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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • I have witnessed companies make this exact mistake before - they have a legacy system written in $LanguageA that they either cannot find developers to maintain, believe is badly written, or does not support some new feature they want to implement (or some combination of the three) - and decide to solve this by taking the existing codebase and porting/transpiling it to $LanguageB (which is more modern, performant, is easy to hire developers for, etc) - without actually rewriting or rearchitecting anything.

    What they are actually doing is substituting one kind of tech debt for another. The existing code that was poorly written and/or not well understood is now just bad code written in a different language. Fixing bugs or implementing new features now takes just as long, if not longer to account for the idiosyncrasies of how the code was ported.

    And now this is being done by AI with even less oversight than usual? Recipe for a maintenance disaster.



  • As others have said, 100% a leak.

    I would advise to stand on a chair or stepladder underneath the ceiling and check to see if it is still level. If you see an obvious deformation around the stain, this will be being caused by water pooling on top of the ceiling plasterboard. In which case, once the leak is sorted, you will likely need to drain the pooled water, cut out the damaged section, replace it, then replaster and repaint.

    We had exactly the same issue in our last house. It was in a difficult to see spot hidden behind our kitchen cabinets. We only realised the severity of the issue when the ceiling boards gave way and fell on my head.




  • I’ve switched both my laptop and desktop over to Linux (Bazzite and Fedora respectively) in the last 6 months.

    The last time I tried to daily Linux (over a decade ago) I ended up switching back eventually, but this time I really don’t think I’ll need to. All of the games I play most often work perfectly, the dev tooling is even better than it is on Windows, and the hardware compatibility side has been completely flawless.

    Gone are the days of having to hunt down obscure Linux drivers for your touchpad or webcam. Everything just works out of the box.




  • AI is just the next level of abstraction. First there was paper tape, then assembly, then C, then C++ and then the higher level OOP languages, JavaScript, and now finally this - natural language. It’s the next logical step. And I’m sure at each previous milestone people were having arguments about it much the same as this time.

    Thing is, this is the lowest the bar has ever been to get into development - and yet, you still need to understand both what you are asking the LLM to produce and, even more importantly, the output it produces. This second part is in my opinion the most likely aspect to blow up in people’s faces.

    Don’t come crying when the mission critical finance app vibe coded by your MBA suddenly starts erroring out at 3am every second Saturday because your LLM decided to hallucinate a magic number somewhere in your codebase.


  • The main issue was a catastrophic failure of the VC_FRONT module which is one of the critical onboard computers that manages things like the 12v battery and low voltage power distribution (basically a “smart” fuse box). Without it the car is bricked and cannot be driven.

    That took several weeks and some back and forth around the extended warranty to resolve, and then even after that module was replaced, on my first drive after the repair it went straight into limp mode and then spent another week at the service centre having that diagnosed.

    During this time I decided it might be time to start looking for a new car, ended up selling it a few months later and took delivery of a new Polestar 2.


  • I’m not sure why anyone expected a new facelift would improve sales. It’s clear the overall decline is associated with Musk going full mask-off fascist, given this, driving around in a car that looks unlike any previous Model Y just makes it completely obvious that you knew this and decided to buy one anyway. If they want to bolster sales, maybe they should have kept producing the pre-facelifted versions for a while.

    Full disclosure, I used to own a Model 3. I had it for 5 years and was generally very happy with it - it was a great daily driver, cost very little to run and maintain, and (aside from a few issues later in my ownership, which was one of the reasons I decided to sell it) in general it was very easy to live with.

    There are clearly some very skilled engineers at Tesla who know how to build a great product. It is a shame their efforts are being undermined by a fascist lunatic with a narcissist complex.



  • Not quite. Even existing EVs (with some exceptions for older vehicles) will be charged the new basic VED rate of £195 when they are next due to renew (which could be in up to a year’s time).

    What EV purchasers were trying to avoid was the expensive vehicle supplementary tax of £425/year for cars with a list price of over £40k, which EVs purchased/registered since the start of April are no longer exempt from.

    As the vast majority of new EVs on the market fall into that price bracket (including all Teslas except the base tier Model 3), suddenly the yearly tax for most new EV purchases jumps from £195 to £620/year.





  • Even without an official rank, on Voyager he was still considered a Department Head and (more importantly) the CMO, which gave significant authority (even exceeding the Captain on certain medical matters), regardless of whether or not he was ever given any pips. The same thing would likely apply on subsequent postings.

    If he ever had to be assigned a rank for clerical/administrative purposes, it would probably be the default required rank for a Starfleet CMO candidate for the class of ship he was serving on.