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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • I don’t have enough superlatives for it. I’m > 300 hours in between three characters, and I’m still finding new stuff to do. Even at full price, worth every penny. Also an amazing co-op experience - played through the whole campaign with a friend, we both agreed it’s probably one of the best games we’ve ever played, period.

    It’s also the first game of this genre that I’ve played, off the back of this I also picked up BG1 & 2, and Neverwinter Nights, which I’m excited to try out to see what I missed out on back in the day.



  • I own a Model 3 which I took delivery of back in 2020. As a car it’s actually been fine - no major issues, aside from a fault with the AC which was sorted under warranty. It’s been cheap to run, cheap to service (basically just tyres and other consumables like wiper blades), build quality seems perfectly fine and overall it’s generally pleasant to drive.

    The charging network is also fantastic and by far the most reliable one, at least here in the UK. It’s now opening up to other makes of vehicles and I regularly see non-Teslas charging there.

    Would I buy another one? With their current lineup, probably not. Nothing to do with Elon, douche nozzle though he certainly is. I mean, people still buy VWs (also great cars, used to own one too) and look who founded that company.

    No, my issue is with the stupid cost cutting measures with removing critical physical controls from their latest cars. Moving the gear selector to the screen is absurd but at least you are (or should be) stationary when you are swiping the screen to change direction. Removing the indicator stalk however and replacing with buttons on a movable surface seems downright dangerous, especially in EU & UK where there are roundabouts everywhere and you need to be able to indicate while at half lock.

    My Tesla is old enough to still have physical controls for all of those things and unless that changes I will not be getting another. I also just don’t do enough miles these days to justify a new car, I’ll just run this one into the ground.




  • Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).

    On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.

    I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.

    I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.



  • Unlike oil, rare earth minerals can be recycled to a degree. What is today your car battery may end up in 10+ years as someone’s house battery, or a power bank or other low-load energy store. The raw materials can eventually be recovered to an extent as well.

    A resource disaster is inevitable either way as nobody wants to give up the convenience that we have become accustomed to. Encouraging affluent economies to adopt EVs is pure damage limitation at this point, our biosphere is already fucked from over a century of waste emissions, the least we can do is try and find solutions that don’t involve burning fossilized plant matter for every car journey.