sitharus

Where I live single use plastic bags have been banned for several years now. People either take reusable fabric or jute bags when shopping or have to buy paper ones, which are good enough for a few uses by themselves.

I always keep a bag on me that folds up quite small. It’s a change but easy to adapt to.

I’ve only recently seen mains flicker from speciality bulbs, small filament style ones and odd fittings with low production rates.

The quick test is to wave your hand quickly in front of the light.

Yes it absolutely is. Those are candle-style bulbs that use filament LEDs, they’re normally just use a basic rectifier and a regulator chip that does basic linear regulation of the peak of the sine wave.

They flicker at 100Hz due to the rectification (or 120hz in those 60hz countries of course).

Dimmable bulbs use higher frequencies.

Markdown was never created as a standard, it was created to fit one person's workflow and how they liked to format documents. It just so happened that it's pretty similar to how many others like to format documents.

That’s full time employment and pretty common with the people I asked for architect-equivalent positions.

That’s gross yearly income, after tax it’s $125k. Though for a lot of people there aren’t many other expenses after tax, just rent and food.

A decent 2 bedroom apartment in Auckland or Wellington will set you back $800k-$1.2M based on a quick look at the market. It can be a lot cheaper away from the cities.

Food however is expensive.

Depending on skillset $150k-$230k is common. You do have to balance this against the cost of living though, we definitely don’t have Eastern Europe’s cost of living advantage.

The problem isn't that people can quickly prototype an idea that they've had without contracting an expensive professional, I think this is great. This will give ideas that would never see the light of day a chance. Plus this gives a much better talking point if they do choose to get a professional onboard.

The problem is that it's sold as a complete solution. Use the LLM and you'll get a fully working product. However if you're not an experienced programmer you won't know what's missing, if it's using outdated and insecure options, or is just badly written. This still needs a professional.

The technology is great and it has real potential to change how things are made, but it's being marketed as something it isn't (yet).

Logs, metrics, data analytics, sent to third parties as identifiers. Unless you have a system small enough that you, or a few people who can be trusted, can know every component your IDs will leak out somewhere.

This isn’t a new principle, it was part of database design courses in the early 2000s at least. However from a couple of decades of bitter experience I say external keys should never be your primary keys. They’ll always change for some reason.

Yes you can create your tables with ON UPDATE CASCADE foreign keys, but are those really the only places the ID is used?

Sometimes your own data does present a natural key though, so if it’s fully within your control then it’s a decent idea to use.

Where I live there’s no such thing as national ID. There’s a few documents that can be used as such depending on the purpose, and some of those change the number on every update!

Never trust something outside your system to be stable.

I recently got curious about the roots of this, and it turns out it’s from Celtic languages. All the Celtic languages count in base 20, and they were widespread across continental Europe before the Romans introduced Latin to their conquests and then the Germanic tribes brought the Germanic languages in.

Celtic remained a strong influence around modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands so we end up with French counting partially in 20s, even though continental Celtic languages are extinct (Breton, spoken in north west France is an insular Celtic language, more closely related to Celtic as spoken in the British isles and Ireland.)

I don’t know how Danish got base 20 counting though. Must have more reading to do.

The binary change is after we made the decision, but the lack of support for some postgresql builtins and no way to add it is still a deal-breaker.

I guess the join one is from the internet memory, good to know for the next time!

I don't hate prisma - it's just a tool - but that's far from the only limiting factor.

I recently looked at migrating a legacy project with basic SQL query generation to a modern ORM. Prisma came up top of course so I tried it.

We use Postgres built-in range types. Prisma does not support these, there's no way to add the type to the ORM. You can add them using "Unsupported", but fields using that aren't available in queries using the ORM, so that's pretty useless.

It also requires a binary to run, which would require different builds for each architecture deployed to. Not a big thing but it was more annoying than just switching the ORM.

That coupled with their attitude to joins - which has truth to it, but it's also short-sighted - eliminated Prisma.

The final decision was to switch to Kysely to do the SQL building and provide type-safe results, which is working well.

I suggest you re-read the article carefully. The author shows that a website can be created that will make the asus software download and execute an attacker controlled app from a server the attacker controls.

I used to work for an AWS support partner, essentially being tier 3 support. We were also involved in onboarding large customers to AWS and working with their teams to migrate their systems.

We always told them that AWS account IDs are not considered sensitive information by AWS, neither are S3 bucket names. Metadata (tags etc) is generally visible to AWS in a variety of ways if you ask for help, but are not public.

This helped them use the services to the sensitive information was actually hidden and apply the correct security policies.

Yep, an SCP can restrict what S3 buckets you can access via IAM.

If you're using a VPC you can deploy a VPC S3 Gateway Endpoint which has a policy document on it, this will restrict which buckets the whole VPC can access no matter what their IAM policy says. This also has the benefit of blocking access using non-IAM methods, like signed URLs or public buckets.

Here a landlord can do an inspection with 48 hours notice. If you're out of town they are allowed access without you present. Also the landlord can end your tenancy with 90 days notice with no reason.

Penalties would depend on the adjudicator's opinion of the damages and risk.

Depends where you are. Where I live it's no modification. If it's hard-wired the tenant can't touch it.

Though in reality many landlords don't mind as long as you know what you're doing and return it to how it was. Just a problem if you get a jerk landlord.

Many countries have no contest evictions, so you could even get evicted if the landlord doesn't like your cooking.

Where I live companies are moving to electric ferries because they’re cheaper to operate, require less maintenance, and are much quieter for the passengers. Plus they don’t emit any exhaust fumes while idling at the dock.

The port also has an electric tug boat, which their reports say is very handy because it changes power output much faster than diesel tugs. Charging times are not a factor according to their reports.

Our power grid is 80+% renewable though.

Of course the article ignores that it’s easier to improve the emissions of a few large powerplants than every car, ferry and scooter, and that the minerals in batteries don’t disappear after use.

None of us write programs from first principles, it's all based on code we've read before. If I was going to write a BASIC interpreter I'd read up on the basics of interpreters, literature which would include sample code, and look at other interpreters' code.

No matter where you think the code came from, the impact of Microsoft BASIC was huge, and they were first to the market.

Conservation of angular momentum doesn’t prohibit reducing angular momentum by extracting energy, in this case the angular momentum is converted to electricity.

This is chapter 11 bankruptcy, which is basically a way to say "We can't afford to pay our debts, but perhaps we can all come to an arrangement". It puts the courts in a position of oversight so any unreasonable parties can be worked with.

In other countries this may be referred to as voluntary administration, though the exact details of what it all means varies from country to country and I'm not a bankruptcy lawyer.

Absolutely fine if used for ADHD, but it’s not the same question because the effects on people without ADHD are different.

A very good article, but I was disappointed to see the misunderstanding about the de Havilland Comet failures repeated

> fatigue failures around its rectangular windows caused two crashes, resulting in it being withdrawn from service

While the accident investigation reports refer to "windows", which really doesn't help matters, the failure point was the ADF antenna mounting cutout. The passenger windows had rounded corners and did not fail in service.

The Comet was not withdrawn from service, they re-engineered and launched the Comet 4 (with oval windows, but that choice was to reduce manufacturing costs) in 1958, but the Boeing 707 was introduced that year and the DC-8 in 1959, ending the Comet's status as the only in-service jet airliner it held between 1952 and the grounding of the Comet 1 in 1954. The Comet 4 continued to fly in revenue service until at least the mid 1970s with lower-tier airlines.

The decision to bury the engines in the wings was one of the deciding factors for airlines - engines in nacelles are easier and cheaper to service and swap if required. Re-engining the Comet 4 to new more efficient turbofan engines the DC-8 and Boeing 707 introduced in 1960 and 1961 respectively required a new wing, but a podded engine was much easier to swap on to an existing airframe and this was done for many of the Boeing and Douglas aircraft.

The last Comet-derived aircraft - the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod - flew until 2011 in the RAF. They did look at upgrading them with new wings and avionics, but the plan was scrapped when they discovered that in the grand tradition of British engineering every fuselage was built slightly differently and they couldn't make replacement parts to a standard plan.

Anyway that's my rant in to the void today :)

Because there's a lot you can do with basic knowledge of a subject.

Very few people need to know the subatomic behaviour of electromagnetic fields that make electricity work, but all of us need to know that it travels in wires and it can kill you.

The METAR was 27028G35KT, or 28 gusting 35 from 270° magnetic

However the runway landing was 33, or 330° magnetic.

So this is 24-30kt crosswind component. The maximum landing crosswind on a dry runway is 32kt. The press conference reported the runway as dry, so if they’re correct then it’s within limits. At the reported -9°c if the runway has been de-iced it could be dry I guess?

The surveillance potato camera makes it look like a hard landing on the right main, which is mounted on the wing root. But it’s very low quality and we’re not going to get the first real answers for a month.

Smaller planes fly more often, and there's a lot more of them, so statistically they're more likely to be involved in any incident.

The DC collision was an accident waiting to happen, but that airport only serves single-aisle jets and runway 33 can only be used by the smallest of those - like the CRJ and Embraer model.

And in this case, it remains to be seen what caused the unexpected roll.

In normal operation, an aeroplane lands with enough fuel for one go-around and re-attempt at landing at the chosen airport, plus enough for diversion to their alternate, plus an additional 30 minutes of flight.

If an aircraft is anticipated to land with fuel for 30 minutes or less they must make a mayday call, and there's an incident report to fill in.

Yes they want to land with as little fuel as possible, but regulations require them to carry more because we know what happens when you let airlines carry less.