I attended an Intel "AI day" in London back in about 2018, before they bought Habana and had all of their focus on Nervana (mentioned in the article) and Saffron - which I've basically never heard mention of again since that day. seems a shame; while the AI accelerators have obvious utility, it was Saffron which sounded like it might be a game-changer.
From the inside, RTO feels more like a way to reclaim leverage from highly paid technical employees who have become too uppity. Summoning us back to the office is about putting us in our place - but in the social hierarchy, not physically.
The bad weather places you mention have largely uniform bad weather, which is not true of England - the south east is noticeably warmer and drier than the north west.
Weather is of course only a contributing factor, just like the historical influences.
Any article which seeks to explore the problems of northern England and doesn't mention the weather is fundamentally incomplete.
I've lived in every part of England, but being in the north west for the last decade has highlighted how much our mental health can be damaged by constant grey skies and rain. A population predisposed to feeling hopeless naturally leads to a less vibrant economy.
I have observed a strange/alarming behaviour when I carry a notebook - because friends and family don't typically have one, they find it intriguing and so will sometimes absentmindedly snoop through what I've written if I leave it unattended. The same thing just doesn't happen with a ReMarkable (and even if it did, you can set a PIN code).
Education comes in many forms. School taught me about long division and the battle of Hastings, but weekends away with my family taught me about societal norms.
We hear lots of complaints these days about how mal-adjusted so many children are, but is there any wonder? They are whisked from after school clubs to private sports activities, then off to bed (or homework) once their mandatory activities are done. Some of this is because parents are terrified of being considered neglectful by under-stimulating their child - but then children never learn to just exist in the presence of events which are more important than themselves.
> Suddenly, the economy looks more like an infinite series of tiny frauds than a harmonious ecosystem.
This hits hard.
I enjoyed reading that far more than I expected, even if I did keep glancing at the scroll bar and wondering if the juice would be worth the squeeze. The meta-commentary at the end (maybe this Slate article will finally seal a book deal) felt faintly reminiscent of the end of the Stephen King "Dark Tower" novels.
> That means your manager has to be switched on and fully on board.
Your manager also needs enough political capital to drive the promotion. This is something I have an acute awareness of, having been told for the last 3 years that I was operating at the principal level (no staff title here) but not getting promoted. Eventually my manager was forced out of the company by bullying from my skip-level, so now I'm left to look for a new role elsewhere or spend some unknown amount of time building the relationship with my new manager.
Fujitsu seems to be weirdly stubborn about global commercialisation of their CPUs. I know of at least a couple of HPC customers who wanted to build systems based on A64FX and the answer was basically "...nah we're good".
The problem is that so many people being paid for 5x8 are actually working 5x9 or 5x10.
At least for myself, I was raised with the notion that working harder would be recognised and eventually rewarded. That has not turned out to be the case, so I am seeking a rebalance.