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patrickdavey

1,366 karma · joined October 2, 2012

snowpool.org, blog.psdavey.com
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patrickdavey··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
Thanks for that. Dune used to be my favourite sci-fi, but, The Expanse maybe trumps that now. I'll definitely check these out once I finish The Long Earth :)
patrickdavey··on WordPress: Unauthenticated path traversal leading to conditional RCE
It's not clear to me: do we need to both apply the patch _and_ check if our themes are vulnerable, or just apply the patch?

Edit: looking at the patch itself it looks like it fixes the root cause and so it shouldn't matter what themes are doing themselves. But possibly I'm reading it incorrectly.

patrickdavey··on I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
I'm sure this is a basic question I should already understand, but, what is actually in it for the bot farm? They spend your money (annoying), but, does Google actually pay them somehow? I don't get what they are "farming"
patrickdavey··on How to Start a Ruby Meetup
I've been helping to run a meetup in Christchurch, New Zealand: https://christchurch.ruby.nz/ for about 10 years (maybe longer, I've lost track!). I _completed_ agree with the article that the best thing you can do to avoid burnout is to organise it with someone else (or better still, two or more others like we do).

The other thing which really worked for us: We were getting fed up trying to badger people to help give talks etc (or just doing it ourselves). Completely exhausting. Ended up saying to the community: "this is your meetup, we just help run it. If we don't get 11 speakers for the year we're going to shut it down". We asked in January, got 11 speakers for the year (Dec is social), and we've been doing it like that ever since. Works an absolute treat. You do need to be prepared for no one to step up, in which case, it's sad, but, shut it down. You're not the community, the community is the community!

patrickdavey··on Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site
Yeah, this collection is _awesome_. I'm currently enjoying the Towers (just do it on 5x5 simple, and find it quite relaxing!).
patrickdavey··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
I haven't looked into it thoroughly yet, but, at some point it'll be worth looking at getting a static IP address and using Cloudflare tunnels to serve toyish projects from your home netwerk. Just need to work out how to firewall it properly from the rest of the home network.
patrickdavey··on Retro-Tech Parenting
Can you point to an article on how to do this? This sounds _amazing_
patrickdavey··on Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)
So you have an article you can point to?
patrickdavey··on Sleep research led to a new sleep apnea drug
Yip interesting, you're the second person in a week who has suggested the magnesium. I frankly never trust these suggestions of supplements (having tried some before), but, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12412596/ at least suggested it was a modest improvement. I'm going to give it a try at least.
patrickdavey··on Sleep research led to a new sleep apnea drug
I've tried a CPAP machine for 6 weeks and felt no different and gave up. I think I was a 6 on the scale. I wish it had worked though!

Currently I've just given up and embracing feeling relatively tired all the time. I've tried side sleeping devices (woody knows backpack) mandibular advancement splints etc.

So hard to tell (I find anyway) to get to a definitive answer

patrickdavey··on AI didn't kill your junior pipeline. You did
This article really captures what I'm feeling about the entire AI jobs landscape. What the heck happens when we don't have juniors for years?

There's gonna be trouble ahead (unless you truly believe AI will be able to completely replace all programming of course)

patrickdavey··on I’ve banned query strings
"It’s my website: I can do what I want with it. "

Right on! It's so liberating having your own wee corner of the internet.

patrickdavey··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
What a bad situation, and I genuinely feel for them. I do think they blamed a lot of other people and I think a section on what lessons they have learned themselves might be a good idea/look.

At minimum you want to have off site backups, preferably readonly (like an S3 bucket or whatever). And test the restore process.

I hope they get it sorted, what a mess.

patrickdavey··on 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
If you're lucky enough to have a job. Which you probably won't in a Great Depression II
patrickdavey··on Untapped Way to Learn a Codebase: Build a Visualizer
I'm about to start a new role. What have you found most effective in using it to learn a new code base? Just asking questions about "what is this class doing" ? drawing architecture diagrams?
patrickdavey··on An Update on Heroku
Any write up on this?
patrickdavey··on An Update on Heroku
Kamal is basically self hosting though right? So you have to take care of keeping the underlying os patched etc. With heroku you only needed to think about git push.. ?
patrickdavey··on Show HN: Kings vs. Knight
May well have bugs as I just finished it (and really it should be baked into the UI so you can easily reverse)... however... here is the reverse play:

https://minichessgames.com/#/play/kings-vs-knight

Hope your daughter likes it.

patrickdavey··on Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation
But this is different? Wholesale copying of copyrighted works and packaging it up and allowing it to be generated. It's not remotely reasonable
patrickdavey··on Show HN: Kings vs. Knight
Yup, I'm going to build out the reverse play when I find time in the next few weeks hopefully! I'll try to remember to comment here :)

Quite probably you did just run up against a bug in it! I'd have to see the position though.

Great question on the maximal theoretical length. Being pedantic I'd imagine infinite if I just move a knight back and forth and you move a king back and forth. (Though I disallow repeat moves for interests sake)

patrickdavey··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
I've been working on https://www.minichessgames.com which I built with my 6 year old (she was the product owner ;). It's a site with a bunch of small puzzles (e.g. imagine a chess board with rocks thrown onto it, then move a single piece to a goal square). Lots of fun building it out. And radioactive pooping knights [1] is _amazing_ if I do say so myself ;).

1. https://www.minichessgames.com/#/play/pooping-knights

patrickdavey··on Show HN: Kings vs. Knight
It's just a basic minmax. The main mistake it makes is that if it can find an assured path to getting you it doesn't care how many moves in the future it is (even if it could win this turn).

That said, the audience is 6 year olds so I don't really want it to play perfectly!

patrickdavey··on Show HN: Kings vs. Knight
Thanks :). Did you manage to beat it (first time?) ;)
patrickdavey··on UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating
well, lets take that as true (no more humans doing accounting). Doesn't that mean that there'll be a knowledge gap there? What happens when new rules come along (laws change all the time which will affect accounting practices). How will an AI (at least the current batch) learn what needs to change when there's no prior art for it to lean on?

I mean sure, if we ever get AGI then all bets are off, but, as far as I know we're not there, and LLMs are unlikely to evolve into AGI. They're not thinking right? It doesn't actually _understand_ anything right? I mean, I'm quite probably wrong here, but, as far as I can tell it's really just very fancy backwards autocomplete.

patrickdavey··on UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating
Interesting thought. I feel currently AI is most useful to those who have a decent understanding of the subject material and can critique any output. To wholesale trust the output of AI and remove any human in the loop, well, it needs to be really correct all the time.

Exams are a different beast and really a subset of a range of common problems.

Still, I'm very curious what happens when people who have just cheated their way through college, or these kinds of professional exams, meet the real world? Will they all get fired a few months down the track?

patrickdavey··on Show HN: Radioactive Pooping Knights
Nope. Intentionally so :)
patrickdavey··on Show HN: Radioactive Pooping Knights
Well done :) the "ai" for this game is really basic, it just tries to find any free move and take it. The other games do a basic minmax to look ahead a bit.

Glad you enjoyed it :)

patrickdavey··on Show HN: Radioactive Pooping Knights
On brand though surely ;)

(What were you hoping for?, the other games have a more traditional winning melody ;)

patrickdavey··on A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2
I'm pretty sure I'd be vomiting everywhere! I'm amazed you found it comfortable!!
patrickdavey··on I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon
I guess I love the idea of the rails community being owned by the community not an individual. I find some of his stances on topics problematic (e.g the latest posting about London). Regarding rails itself I have no major issues, but, as titular head of rails itself I think he should be more inclusive.
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