bluehatbrit

So beyond LinkedIn, what sort of channels are you using now? Is it basically all about paying influencers?

Mostly, yes! They use a very specific clay from a producer which went out of business a few years ago. They've bought up all the stock they can and use that clay for pretty much all of the character puppets, along with other materials. There was a great documentary on the BBC a couple of years back which went behind the scenes and talked about how they make and use the puppets.

This seems a lot like Cloudflare OS (https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-os/). Is that a fair comparison? If so I'd be keen to understand how this differs aside from not being baked into the Cloudflare estate.

Of course! I don't see how anyone could expect to excel at a craft without also studying the work of others.

This is where AI concerns me for people who are juniors in their field (software or otherwise). You get quick answers which don't help with learning, and it's very easy to never read the code. It's like a very tempting drug that stunts growth but feels like progress.

I'm a hands on engineering leader for a team of about 20 engineers and I've been spending the past 6 months trying to get my team to understand just this.

On Friday we had a coffee hour to share how we've been working recently and they all seemed perplexed at the workflows I've been adopting. It seems natural to me as someone who's been a manager for some time now, but very alien to all those who've never gone down that path.

That's not to say my workflows are superior, but they're extremely different to some of my teams now. In reality it's just leaning heavily on things like prds, limiting communication between agents, etc.

I've been using elixir professionally and for hobby work for the past 7 years now. Language models are damn good at it, and have been for some time.

The language isn't huge, the documentation has always been very good, and the patterns extremely consistently across the community. I almost wonder whether it's smaller community has been a benefit, as LLMs have been trained on a tighter set of code samples.

I can't speak for Ruby or PHP.

That assumes that they do actually believe it's a mistake. They didn't explain the reasons they've gone for this architecture in much/any detail. I'd be interested in hearing them talk more about that in the future.

Perhaps you or I would make a different decision based on the aims that lead them there. But there isn't enough information to say whether or not their decision was a mistake, even if it has lead to a peculiar bug. It may be perfectly legitimate and we just don't know some of the constraints they had.

This is also my view. These sorts of roles can have a very high impact and be very successful if everyone feels like they're rowing in the same direction.

The people in those roles need make people feel like there is value in seeking their input. They also need to find ways to say yes that helps things happen in the right way, rather than stopping them entirely.

This happens naturally in organisations where security is valued by everyone. InfoSec / CIO roles can operate very successfully and deliver a lot of value. As soon as people lose faith and see them as the "no" team, they start trying to hide from them.

There are lots of ways to create this but it's as much about the people in the role, as it about the organisation itself. If either are skeptical about the other, it falls apart very quickly.

I've got two small projects on the go right now!

The first is a piece of small charity / business governance tech. I'm a trustee of a small charity in the UK, and my wife has been a senior leader of one in the past as well. All the governance tools are super expensive and aimed at businesses with large boards. They're not very suitable for smaller charities who just need something to help them maintain and publish policies, track key structure changes, and governances cycles.

So I'm working on a small bit of SaaS which helps those organisations to stay organised, and walk them through particular processes. The two big benefits are:

1. An audit log of all actions taken across policies, risk registers, board member terms, key information submissions, etc. So you can always see who did what when. 2. A calendar + reminder system which does things like prompt the Chair when someone's term is coming to an end, and auto-populates upcoming meeting agendas.

It's been useful for the charity I work with, I don't really expect it to be a big thing but the hosting cost of ~£40 a month is already saving me a lot of time. I'd like to see if I can get it in use by a couple of other organisations though.

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The other is a data toolkit for UK secondary schools. We have quite a complex way of assessing a schools outcomes for students called "Progress 8". The spec for it is published by the DfE, but there isn't really a tool out there which will do the calculations so a lot of schools either work from complex spreadsheets or wait for the DfE's announcements with the league tables.

My father is a Director of Schools Performance at a Multi-Academy Trust and this seemed like something we could pair up on. He's got a very comprehensive spreadsheet which does the initial calculations, and some continued analysis but it's not very easy to use and making tweaks can take days.

I put together a prototype project which would take in a csv of pupil results and spit out all the Attainment 8 and Progress 8 results. The next step is to wrap it up into a nice web app, and do further analysis. I'd like a school to be able to see things like the Marginal Contribution of each subject and such.

Again, this isn't something I expect to sell to many people. Schools in the UK have no money going spare right now, but it's been a fun venture into the world of data.

Two reasons really. First, there have been instances of bot networks allowing people to buy stars on their repos. This was more common back a few years ago but I'm sure they still operate.

Second, stars don't denote usage or downloading of the code or app. Lots of people use them more as bookmarks which show interest but not much more.

I think if you go back a few years people really did think of GitHub stars as some kind of social proof. That seems to have largely come back around now, and while it's a sign that the project has some attention, there are better ways to see that it is active.

None of that is to devalue the work you've done. It does look like a nice and well thought through application.

I'm not sure the star count means much these days. Regardless, the tool seems interesting. Thanks for adding the videos into the readme as well, it seems quite polished from those - although I've not tried it out myself.

GitHub is big. They'll be doing lots of things all at once. This is probably just a case of some normal component replacement for some maintenance reason. I'm as frustrated as anyone about the lack of stability and the hard pivot to AI, but this at least shows they're doing work on this area of the application.

For all we know this could be a knock on impact from an upgrade or component replacement for improved stability. Maybe even critical security fixes. I don't think it's fair to lambast them for doing work around the core git/ssh systems.

My alert thresholds are $8 and $10 because I only use aws for some backups to S3. It was reporting my actual spend as $425 billion, and forecast at $777 billion.

I thought it was a bad phishing email first, when I saw it in the console I just laughed. I killed my access keys anyway before I noticed the incident on their status page.

Checked this morning and it's all back to normal.

I'm not sure I've seen anyone with a higher actual / forecast from this. Can anyway top mine?

The British constitution is unwritten and based on centuries of convention which are so old they are considered law... Sort of.

From what I can tell there isn't anything about identity in the way you're suggesting. However there are conventions and regulations around dress in the Commons which preclude wearing hats.

As for what he'd do if he won, he hasn't said so far. However he does have a policy list which includes nationalising Adel and building 1 affordable home. As an MP he could campaign for those and attempt to table a private members bill.

I think the answer to a lot of these questions is "we don't know". He's been running in various campaigns for years, this is just the first time he's the only other candidate in a potentially high profile campaign.

I hope some Oxfoed PPE students will be using this for their dissertations.

It's also worth noting that he's being investigated by the Parliamentary Standards Committee. Now that he has stepped down as an MP, that investigation would ordinarily be paused (and is from what I can tell). It would be resumed if he won but he gets a while to organise things before he has to face them again.

All of these are the problem of the business, and negatively impact the employees ability to disconnect and enjoy their free time.

If you need an executive assistant to be available in the evenings, hire evening cover. If it's not worth it to the employer pay for that cover, then why should it be on the employee to do that work for free during their time off?

Employers need to remember that employees often don't have a stake in the business. Free extra work gains them nothing, and loses them what little free time they had. That's not a trade, it's theft of time through a power imbalance.

It's reasonable for a business to pay the proper price for the full services it receives from it's staff. Businesses have proven they're unable to be fair in this regard, so it's reasonable to regulate them.

I think the messaging is just a bit confusing. You've said this had no ads and no subscription, and then people see you want them to create an account. If there's no money being paid, and no ads then the next conclusion is either you'll sell data or rug-pull later on. Clearly that isn't actually your intention.

Maybe try changing how you talk about the price a bit on the page. No one's going to be put off by knowing there's a lot of free content, and then later on you have a one-off fee to continue playing. But they will be put off if they don't understand how any of the pricing works, and if they feel like there's a catch you're not telling them about.

I get what you're trying to do, you want to offer something on the cheap and that's great. Just be open about when the payment is needed, and what that payment is. You'll likely get more sign ups from being open about it up front.

I spent several years working for a competitor of Ticketmaster. The industry is really difficult to break into.

First, there's the chicken and egg problem of content (events) and consumers. One big part of the sales process is a venue or promoter understanding how your platform will support their sales and marketing processes. If you already have consumers with an app and push notifications, it's an easy sell.

Another issue is cash flow. Deals often depends on what advance you're willing to pay, and it's not uncommon for very large venues to get signed at a loss just for the content. You need the cash to compete, and the big boys will happily take a hit on the big venues to hold onto them. The actual take per ticket is quite a low margin, and if a venue performs worse than you'd hoped you can easily end up making a lot less than planned.

Then you've got all the usual RFP noise around feature offerings. Plus regulation in different countries (looking at you, Italy).

You need investors to fund your sales process, and your development all at very low margins. You also need all the industry connections to build an enterprise sales pipeline and secure business. All of that is to say it's a difficult industry to get any sort of a foot hold in, let alone grow enough to be a serious contender.

The company I worked at ended up doing several rounds of layoffs followed by a very poor sale with no consideration to staff options. It's limping on as it slowly gets absorbed into the company who bought them who are also in the ticketing and event space.

The Turing test is to test whether a programme exhibits intelligence.

Turning complete is a measure of whether something can be used as a programming language to run as a universal Turing machine.

I don't think we're anywhere close to the downfall of GitHub. It'll be a very slow decay.

The fact is, lots of people are very happy using AI tools, and most of those hook straight into GitHub. If AI is driving all this new code, it's only going to make moving away from GitHub more painful.

Businesses I've spoken to hate the idea of moving their code forge. Migrations like that suck and they're expensive. There isn't a meaningful differentiator between the other managed options, so the goal would just be to stand still. Unless GitHub's stability spirals fast I don't see a big wave of businesses leaving.

I say all this as someone who's been moving their code over to their own Forgejo instance. I'm all for more competition and fragmentation in this area, I just don't think it's happening soon.

As an expectant first time parent, this is the bit that I'm bracing for most.

If their technology choices are holding them back it just means the product becomes more turbulent as they desperately thrash for a way to make more money.

A protocol isn't a good enough reason for investors not getting their payday. They'll just force aggressive and reckless changes to see a return.

The only way this kind of thing works is if profit isn't in the equation, or the easiest path to profit lines up with what's best for the customers.

This is why I'm skeptical about bluesky in general. Despite the protocol, it's incredibly centralised. If they wanted to make money it won't be long before they start putting up the walls around their garden. The same thing applied here as well, if investors demand a return the open protocol usage will shrink or become less open.

Cal.com has always had an open source community edition, I've been using it for some time. Is this just a rebrand of that line?

Seems like a nice way to raise a bit of money for the foundation, and the problem of children needing email addresses is a real one. I just don't understand how reserving an email address years before they need it actually improves their privacy.

Is this really just a case of reserving an address if your child has a common first name and last name, without having to keep the address active?

Could you elaborate on the issues with their S3 compatible storage? I've been considering it and haven't seen too many issues in my testing, beyond the lack of identity control.

Absolutely not, that would prevent profits to big political donors. Instead we should ban bash oneliners, or ID gate them. No loops or pipes (etc) unless you've handed over government issued ID.

Google pay Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars each year to place Google as the default browser. It's by far their biggest income stream. In 2023 it was reported as 75% of their revenue.

There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.

Great for shareholders, terrible for consumers. This is what we get when we allow rampant consolidation and throw out the idea of regulated competition.

At university in the UK it's almost always maximums rather than minimums. It's damn hard as well, you never get the word count you actually need to fully cover the subject and always end up desperately counting those last few as you trim it down. My university would cap your grade if you went over the count by a certain % as well.

I do think it made me better at writing though, and it certainly made me aware of how much people are actually willing to read.

I've been on a similar journey this past month, although it sounds like mine went a little more successfully. I've managed to get a repo setup which contains a nix flake with nix-darwin configuration, and it also calls into some home-manager modules which I also use on a linux device as well. I do agree, the nix language isn't particularly to my taste either.

I know you're hoping to go from first principals but I'm happy to share the repo if you want (email in my profile).

Aside from that, what issues did you run into? I'm keen to know if I've just not gone deep enough and will soon hit something.