Just dropping a comment to say congrats for getting something up and running and that it's nice to see somebody doing something for the elderly and those less technically proficient.

Here in the UK the same problems exist regarding general ease-of-use, scams, and ability to navigate tech in general: and we also have a signficiant (and growing) problem where government services and support are all being moved online, with seemingly little support for those who find modern tech difficult to engage with.

Though my gut feeling says you may struggle to build a viable long-term business around this: I really do hope you succeed!

Personally I think governments and institutions need to radically improve things for the non-techies amongst us and those who find it difficult, whether cognitively or physically, to engage with tech in the first place. Right now it seems that the default assumption is that everybody is perfectly fine using a website or app, and if you're not, you're out of luck!

The 'tailored music' scenario suggested in this paper doesn't require any kind of NFT, let alone an 'iNFT'.

If ever there was a solution looking for a problem, this is it.

This is great and all, but the merge process is still messy as hell

Very timely post for me - as this is exactly what I'm trying to achieve at my own place :P I've forwarded it to several people to help bolster my argument, so thanks!

Glad you found it useful! I highly recommend the Teams Topologies book cited in the article. Its a bit dry at first, but the solution leverages everything you learn in the earlier chapters in a jujitsu-like "use the enemy's power against itself" way. (Hope that makes sense)

I think it largely depends on what the work actually involves. For me - I personally don't like working from home. I need the separation between my place of work and my place of rest, but I fully appreciat that this is my own personal view and not everybody shares it.

However, my actual job requires a lot of communication - some of it is perfectly ok to do remotely via calls etc, but a significant portion of my job involves ad-hoc discussions, whiteboarding, throwing ideas around and coming up with a solution to a problem that is highly specific to our domain. This is the problem area, for me - I've found no combination of tools that adequately plugs the gaps that remote working has left in our ability to have those kinds of conversations / design sessions - and certainly no combination that everyone 'gels' with.

For me, it's a major issue. Productivity in those area has absolutely tanked. Pre-planned, pre-determined work is generally ok, but the more informal side of things - which is actually probably around 50% of what we actually need to do in order to keep things moving, has gone to hell, which now means we ask people to come in at least a few days a week to try to plug the gaps.

My team has ad-hoc meetings all the time while working remote. We've been throwing ideas around, having design discussions, the whole shebang. Yes, the first six months were difficult - it took us a while to figure out a new way to work. But now it's been 2.5 years since we've been in the office and we've been hiring people who live several hundred miles away or more from what used to be our office. C'mon - if we can make it work then you can make it work.

> C'mon - if we can make it work then you can make it work.

If this was a reasonable argument, nobody would ever have any issues!

It's the law of averages. We're just an average, ordinary dev team producing extraordinary results because we scrutinize every aspect of how we work.

We also scrutinise every aspect of how we work; it doesn't mean that there's a viable remote-only replacement for everything a team might need to do.

Your anecdote is not data - it's just an anecdote.

The 'bare minimum to not get fired' is the expectation of any job.

If the employer wants to increase the expectations levelled on employees, then they should write it into their contracts. No contract? No expectations.

You can't hold people to some abstract set of expectations that are never written down anywhere; and if you try - well that's why they have to invent a stupid term like 'quiet quitting'.

I recently set up NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi and found the process a little more convoluted than I would have liked - but that was mostly because the linuxserver.io image for MariaDB seemed to have some problems during database initialisation which I couldn't figure out. I switched over to use the yobasystems/alpine-mariadb image and that worked flawlessly. I haven't tried syncing contacts or calendar yet but that wasn't really my primary motivation - I just wanted self-hosted files with a nice interface. The NextCloud UX is a little clunky imo but I'm not complaining - it's a great piece of software especially considering the price tag! I also am trying to do open-source everything so it is very attractive in that regard.

Nice organisational simplicity would be to simply not have any special rules for the unvaccinated in the first place

That's a matter for a different organisation. For many different organisations, if the organisation is a large one.

If you organise a departmental meeting where n people travel to meet, perhaps once every month or year, the organisations that set the rules for that locale matters, not just your own. If you send some people to take part in a course at a vendor, the vendor sets rules. If you send people to a customer, the customer's rules apply.

Each large company has basically three options:

1. Apply any unvaccinated-only rules to everyone, always. This is simple in principle, but can be bothersome in execution.

2. Require that everyone be vaccinated and don't bother about unvaccinated-only rules. This is also simple in principle, but hard on those who won't get a vaccine.

3. Keep track of who's who and what rules apply to each employee on an individual level.

Other options exist in theory, e.g. "we'll close the shop in any jurisdictions that introduce any rules that apply only to the unvaccinated" but I dare say that this isn't realistic for even a medium-sized company, far less for one as large as this bank. Large companies have to accept that different rules apply depending on jurisdiction. Ditto for e.g. hotels when finding meeting space for a departmental get-together.

How about a rule like: Don't bring Covid to work/work events. Seems a lot more aligned with the presumed goals.

I've heard about such rules (e.g. hygiene rules in medical establishments).

If you're not vaccinated and you infect someone, and they die or are seriously affected by long covid, they can say that your lack of vaccination is a lack of the precaution required by the rule, and sue you for that person's expected lifetime earnings plus quintuple damages for negligence. Is that what you want?

> Is that what you want?

No, but I don't expect that to be my only option. I'm suggesting a good faith effort by all to generally reduce infectious transmission. The reality now is that a vaccine gives license to spread.

If banks simply refused to implement stupid and ineffective rules, no government is going to shut them down.

It's not black and white; a lost year of education is a terrible thing on its own in terms of future prospects - but kids need to be around their peers for reasons that go beyond academic success. Lengthy periods of isolation are normally considered a punishment for a reason. It's not supposed to last indefinitely or be a constant threat based on factors they can't control, and appeals to the greater good can only be justified for so long (and only when the effects of the restrictions put in place are actually effective and not overridden by other harms they may cause).

I don't think a cover letter is necessary - but being able to demonstrate that you can write thoughtfully and clearly is always going to be a plus imo, whatever the job entails. There are very few roles in which decent communication skills have no value.