I used to be able to tell Siri "Turn off the lights."
Sometimes in 2017 or 2018 they "updated" it and now it replies "Which room?" Followed by slowly listing out the 6 or 7 options including "everywhere."
I haven't been able to reprogram myself to say "Turn off all the lights" which works as before. Hearing that reply is the equivalent of hitting your toe on a wardrobe.
This update didn't fix this. The functionality is the same as before.
It looks like it's the GOVUK Frontend JS. Most of it is probably not necessary.
That being said, the site feels instantaneous to me, and scores 95/100 on PageSpeed Insights, with the only oversight being the render-blocking Google font which adds 750ms to initial render, but should be cached on subsequent navigations. Perhaps your browser isn't caching it, which would explain the sluggishness.
200kB of JavaScript (50kB gzipped) is pretty lean for modern websites. React.js on its own is around 130kB, for just the library.
So do I, but on a flight 2 days ago, I forgot the name of a Ruby method, but knew what it does. I tried looking it up in Dash (offline rdocs) but didn’t find it.
On a whim, I asked Zephyr 7B (Mistral based) “what’s the name of that Ruby method that does <insert code>” and it gave me 3 different correct ways of doing what I wanted, including the one I couldn’t remember. That was a real “oh wow” moment.
So offline situations is the most likely use case for me.
> Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
Assume this attitude when you're looking at other people's work and questioning their decisions. Assume that others will do the same for your work.
The Romanian for "to use" is "a utiliza." Bilingual speakers might find "utilize" more familiar and choose it as such. The same might be true of other languages, and a possible explanation for its popularity.
alphagov is GOV.UK and shared services which are part of the "Government as a Platform" service line. Things like GOV.UK Notify (Twilio), GOV.UK Design System (Bootstrap), GOV.UK Service Manual (Ops manual), GOV.UK PaaS (Heroku, now defunct), and so on.
Every major UK government department has their own GitHub orgs:
I'm a very happy Framework laptop daily user. I want to get so many upgrades now: AMD mainboard, 4kg hinge kit, New louder speakers, 61Wh battery, Blank ISO keyboard, WiFi 6E card.
The only downside is that's so many components, instead of upgrading, I'll probably buy a whole new one and donate the old one to friends or family. :)
> The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
> In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
I've used the GOV.UK PaaS since the private beta. I was a user research subject and gave early feedback. I've used it on multiple projects since.
As with Notify, the Design System, and all the other great tools that GDS produces, the PaaS is an absolute joy to use. Think Heroku, but built on top of FOSS, and with everything you could want to help you build the long tail of cookie cutter form or API-based government services.
It's a damn shame GDS killed it.
It's even worse they did so without providing a clear migration path. That sends a very bad message to other departments: GDS will kill things you depend on. They will also leave you high and dry when they do so. So don't depend on or adopt their tools. "Not invented here" has always been a problem in the UK government, this news only makes it worse.
Colleagues of mine have staked their reputation on the line to convince legacy IT to let us use the PaaS instead of their own home-grown, poorly documented, and unsatisfactory solutions. Now, we look like fools.
I love working in government. I love building accessible, robust, and user-centred services.
I don't love: writing IAM policies, learning about what a "service principal" is, naming resource groups, having to open a support ticket to change an environment variable, having my password expire in the middle of an incident when I want to read logs, or spending more than £50 a month of taxpayer money for a monolith with a database and a Redis. I had to do none of those on the PaaS.
Apple Music has a feature based on iTunes Match that will take your local files and attempt to match them based on their metadata and audio fingerprint.
The last time I used it, from my (then) ~5000 song library, it matched ~3600. That means that a good third of the music I listen to is not available in the same exact version on streaming services.
I dug into why, and reasons include:
- The LPs were never licensed properly. Such as Exmilitary by Death Grips, which is a bootleg release with copyright issues.
- The artist hasn't signed up for streaming, like it used to be the case with Tool. Or they only stream on one platform and not another. Dr. Dre and Jay-Z come to mind. All three artists I mentioned in this bullet are "really mainstream."
- The version I like is not the streaming release. I like the casette version of Ashes 2 Ashes, Dust 2 Dust by Tommy Wright III, but not the CD reissue.
- The artist is actually too niche. I have quite a few things in my collection from Bandcamp or Soundcloud that don't exist elsewhere.
- The release is "weird." Like the radio stations from the classic GTA games.