on that. I came across the idea half way through of getting him to try and describe his funny diode in the s-domain.

A diode is what you want it to be depending on what you're using it for. The question was void.

[1] difficult to argue about that. I saw one fintech product (never released) which was based around the hierarchy that Money is-a (subclass of) Integer. No; Money has-a Integer, or Float, or BigNum instance variable.

Ah the mortal sin of using inheritance instead of composition.

This is nothing though. I wish I had such modelling concerns. First we start with an idea of a thing, on the wire of course because it's all about moving data around rather than actually handling it. And of course, the blunt instrument used today is JSON over HTTP...

Code: Select all

{}

Then we give it a name.

Code: Select all

{ "money": null }

Then we give it a value

Code: Select all

{ "money" : 123.456 }

then we find out that it's difficult to represent money accurately in a float so we "fix" it

Code: Select all

{ "money": "123.456" }

then someone says that the currency needs to be handled. But they have told everyone the wire contract and it's difficult to change now because everyone is deserializing it into Java/C# objects which would need to be recompiled in 20 different places.

Code: Select all

{ "money": "GBP/123.456" }

Then people with this mentality come along and do something really damaging like changing the FCA registration number format by adding an extra digit because they have run out. "123456" becomes "0123456". Systems across the UK collapse into a heap as everything was stringly typed and "123456" is different to "0123456" and 123456...

So in the process of avoiding composition we've invented a new loose ADT with its own meta-format, broken several parsers and generally failed to do what the ask was in the first place: model a single number with a defined precision and unit at a point in time. Yet they pat themselves on the back and bark appreciatively like a demented seal.

[tggzzz]

Quiz: in message 222 in The Other Place, who wrote:
"You sound like a programmer. Only programmers fuck up taxonomies this badly." [ 1]
Message 223 locked the thread, with harsh (but justified) words for the OP.

I took one look at the first post 3 days ago, saw it contained a poll about a technical subject titled "is an X a Y", and thought of hoodoo (<= AI autocorrupt in action) videos

I was a little off kilter on that. I came across the idea half way through of getting him to try and describe his funny diode in the s-domain.

Well that thread was so dimwitted that it spawned a meta-thread. That contained an amusing/accurate Q&A summary https://www.eevblog.com/forum/supporter ... msg5467441

Quote from: Nominal Animal on Today at 09:56:37 am
It got locked just before I finally devised a good analogous summary of that thread:

A: Do you think physics models the movements of planets in our solar system correctly?

B: Well, yeah.

A: No, Newtonian physics does not model the orbit of Mercury correctly.

B: Who said anything about Newtonian physics?

A: So, you claim Newtonian physics isn't physics?

B: What on Earth are you babbling about?

A: Our classical mechanics are based on Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, but I suppose peons like you don't like to read. Perhaps you also believe the Earth is flat, you ejecta of public schooling?

B: You twat don't know the meaning of the words you use, nor what "context" is.

A: Ah. I see you are afraid of my obviously superior intelligence. It must be dull being as stupid as you are, living life without such cognitive skills as I have.

B: Oh, go away, troll.

[tggzzz]

...
I wish I had such modelling concerns.

Ah yes. Modelling.

Back in the early 80s, when expert systems were called AI/ML, a friend developing such systems tried to have business cards with a job title of "Applied Philosopher". His arguments were along the lines of: people have two legs, so does that mean someone with an amputated leg isn't a person? So, what do you mean when you use the concept person/table/submarine/etc?

First we start with an idea of a thing, on the wire of course because it's all about moving data around rather than actually handling it. And of course, the blunt instrument used today is JSON over HTTP...

(For the sake of sanity, I'll ignore OOP<->RDBMS Transfer Objects (buried inside a product) which contain business logic.)

At least XML could refer to an XSD schema. I guess that dropped out of favour because it was too difficult to explicitly define allowable structure, and didn't fit in with XP/TDD.

Then people with this mentality come along and do something really damaging like changing the FCA registration number format by adding an extra digit because they have run out. "123456" becomes "0123456". Systems across the UK collapse into a heap as everything was stringly typed and "123456" is different to "0123456" and 123456...

My principal bank account, opened in 1975, has one too few digits

So in the process of avoiding composition we've invented a new loose ADT with its own meta-format, broken several parsers and generally failed to do what the ask was in the first place: model a single number with a defined precision and unit at a point in time. Yet they pat themselves on the back and bark appreciatively like a demented seal.

It passes the unit tests therefore and by definition it works. Job done.

As for "Money", it is as easy to nail down as "Time and Date" or "Postal Address". The number of misconceptions is amusing/horrifying depending on whether you are inside the tent or outside.

Mind you, ensuring such things continue to work has been good for IBM and Burroughs, since they can exploit the captive market for object code written in the '60s.

[bd139]

...
I wish I had such modelling concerns.

Ah yes. Modelling.

Back in the early 80s, when expert systems were called AI/ML, a friend developing such systems tried to have business cards with a job title of "Applied Philosopher". His arguments were along the lines of: people have two legs, so does that mean someone with an amputated leg isn't a person? So, what do you mean when you use the concept person/table/submarine/etc?

We have that problem with the current multiplicity of genders as a fine example of where modelling goes to hell. For the sake of financial products, we "cast" all genders quietly to { male, female, fuck-knows } based on the current understanding of which each one is. If a gender changes or lands on fuck-knows, don't go expecting to get a financial product as it changes your risk profile to "flake".

First we start with an idea of a thing, on the wire of course because it's all about moving data around rather than actually handling it. And of course, the blunt instrument used today is JSON over HTTP...

(For the sake of sanity, I'll ignore OOP<->RDBMS Transfer Objects (buried inside a product) which contain business logic.)

At least XML could refer to an XSD schema. I guess that dropped out of favour because it was too difficult to explicitly define allowable structure, and didn't fit in with XP/TDD.

There is a Hibernate based ORM underneath all that. And most of the business logic is NOT implemented in there but in stored procedures and views mapped underneath it because these are one trick ponies these humans who couldn't work out how to structure the domain.

As for XSD, yes indeed. Now the thing with XSD and XML is no one could be bothered to understand it which is why JSON came around. And of course when they hit the same walls, they started to realise that yes you do need a schema contract on both sides of an interface and it's better if it is another abstraction. So we have JSON Schema now. https://json-schema.org

Greenspun's 11th rule would be something along the lines of his 10th but XML instead of LISP.

So in the process of avoiding composition we've invented a new loose ADT with its own meta-format, broken several parsers and generally failed to do what the ask was in the first place: model a single number with a defined precision and unit at a point in time. Yet they pat themselves on the back and bark appreciatively like a demented seal.

It passes the unit tests therefore and by definition it works. Job done.

These unit tests you are speaking of tend not to exist as often as quoted. There are literally people reading confluence pages and clicking shit.

As for "Money", it is as easy to nail down as "Time and Date" or "Postal Address". The number of misconceptions is amusing/horrifying depending on whether you are inside the tent or outside.

Ah yes, a guy who lives in Eucla needs to schedule a call with a guy in Sydney next week but he is currently in Perth and it's the 30th of March. How late is he going to be?

Mind you, ensuring such things continue to work has been good for IBM and Burroughs, since they can exploit the captive market for object code written in the '60s.

That's what I do. Or did. It is good money

[tggzzz]

We have that problem with the current multiplicity of genders as a fine example of where modelling goes to hell. For the sake of financial products, we "cast" all genders quietly to { male, female, fuck-knows } based on the current understanding of which each one is. If a gender changes or lands on fuck-knows, don't go expecting to get a financial product as it changes your risk profile to "flake".

Entertaining, and surprisingly rational for the financial industry.

I'll keep that technique in mind for future abuse.

As for XSD, yes indeed. Now the thing with XSD and XML is no one could be bothered to understand it which is why JSON came around. And of course when they hit the same walls, they started to realise that yes you do need a schema contract on both sides of an interface and it's better if it is another abstraction. So we have JSON Schema now. https://json-schema.org

Oh, FFS. Round and round and round, world without end.

People forgot about why RPC begat CORBA, and thought SOAP (i.e. RPC over IP HTTP) was neat. Even in 1999, when implementing a very early web-based distributed photo store and fulfilment company ecosystem, I thought SOAP was a crap concept. A couple of years later it became easy for me to describe the philosophy of my structure: REST.

Greenspun's 11th rule would be something along the lines of his 10th but XML instead of LISP.

I've been known to use a variant, describing XML as being the emasculated COBOL version of LISP.

As for "Money", it is as easy to nail down as "Time and Date" or "Postal Address". The number of misconceptions is amusing/horrifying depending on whether you are inside the tent or outside.

Ah yes, a guy who lives in Eucla needs to schedule a call with a guy in Sydney next week but he is currently in Perth and it's the 30th of March. How late is he going to be?

For me it was "a guy has a phone contract in the UK where calls are cheaper at night. He is in France and calls someone in the US at 11:59:30 pm on Dec 31st. Should he be cut off before completing a 60s call, due to lack of funds?" (Yes, the customers really did care about that kind of thing; when some customers became irritated chairs flew across the room. Allegedly).

The idiots in my company had been happy with schoolboy understanding of dates and times. To get them out of that mentality, I used to ask them
How may seconds in a minute?
How many hours in a day?
How many days in a week?
How many days in a month?
How many months in a year?
How many days in a year?
What year is it?
Too many only got two answers right; nobody got all right.

[bd139]

As for XSD, yes indeed. Now the thing with XSD and XML is no one could be bothered to understand it which is why JSON came around. And of course when they hit the same walls, they started to realise that yes you do need a schema contract on both sides of an interface and it's better if it is another abstraction. So we have JSON Schema now. https://json-schema.org

Oh, FFS. Round and round and round, world without end.

People forgot about why RPC begat CORBA, and thought SOAP (i.e. RPC over IP HTTP) was neat. Even in 1999, when implementing a very early web-based distributed photo store and fulfilment company ecosystem, I thought SOAP was a crap concept. A couple of years later it became easy for me to describe the philosophy of my structure: REST.

People didn't forget. They thought they could do better and find they didn't.

Amazing how the philosophy comes after the design. Incidentally back in around 2003 before it was trendy I designed and implemented a service that backed a Windows CE point of delivery application. I designed an algorithm for efficient compression and replication of POD signatures that worked over 2G/GSM connections and an encapsulating binary wire format which turned out to be nearly identical to protobufs (including an IDL and code generator). To get through horrible networks this had to be http so it was roughly REST/protobufs over HTTP. I didn't realise what I'd done until about 10 years later.

Edit: worth adding the company we bought this off, headed by Simon Monk of Arduino, Make and Practical Electronics for Inventors shite fame, was selling an XML based markup language for cross platform mobile apps at the time. Bear in mind the industry was windows CE and Symbian and some weird java shit and that was it. The product was so fucking awful and the vendor such an arsehole that I actually rewrote their ENTIRE server side and the client side over a weekend because I disliked it and all our clients were on Windows CE. It was 1/10th of the size, 10x the speed and actually worked. The company CTO was rather impressed with this and refused to pay up the vendor who had not delivered which inflamed a lot of people. Tee hee.

This may explain my ire towards him and the whole culture around people who talk a lot but can't do.

For me it was "a guy has a phone contract in the UK where calls are cheaper at night. He is in France and calls someone in the US at 11:59:30 pm on Dec 31st. Should he be cut off before completing a 60s call, due to lack of funds?" (Yes, the customers really did care about that kind of thing; when some customers became irritated chairs flew across the room. Allegedly).

Bugger telecoms billing. I know someone who worked on that for a few years, went mental and decided it was a better idea to become a hermit.

The only improvement that has come from the existence of HR departments is reduction in chair throwing.

The idiots in my company had been happy with schoolboy understanding of dates and times. To get them out of that mentality, I used to ask them
How may seconds in a minute?
How many hours in a day?
How many days in a week?
How many days in a month?
How many months in a year?
How many days in a year?
What year is it?
Too many only got two answers right; nobody got all right.

I can get all of those right with associated caveats and footnotes, only because I've been hurt by them all at least once. I will bear that in mind for any interview questions I need to write up.

[BU508A]

The Man Who Killed Google Search


https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Quote:
"The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined."

[tggzzz]

People didn't forget. They thought they could do better and find they didn't.

In that case, which I don't dispute, they didn't understand the "why".

If you look at many safety regulations/practices, some seem obtuse and pointless. That's because you don't know the incidents that caused them

I didn't realise what I'd done until about 10 years later.

That's happened to me several times. FSMs when I was in school. Microcode at university and first job. Most irritatingly I made a filter with a Q of ~4000 from 10% capacitors and a CMOS multiplexer, knew there was more lurking there, but never had the chance to invent Tayloe mixers.

This may explain my ire towards him and the whole culture around people who talk a lot but can't do.

My ire is largely reserved for people that don't understand theoretical fundamentals, but charge ahead and create things with predicable (but unpredicted) practical failure modes. And then sell them to the ignorant. And at worst get lawyers to prosecute the innocent.

Oh, and those that ignorantly reimplement wheels, but make them elliptical. Especially prevalent w.r.t. software, but it happens in hardware too.

The only improvement that has come from the existence of HR departments is reduction in chair throwing.

I believe those incidents occurred somewhere in the Balkans, where civilisation is a thin veneer, and justice can be personal.

I can get all of those right with associated caveats and footnotes, only because I've been hurt by them all at least once. I will bear that in mind for any interview questions I need to write up.

I'm sure you are aware of these pages; for those that haven't seen them before, settle down in front of Amazon Prune or Netflux or... , and have a quiet smile.
https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods- ... addresses/
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/fa ... out-names/
https://infiniteundo.com/post/253269996 ... about-time
https://infiniteundo.com/post/255093540 ... about-time

[Zenith]

My ire is largely reserved for people that don't understand theoretical fundamentals, but charge ahead and create things with predicable (but unpredicted) practical failure modes. And then sell them to the ignorant. And at worst get lawyers to prosecute the innocent.

Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos springs to mind. She must have a very strange mentality, maybe something to do with an unshakeable belief in the power of positive thinking.

I suppose the radium craze of the 1920s could also be included, although it could be argued that the dangers weren't understood. Radium was powerful and good and a wonder substance, and very often it was associated with all sorts of things such as shoe polish and butter, which contained no radium at all. There were quack medicines sold on no basis other than the imagined benefits of radium, which were extremely dangerous.

We have something similar with the Post Office scandal in the UK, whereby bugs in the Fujitsu Horizon software were denied and thousands of sub-postmasters had their lives turned upside down, and in many cases were jailed, as a result. There also seems to have been an element of vindictiveness in pursuing them. Predictably most of the major actors are making smoke and scurrying away.

[tggzzz]

My ire is largely reserved for people that don't understand theoretical fundamentals, but charge ahead and create things with predicable (but unpredicted) practical failure modes. And then sell them to the ignorant. And at worst get lawyers to prosecute the innocent.

Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos springs to mind. She must have a very strange mentality, maybe something to do with an unshakeable belief in the power of positive thinking.

And the "fake it until you make it" way of proceeding.

There was also uBeam/SonicEnergy, which used ultrasonic sound to transmit energy. That owner was famously intolerant of anybody that raised objections, e.g. the safety of a 145 dB to 155 dB SPL sound! (140dB SPL is a military aircraft taking off 30m away)

More frequently and less dangerously/visibly, there are salesman that claim their product is scalable and reliable. Lots of money invested and then the scalability and failure modes are found; cue lawyers.

[Zenith]

Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos springs to mind. She must have a very strange mentality, maybe something to do with an unshakeable belief in the power of positive thinking.

And the "fake it until you make it" way of proceeding.

I think there's also an element of holding a tiger by the tail. While it's going they are not in jail. The longer it keeps going the heftier the punishment is likely to be, but if they thought long term they wouldn't be in the mess they are in. There's also McCawberism as well; something might turn up.

There was also uBeam/SonicEnergy, which used ultrasonic sound to transmit energy. That owner was famously intolerant of anybody that raised objections, e.g. the safety of a 145 dB to 155 dB SPL sound! (140dB SPL is a military aircraft taking off 30m away)

More frequently and less dangerously/visibly, there are salesman that claim their product is scalable and reliable. Lots of money invested and then the scalability and failure modes are found; cue lawyers.

There have been things which as far as I could tell had no basis in evidence, such as magnetic water softeners. They came with some patter about the effect of a magnetic field on calcium atoms. I doubt they were of any use at all. How about the various nostrums for reviving car batteries? I wonder why it is they can still sell new replacement batteries. They may have some demonstrable effect, but it must be marginal. These things may be a waste of money, but they are not a danger.

There have been numerous UK government software projects, which have been delayed for years and have gone hugely over budget. The government bods involved have been promoted, and the contractors have made out like bandits.

[vk6zgo]

My mind shut down during all the preceding blather, but came out of hibernation when I saw this example.
It is not a rare problem & is solved multiple times a year by real people.
The obvious answer is to use UTC, but for ordinary folk as distinct from computers, hams, comms people & the military, it is normally solved by knowing about time zones & the iniquitous practice of Daylight Saving.

[vk6zgo]

My ire is largely reserved for people that don't understand theoretical fundamentals, but charge ahead and create things with predicable (but unpredicted) practical failure modes. And then sell them to the ignorant. And at worst get lawyers to prosecute the innocent.

Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos springs to mind. She must have a very strange mentality, maybe something to do with an unshakeable belief in the power of positive thinking.

I suppose the radium craze of the 1920s could also be included, although it could be argued that the dangers weren't understood. Radium was powerful and good and a wonder substance, and very often it was associated with all sorts of things such as shoe polish and butter, which contained no radium at all. There were quack medicines sold on no basis other than the imagined benefits of radium, which were extremely dangerous.

We have something similar with the Post Office scandal in the UK, whereby bugs in the Fujitsu Horizon software were denied and thousands of sub-postmasters had their lives turned upside down, and in many cases were jailed, as a result. There also seems to have been an element of vindictiveness in pursuing them. Predictably most of the major actors are making smoke and scurrying away.

Another example is "Robodebt" in Australia, where people receiving the "dole" & some other benefits were pursued relentlessly for wholly imaginary "overpayments" as part of a campaign against "welfare cheats", brought to you by, you guessed it--the "right" side of politics!

It was built on top of an earlier scheme which considered individual cases & allowed discussion & appeals to real people.
Robodebt threw all checks & balances aside & totally relied upon a flawed computerised system. There was no effective appeal structure, & in their ideological zeal, the politicians who supposedly were meant to "oversee" the scheme could only see "all that lovely money" being extracted from those least capable of paying.
The whole thing was found to be illegal, & "heads were going to roll", but many of the architects of the scheme are still swanning around scot-free.

[vk6zgo]

My mind shut down during all the preceding blather, but came out of hibernation when I saw this example.
It is not a rare problem & is solved multiple times a year by real people.
The obvious answer is to use UTC, but for ordinary folk as distinct from computers, hams, comms people & the military, it is normally solved by knowing about time zones & the iniquitous practice of Daylight Saving.

I don't normally reply to myself, but I was thinking------ ( I know, it's dangerous! ) .

In the example, "next week" is a fairly broad time interval. If he is "currently in Perth" he could drive back to Eucla, using up the remaining one day of EADT, & most of the next day, then everything would be back to normal.
In the real world, his ISP would probably have assumed he was on WAST all the time, anyway, so in Perth or Eucla would assume the same time.
Indeed an error, but a workable one.

An interesting example is buying on line from Coles (for non-Oz folk, a major shopping group).

On their website,on the page showing delivery times, they warn that after 9pm you can't book deliveries for the next day & will have to do it for the day after that.
So far, everything on the website gives the impression of having made the time zone correction for wherever you are in "this wide brown land", but when at 6:05 pm WAST I tardily selected the delivery time for "tomorrow", I realised that their "tomorrow" was my "day after tomorrow", as it was now 9:05pm EADT!

[bd139]

My mind shut down during all the preceding blather, but came out of hibernation when I saw this example.
It is not a rare problem & is solved multiple times a year by real people.
The obvious answer is to use UTC, but for ordinary folk as distinct from computers, hams, comms people & the military, it is normally solved by knowing about time zones & the iniquitous practice of Daylight Saving.

I don't normally reply to myself, but I was thinking------ ( I know, it's dangerous! ) .

In the example, "next week" is a fairly broad time interval. If he is "currently in Perth" he could drive back to Eucla, using up the remaining one day of EADT, & most of the next day, then everything would be back to normal.
In the real world, his ISP would probably have assumed he was on WAST all the time, anyway, so in Perth or Eucla would assume the same time.
Indeed an error, but a workable one.

An interesting example is buying on line from Coles (for non-Oz folk, a major shopping group).

On their website,on the page showing delivery times, they warn that after 9pm you can't book deliveries for the next day & will have to do it for the day after that.
So far, everything on the website gives the impression of having made the time zone correction for wherever you are in "this wide brown land", but when at 6:05 pm WAST I tardily selected the delivery time for "tomorrow", I realised that their "tomorrow" was my "day after tomorrow", as it was now 9:05pm EADT!

Now this is an excellent post because it shows exactly what the humans who deal with it think about the problem and that is always disparate to the logic applied from afar.

Our approach to solving this was to send someone from the UK who knows nothing about it and assumes that we are the centre of the temporal universe (well we are) to Sydney for 2 weeks and work it out with two people there who have never left Sydney.

You can imagine how that went.

[tggzzz]

Strangely I also used Australia as the example of how simplistic notions of time would cause cellphone users to be annoyed - and hence our customers to be annoyed.

I'd love to see what an LLM chatbot would give as answers to such time-elated questions.