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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • These definitely exist. They are typically referred to as ‘compliance cars’ - i.e. the manufacturer is obligated, usually by regulations, to produce an EV, but they don’t want to spend money designing a new platform for it - so they take an existing model, rip out the engine, cram a motor and batteries wherever they will fit and call it good. Examples: Volkswagen eGolf, Fiat 500e, Mercedes B Class EV. Ford Focus Electric…

    However, doing this means you are constrained to the shape of the combustion vehicle it is based on. So the aerodynamics may not be optimal to get the best range, you may have a transmission tunnel taking up space in the interior that is no longer necessary, directly swapping the position of the engine and the motor/inverter means you lose the opportunity to repurpose the front of the car for additional storage - ultimately it ends up compromised in one way or another.

    If on the other hand you design the platform from the ground up to handle an electric drivetrain then all of these points can be taken into account.

    (And regarding cars in general becoming rolling computers: this is not an EV specific issue, unfortunately.)



  • If I’m not going far, not driving or not planning on spending much then yes, wallet stays at home.

    Otherwise, if I’m driving then I’m taking my driving license with me (you never know), if I’m making a purchase over the contactless limit then I need to take my actual card with me anyway, or if I’m away for a longer period then I might need cards that I don’t have linked to my phone (like my corporate card - like fuck am I putting that in my phone).

    And for all that, I’d rather have a wallet instead of just a loose amalgamation of plastic in my pockets.




  • I was born in 89, so remember a good portion of the 90s. It was a much simpler time but obviously we tend to romanticise the fun memories and quietly ignore how vastly more inconvenient daily life was.

    Mobile phones were not really a thing yet so getting in touch with your friends required a combination of patience and sheer luck.

    The internet was a different place entirely and was experienced in 30 minute chunks of time, just long enough to download a song or two before being kicked off for tying up the landline.

    Daily entertainment was 4, maybe 5 analogue TV channels, plus a collection of VHS tapes which are all degrading by being rewatched constantly.

    Every piece of life admin that you would normally do online today was instead done with pen and paper.

    Honestly, I’m amazed we ever got anything done.



  • 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.




  • Well, I’m currently writing a service and frontend, both in C# (Blazor for the UI), and using docker-compose to build and deploy them to a Raspberry Pi running Linux. So not only cross-platform, but cross-architecture as well.

    This is not a new thing either. Since .NET Core was released almost 10 years ago, it has supported cross platform development.







  • I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.

    It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.

    Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.

    Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.


  • Not exactly crazy but just mysterious…this was at a software company I worked at many years ago. It was one of the developers in the team adjacent to ours who I worked with occasionally - nice enough person, really friendly and helpful, everyone seemed to get on with them really well and generally seemed like a pretty competent developer. Nothing to suggest any kind of gross misconduct was happening.

    Anyway, we all went off to get lunch one day and came back to an email that this person no longer worked at the company, effective immediately. Never saw them again.

    No idea what went down - but the culture at that place actually became pretty toxic after a while, which led to a few people (including me) quitting - so maybe they dodged a bullet.



  • I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

    To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

    Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.