In the UK to own a gun you need to have a good reason to do so. This is usually by being a member of a gun club, and getting a license to own a gun. Once you have a club membership and a license you then need to start speaking to the police to purchase a gun alongside having a gun box that is secure and certified by the police. Its an awful lot of hassle so the only people with guns are those who are interested in it.
Police dont tend to have guns apart from specially trained units(?) so you only see these quite rarely. Northern Ireland is a bit of an exception all police in NI have a gun, and are trained to quite a high standard to just be able to use it. NI's police actually go over to England reguarly enough to help when police with guns are required.
Not really all that exciting a story. Small enough company with an even smaller IT team, with management who aren't at all aware of what IT actually do and an ethos of "just stick it on the IT list" to solve any problem.
Its not an IT business so naturally the focus isn't on how IT does their job the attention is on how quick can we get it done. Unfortunately that leads to a lot of half baked solutions being put out knowing full well that this is a time bomb and it will blow up at some point. I usually wake up with this immense feeling of dread before turning over to my phone to see what has broken over night and to gauge what my day is going to be like.
The worst thing is, everyone in IT are aware of these issues and bring them up constantly but there is no desire to improve things higher up in the company so it'll continue on as it is because it works well enough.
The IT exodus isn't for fear of AI or anything of the sorts, its never something I've been interested. I got my start as a teenager programming mods for Minecraft and making games on Roblox. I enjoy some of what I do at work but when your spending more time politicking then actually developing software it begins to bore you
As for the new non-IT job, my formal education is in Technical Theatre and Live Entertainment, its something I have been doing for about as long as I have been programming. I was at PLASA (Big events industry tech conference) in London last year and seen a cruise line hiring technicians which put the thought into my head. It was a few months before I actually applied but I got it and managed to get all my Visas and my ENG1 cert. Its a bit of a pay bump, but ultimately I am starting from square 1 so I dont mind it all that much.
Theres probably enough in this for one of my colleagues to put 2 and 2 together to figure out who I am, but nothing I've said here is something I've not said aloud and been quite vocal about
I used an AMD Radeon 7770 for years, then I upgraded to a GTX 1060, the 7770 became my younger sister's GPU for her PC. It has only recently gave out, after some 14 years of service.
Likewise for the 1060, its still going strong. I upgraded to a 3060 round about the time my younger brother decided he wanted a PC so he is now using it without any issues. About 10 years use out of it, plenty more to go.
GPUs are pretty damn resilient if you aren't pissing around with them.
You are not a European citizen, you do not reside in the EU, GDPR only applies to those physically within a country within the EU. Same is true for EU citizens if they reside outside of the EU, a European living in America using an American service does not get the rights the GDPR provides
I kinda went through this when I joined my current employer. My boss's emails were (are) at worst unintelligible and best hard to follow, weirdly formatted and generally hard to grok. Usually they are just blocks of text that are one big garden path sentance. But it all magically goes away in client communications
Not sure why this is, but it never really bothered me. It took me a while to learn my boss's interpretation of the English language. I don't think its a case of being in a position where it doesn't matter, other department heads don't do this, I reckon its just down to necessity.
You aren't trying to portray an image of yourself to your team, you don't need to come across as a poet laureate for internal discussions.
If you are trying to craft an image of yourself to your team instead of doing your job well and letting your work build your image you are doing something wrong
Spend your time wisely, put effort into your emails where it matters, format everything nicely, double/triple check your grammar, but among colleagues you don't need to pretend
I dont think people fully realise how novel Stripe actually is.
The idea of capturing payments via an API itself isn't unique, but the fact that as a company Stripe is actually on average pretty competent. I've never had an issue with stripe on the integration side because that just works.
I work with a massive variety of payment gateways, I'd imagine more than most people on this site ever will, 90% of them suck. The big ones all suck, Stripe's "competitors" suck. They all have effectively the same API but the issues are organisational.
Stripe is a technology company, its technology is good, its approach to the end user (Technical people implementing it) is good. The rest are finance companies and you get all the slow to move, impossible to get through to bureaucracy that comes with it. Of course they didn't respond to the actually issue and said "You've already solved it" and then ignored the actual problem. These payment providers sell their services to business not developers or anyone with technical chops.
They wont care about these issues because your boss has already been sold on the product, the issues are very very unlikely to change their mind and it is now your problem to solve.
> The rest are finance companies and you get all the slow to move, impossible to get through to bureaucracy that comes with it.
Look, I 100% get what you're saying here, but it's not (entirely) the other companies fault. The financial sector is incredibly regulated, and they're required to have policies and procedures for everything which leads to a terrible, no good, sub par user experience.
Stripe has (so far) managed to avoid this, but if (when) they end up in the regulators cross-hairs they too will become like many other financial companies. I mean, I want to be wrong on this but I don't think I am.
This is why a sane e-commerce platform should have routing through a bunch of different payment processors so they're not vulnerable to the regulator or regulatory officer anomalous behavior at any particular one.
How do you think Stripe had avoided the regulators crosshairs? Probably because the users are satisfied and not complaining. Which brings us back full circle to GP's comment on why users are happy.
I mean, Stripe are pretty young for a financial company. Assuming they keep growing, they'll eventually end up as the focus of regulation.
They do seem to be a very well run company, but if they end up as a bank, then they'd be globally systemic and at that point they'll be a focus for regulatory scrutiny
I mean the RIRA is a splinter group of the PIRA which had massive funding from overseas, especially from the United States. PIRA was not a small-time group.
I'm assuming that's a typo missing a zero (i.e. should be half a million), not a typo substituting comma for decimal (i.e. five hundred quid). Even with 24 years of inflation, that spend does not suggest a big group to me.
Hearing some of these stories of Belfast its hard to believe. Flew out of both Belfast International and Belfast City airports last year and they are by far the best airports I have ever had the luxury of travelling through.
Out of Belfast I flew into both Heathrow and Stanstead both are fucking miserable ordeals.
Police dont tend to have guns apart from specially trained units(?) so you only see these quite rarely. Northern Ireland is a bit of an exception all police in NI have a gun, and are trained to quite a high standard to just be able to use it. NI's police actually go over to England reguarly enough to help when police with guns are required.
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