Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

RE: https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/116732458668556757

Modern finance is *insane*, and apparently getting even more so. This makes absolutely no sense, surely?

The London PostgreSQL Meetup Group will be hosting its next in person event 2 weeks from today! Join them at The Star of Kings on June 23rd for “Stopping Collations Going Wrong” with Andreas Karlsson and a recap of PGConf DEV with Alastair Turner and Valeria Kaplan.

https://www.meetup.com/london-postgresql-meetup-group/events/315092418/?eventOrigin=network_page

#PostgreSQL #postgres

Some politicians in the UK think it is a good idea to introduce identity verification for using VPN services.

It could be that these politicians do not understand what they are proposing. The alternative, that they do understand, would be even worse.

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UK net #migration has dropped to 171,000 for the 2025 calendar year, according to provisional data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This marks a nearly 50% decrease from 2024 and an 82% drop from the record peak in 2023.

Key drivers of the decline:

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The idea that the US & UK militaries are lobby that same technology that tells me “I’m absolutely right” on an almost daily basis as I point out its inability to follow instructions should be allowed to kill people’s without human oversight is nuts to me.

This is biggest technological ethical crisis of our lives.

Everyone talks about not having senior devs in the future because we’re replacing the juniors with LLMs, but nobody’s talking about losing senior devs now because people who are competent and care about the quality of their work are leaving this LLM-infested hellscape of a career path to go into carpentry, hostelry, or subsistence farming

If all the #Mamdani news seems too good to be true, it’s because politicians haven’t worked for the average person for decades and we’ve gotten so use to it a politician doing their job correctly seems completely foreign.

Only a handful of days remain to submit your talk proposal to PGConf.EU 2026. If you've been sitting on an idea, now is the time.
https://2026.pgconf.eu/call-for-papers/

Ed Zitron:

"LLMs impress the writers who do not want to write, the coders who don’t want to code, the researchers who don’t want to research, and the lawyers that don’t want to actually understand case law. Those that desperately tell you how powerful AI is and that you simply must use it are looking for you to validate their own laziness or distaste for effort, and those who are impressed with LLMs’ outputs tend to be people with low standards."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
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In 1990, the high school dropout rate for Dolly Parton's hometown of Sevierville Tennessee was at 34% (Research shows that most kids make up their minds in fifth/sixth grade not to graduate). That year, all fifth and sixth graders from Sevierville were invited by Parton to attend an assembly at Dollywood. They were asked to pick a buddy, and if both students completed high school, Dolly Parton would personally hand them each a $500 check on their graduation day. As a result, the dropout rate for those classes fell to 6%, and has generally retained that average to this day. Shortly after the success of The Buddy Program, Parton learned in dealing with teachers from the school district that problems in education often begin during first grade when kids are at different developmental levels. That year The Dollywood Foundation paid the salaries for additional teachers assistants in every first grade class for the next 2 years,