orobinson

The Cyberiad is brilliant. If you haven’t read it already I thoroughly recommend Monday Starts on Saturday by the Strugatsky Brothers. It has a kind of similar vibe, hilarious, fantastical yet still sci-fi.

The iPad is worst for this, I still haven’t got to grips with all the convoluted gesture based multitasking controls.

Recently I've been wondering why my internet seems to be getting so slow. It then dawned on me that webpage bloat has progressed to the point that my 2015 MacBook (the small one with the rubbish processor) really struggles to load a typical webpage in a reasonable amount of time.

This. The computer science degree I did started off in the first term with us building computers on an FPGA by mapping out the logic gates, then programming it in assembly. Learning how to program in C followed this.

It's a good way of helping people with no programming knowledge get past the stage of "what are those magic colourful words you type that somehow make the computer do things?".

I feel the same. I think it’s because it really represents the end of an era. The 20th and early 21st century ushered in unprecedented improvements to quality of life in Britain but it has felt of late that that has peaked and the country is facing a serious decline: Brexit, the increasingly visible effects of climate change, the aftermath of covid, the possible break up of the union, rising costs of living, recession, possibly even war. The death of Elizabeth II coincides with the end of a long period of stability and comfort and is not only a poignant point in history itself but a marker for a transitional point in history for our country.

I’ve stopped buying most things at Amazon for this reason. Surely they realise that long term this is going to be an existential threat for their retail business? Much like how Netflix is now having issues after pumping out sub-par content for too long.

I remember when the smart object removal feature was added to photoshop and it was pretty cool. The fact that you can now get the same functionality working even better in a free browser tool is mind blowing.

They may not live in a city. Even tiny villages in the UK will have a pub and some pubs are literally just on their own in the middle of nowhere. I grew up in a small town in eastern England and people would drive from the surrounding villages to go to the pubs there and then drive home after several drinks. Drink driving outside of cities is unfortunately very common.

A huge tunnel is being dug under the Thames for sewage overflow to prevent this from happening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tideway_Scheme

“NASA believes it will need 40 kilowatts of power for the first lunar inhabitants”

Sounds like it’ll only need to be a small reactor, something akin to what goes in a submarine. I’m no expert but presumably something like that is significantly quicker and easier to build than a megawatt scale nuclear reactor. The obvious challenge that the bidding companies will have to solve in the next 8 years is how to get the materials into space safely and assemble them on the moon.

Interesting. I was very into PC gaming in my teens and look back on that time quite fondly. Certainly not with any regret or a feeling that I wasted my time.

I wrote an email to Tim Cook in 2018 complaining about the butterfly keyboard on my MacBook and pleading that apple change the design on their future machines. I never got a reply but they did change the design a year later which I’ll take the credit for.

I’d argue addressing things like fast fashion is focusing on the existential threat that we are all facing. It’s just one of the many things in society that needs to be curtailed if we want to bring our usage of planetary resources back into safe boundaries.

Just be careful applying the same technique to squeeze mayonnaise bottles…

Re the last 3% of ketchup, just cut the bottle in half and scrape the rest out with a spoon.

I find TDD is great when you have an interface to some code defined and are changing the behaviour of what happens when interacting with that interface. You can then add some tests to the existing test suite for the interface, watch them fail, then get to work implementing and be content that you’re done when all the tests are passing.

However, if you’re still developing the interface definition itself, TDD just wastes time when it transpires the interface you envisaged and wrote tests for doesn’t quite match up with the implementation as you write it.

I'm planning to read a mixture of classic 20th century novels, sci-fi (which has some intersection with 20th century classics..) and historical non-fiction. So far I've read one from each of those categories: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, The Doomed City by the Strugatsky Brothers and October by China Mievelle.

I like to roughly alternate between fiction and non-fiction. It keeps things refreshing. I also find reading fiction after reading non-fiction makes it easier to glean the ideas the fiction book is trying to convey as you're still in the information processing mindset of reading a non-fiction book. This adds an extra layer of appreciation beyond enjoying the story.

In terms of choosing a book to read - just think of things you've always been interested in and then ask for recommendations for books (fiction or non-fiction) that discuss the topic, or use that topic as a major plot point. A good general rule of thumb I've found is not to bother with books with less than a rating of 4 on Goodreads unless it's a subject you really think is going to interest you, or an author you know you like already.

Once it’s up and running it’s fine but importing photo libraries into Photos is truely the worst software experience I have ever had. It took me weeks of on and off tinkering to get my partner’s photo library setup correctly and syncing with iCloud Photos. The worst part is that when it does fail there’s absolutely no indication to the user what went wrong. At best you’ll get some kind of generic error message, at worst it just hangs forever. Perfectly demonstrates how Apple’s “it just works” design philosophy falls apart when it doesn’t just work.

Yup I’ve had to debug an issue exactly like this. An IN statement that when populated with <7 parameters would happily use an index but when populated with >=7 parameters would decide to do a full table scan. I was quite dismayed to discover Postgres doesn’t support index hints like MySQL does when I came to fix it.

Benefits of playing on mobile - “hey Siri what’s <insert maths here>”

As someone who likes to try new technologies but has zero creativity when it comes to deciding what I should build in order to learn said new technologies, this is extremely helpful advice! I’ve got tonnes of ideas now.

Understandable. Although vaccinations have proven only partially effective at preventing you getting covid so even if he was vaccinated you wouldn’t be in a much better position in that regard.

That's because the chances of serious illness with Covid in under 5s is extremely small. Here in the UK nobody under 12 has been vaccinated except those who are extremely vulnerable. The data for England[0] puts the death rate within 28 days of a positive test in the 0-4 age group at 0.8 per 100,000. I believe there are around 3 million children in that age group in the UK so that works out as 24 deaths in that age group in the UK throughout the entire pandemic. Obviously that's a tragic number and awful for the affected families, but at the same time you have to put the risk to your children in perspective for your own sanity.

My kids are 2 and 5 - they've both had Covid at least once, possibly twice and it was indistinguishable from all the other colds they've had since the pandemic hit.

[0] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nati...

Skilled senior engineers working for hedge funds or in low latency trading can get paid that much but I've never seen tech salaries that high in any other industry in the UK.

What worked for me is getting a good book and working through it. I’ve been using this one https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2506894

I started learning the piano a year and a half ago. I make electronic music and was becoming frustrated by my limited musical knowledge acting as a barrier to creating more complex arrangements.

I've found the best way to get stuck into a new hobby is to not make excuses to yourself like "oh but I can't do that because I don't have X or Y piece of equipment". Just start with whatever means you have available and if it sticks then invest some money in the hobby. For example, I had a small midi keyboard so I just started learning on that, then bought myself the cheapest full size electric piano I could find once I'd managed a couple of months of consistent practice.

Also I think it's hard to pick up a hobby just for the sake of it, there has to be some kind of motivation - like the example of me wanting to improve my songwriting by learning the piano. I'm now seeing tangible results and it's immensely satisfying, which motivates me to carry on spending 20-30 mins a day practicing the piano.

Intel Q6600 I presume? Great CPU. PC I a built in 2008 has the same. I recently retrieved it from my parents’ attic and updated it to Windows 10 - still works like a charm.

This is exactly why I started using Apple Music. Some of my music collection isn’t on streaming platforms but Apple Music let’s me host it and stream it in a library right alongside music I don’t “own”.

I also generally like the paradigm of being able to collect streamed music into a library so I can come back to things again and again. Back when I last used Spotify around 2015 I used the starred playlist to do this but it was no substitute for just being able to see a collection of albums. I’m not sure if Spotify’s UX around having a “library” of music had improved since then.

I have the first (2015) version of the 12”, it’s still my main laptop. It’s powerful enough for light coding and music production which is all I need. I love the form factor and if they brought a new one out with an M1 chip I’d buy it in a flash.

At lower data volumes (<10,000 events per minute) it’s perfectly feasible to just use single partition topics and then ordered event delivery is no problem at all. If a consuming service has processing times that means horizontal scaling is necessary then the topic can be repartitioned into a new topic with multiple partitions and the processing application can handle sorting the outputted data to some SLA.