Replied to https://rubyquartzglasses.me.uk/2026/02/4321/ by Phil Phil
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. – https://mastodon.online/@pseudonym/116135917950981989

See also https://electrek.co/2026/03/17/former-uber-self-driving-chief-tesla-fsd-crash-supervision-problem/:

Tesla is asking humans to supervise a system that is specifically designed to make supervision feel pointless. As he puts it, an unreliable machine keeps you alert, and a perfect machine needs no oversight, but one that works almost perfectly creates a trap where drivers trust it just enough to stop paying attention.

Read Short tempers and legal threats: UK teachers report rise in problem parents by Richard Adams

For me, this is the most damaging result of our short-sighted rush towards “productivity”:

More recently, heads said parents had been using AI to generate lengthy, legalistic complaints that required increasing amounts of time to administer.

This is a completely justified use of an LLM and it’s going to cost more time than an LLM will ever save. Unless you use an LLM to respond, in which case we’ll just have LLMs burning resources achieving nothing.

If I hadn’t let the RAF recruiter convince me to apply on an officer track JUST because I was a graduate, I reckon I’d have seen at least four “hot” combat deployments and three or four “very warm” airlifts, by now. Well, assuming I survived being deployed to Afghanistan on probably my first ever tour. Weird thinking about it.

Makes perfect sense to me. A country populated with people that believe that “more guns” makes people safer WOULD be in favour of starting a war in the name of peace.

I don’t really get how people continue to be surprised by this pervasive dislogic.

I sent a Pull request with some minor improvements to the Power Apps documentation in December 2024. Totally forgot about it. Apparently, they just got merged. I feel bad for anyone that tried to follow that tutorial in the mean time…

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Interesting problem this morning. Had a container that wasn’t appearing that should always appear. App showed this behaviour when published and in Studio but, by the time the App was loaded and ready to edit in Power Apps Studio, it looked like it should be working fine.

All the variables were set as expected and the results for each control property evaluation looked right e.g. the code in .Visible was resolving to TRUE… except the .Height property was showing as 0. Weirdly, in the “canvas” view, it looked like the height was definitely non-zero as there was an outline around an apparently hidden, but large, control. For that reason I spent a long time looking at how .Visible was evaluating. Appearances were deceiving in this case!

Ignoring the evidence of my eyes, I eventually dug into what was setting Height on the control, a Context variable called containerMaxHeight, which was set by:

UpdateContext(
    {
        controlHeight: 30,
        containerHeight: 50,
        containerMaxHeight: Switch(
            Settings.Size,
            ScreenSize.Small,
            containerHeight*2,
            ScreenSize.Medium,
            containerHeight,
            ScreenSize.Large,
            containerHeight,
            containerHeight// For extra large
        ),
        helpContainerHeight: 40,
        helpContainerMaxHeight: Switch(
            Settings.Size,
            ScreenSize.Small,
            helpContainerHeight*2,
            ScreenSize.Medium,
            helpContainerHeight*2,
            ScreenSize.Large,
            helpContainerHeight,
            helpContainerHeight// For extra large
        )
    }
);

An experienced Power Fx/Apps user might see the problem immediately. It’s dead simple. These are all evaluated simultaneously, so they can’t depend on one another. I just needed to split the UpdateContext() function into two calls:

// have to set these first
UpdateContext(
    {
        controlHeight: 30,
        containerHeight: 50,
        helpContainerHeight: 40
    }
);
// so they can be referenced here
UpdateContext(
    {
        containerMaxHeight: Switch(
            Settings.Size,
            ScreenSize.Small,
            containerHeight*1.5,
            ScreenSize.Medium,
            containerHeight,
            ScreenSize.Large,
            containerHeight,
            containerHeight// For extra large
        ),
        helpContainerMaxHeight: Switch(
            Settings.Size,
            ScreenSize.Small,
            helpContainerHeight*1.5,
            ScreenSize.Medium,
            helpContainerHeight*1.5,
            ScreenSize.Large,
            helpContainerHeight,
            helpContainerHeight// For extra large
        )
    }
);