I’ve had good experiences buying 2nd hand laptops off ebay and putting linux on them. As long as the battery is in good condition, you can breath new life into old hardware for not a lot of money.

Ha! Bad consultancy is bad consultancy, regardless of whether it’s delivered by a person or AI. I’ve worked with some great consultants, but it’s very much the minority. So this feels like a natural commoditisation of the shitty consultancy model.

Perhaps the more worrying aspect, is at least there’s a finite number of shitty human consultants at any one time. AI would remove that constraint.

Yep. I agree with this. Re-creating Reddit at the same scale just brings all the same problems. I like that federation means smaller more localised communities that can be connected (or not). I get that it’s not what everyone wants or is used to, and that’s okay.

There’s a lot of politics at play and I think the WRU are trying to take an approach where they are seen to be working with the regions to bring about change. Or it might be to give less ammunition for a legal challenge. :D

I’m surprised they decided to only drop down to 3 regions and not 2. In some ways it seems fairer in terms of spreading the pain around, and would focus our resources in having (hopefully) two very good regions.

I think the changes to the regions is set to happen by 2028. And whilst the WRU is trying to avoid a messy legal process, it seems inevitable as nobody will want to go quietly.

I sound terribly pessimistic. And I’m not. I’m pleased to see the WRU finally recognise that change is needed, mostly brought about by the downturn in results. But I suspect this process isn’t going to be quick, and maybe it shouldn’t be if it’s really getting the fundamental stuff right.

Rejection of fascism and racism is good not just for New Yorkers, but more widely Americans. The optimist in me also likes to think that this is a signal to politicians and political parties everywhere that you can challenge far right populism and win, rather than absorbing elements of it to attract voters. (Labour continue to disappoint me in this respect)

I think the challenge for Mamdani now (as I suppose it is for any progressive who gets voted in) is actually making positive change happen at the rate that people want and need it. There will be a lot of people waiting to leap on failure, including some Democrats.

#enshittification

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

I knew it was going to emotionally manipulate me, and it still got me.

Sadly for Wales, I don’t think we’ve found rock bottom yet. Change takes time and the WRU have an awful lot of foundational systemic stuff to fix.

I dead headed mine last year when it looked like this, came back fine this year. Have just done the same this year.

I tend to give it a good prune in October and take out anything that looks like it’s struggling. Thing is growing like mad and seems pretty resilient.

Also based in the UK. :)