Why can a 78-year old widow's life savings be managed through an online bank system?

Bring back local branch offices where people have to manage their high-risk accounts in-person.

That's pretty interesting, because the US is often stereotyped for being aggressively cost-cutting in pursuit of margin. And yet in the middle of nowhere in the US local bank branches are still very common. I can easily get someone from my bank on the phone any time I need to. And if anyone attempts to move a large sum of money out of my account, the bank will promptly call me and freeze the action unless I allow it. Best of all the account is entirely free of fees with no minimum balance.

That's still considered normal customer service by a local bank here in the US. I assume it degrades if you bank with one of the giants like Bank of America.

The US has weird banking regulations dating back to the depression that lead to this situation. I'm sure banks in the US would love to close everything and consolidate into 2-3 megabanks like in the UK.

> consolidate into 2-3 megabanks like in the UK

The UK has greater industry competition in the form of challenger banks than the US

Because in person banking services are really really expensive and no one will pay for them.

Because you're not allowed to ban old people from your services.

Because at least some old people use these things successfully and at least some young people get defrauded.

Because UK banks are closed more than they are open (my local NatWest.

People should be able to opt out. But that won't really help as the core issue here is the customers themselves...

You know the answer - because branchless operations are cheaper. If you want to mandate in-person transactions, who would you have pay the extra costs?

Banks make no money from retail customers as it is, they certainly aren't going to be reopening branches any time soon.

That's where effective legislation and regulation can play a role. It's not as if other parts of the same bank aren't making money hand over fist.

Is it better to spend money subsidising bank branches? Or generally improving security and beefing up the police? I would say the latter - it benefits everyone and reduces crime.

The actual actions of the government have been to do neither.

Unless governments subsidize this, all this does is hurt small banks.

You can't even talk to a live support person on the phone anymore. Just moved to the UK (from Czech Republic) and was shocked how everything is IVR here. We are all just numbers in the database here.

For most of us avoiding telephone queues is a blessing.

I have 3 "proper" bank accounts (different banks), a couple of "challenger"/app bank accounts, and 3 credit cards and haven't stepped foot in a branch to open or deal with any of them in 20 years. I've had to get on the telephone with a couple maybe a couple of times.

I couldn't be happier with this arrangement, as long as someone is reachable when shit really does hit the fan.

Sounds like a business model, you can try it and see what happens.

It is a huge problem if we cannot have vital services because they disappear. No banks given the trends, no cars given the trends, no documents given the trends... (In the terms of, many would not use a computer at all if the only option were UntrustedOS.) You can raise the issue of "more profits the other way", but it does not fully work ("dirt served at the restaurant, cheap and profitful") and an amount of people will remain serviceless.

There's a challenger bank (aka startup) doing exactly that: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-8595205/...

Sure; and bring back bank charges for in-credit accounts.

Comparing AsciiDoc to Markdown (instead of for instance reSructured Text/reST) is clever, but I don't think there's any widespread controversy about the shortcomings of Markdown. So that's just an easy win.

I've seen this premise a lot (quoting from the article)

»The most compelling reason to choose a lightweight markup language for writing is to minimize the number of technical concepts an author must grasp in order to be immediately productive.«

What relevant documentation markup languages have this issue?

If we already agree that documentation should be written as code, let's embrace it and not be scared of showing syntax. It's our tools that matter here - syntax highlighting, previewing, CI feedback.

I see much more that people writing markup languages get extremely motivated from their first victories with coding something.

Don't be afraid of showing people syntax -- Wikipedia got pretty far with a less-than-optimal markup language!

I think the real issue with AsciiDoc is something more along these lines: https://xkcd.com/927/

I'm working in a large organization where we are failing to streamline and spread documentation practices because of many different standards and practices popping up everywhere.

I like a lot how the Python community has centered around Sphinx and Read the Docs. It's great that for instance Sphinx support both Markdown and reST in that regards -- but then when things like Hugo/Docsy, AsciiDoc, Github Wikis, groovydoc etc. starts popping up, the unification of documentation practices in a large organization becomes harder -- and also of course across the specter of Open Source projects.

Students can make very big and positive contributions to Open Source and contributing to Open Source with a primary goal of benefiting the project is great. But if this is just a secondary goal, then I would politely say "no" to the offer.

If, however, the university would provide resources to ensure that contributions have the required quality and can assist maintainers with the added load, then it would possibly work! I could imagine that a direct link between maintainer(s) and university supervisor/lecturer would work well, so that maintainers can express their needs and priorities to someone who can handle/govern them in front of the learners.

ORMs give an affordability to write code faster. That may save time, but instead of saving time, you can also reinvest in better quality and performance. That's up to you and your team.

For instance, Django has prefetch_related and select_related. At almost every Django conference, there's a talk on this topic because it's so important and very underused/overlooked. But these are provided methods of the ORM.

Aside from that, there are wonderful introspection tools such as django-debug-toolbar to view the raw SQL and its performance.

It can be argued that if a solution written in Django hasn't had its database performance introspected with for instance django-debug-toolbar, then the solution isn't done. This is a small step with big rewards.

This introspection can easily identify where raw SQL is useful. But apply it late in process: As a project matures, the costs of converting some queries into raw/hybrid SQL are lower, as the statement is less likely to change. But keep these SQL statements in the models and managers, don't let them spill into views, template tags etc.

On a typical laptop, what level of interrupts is too high? And what can be done about it?

The tool 'powertop' is very useful here, it will show what is causing any form of wakeup on your system, and offers a 'Tunables' tab with suggested settings to improve some aspects.

Powertop is great. You can even run it in non-interactive mode. That said, it only optimizes for lower power usage and lower interrupts. You can further reduce interrupts by disabling devices. If there are devices you don't need, you can blacklist them in /etc/modprobe.d/ provided you understand the potential dependencies other devices may have on the drivers. This can free up a tiny bit of memory as well.