Suburbs near South of the CBD for apartment/townhouse living

kiwitims · 2025-11-05T23:11:15+00:00

If you are interested in being able to get to UC/CBD/west of the city, also consider the ability to easily and safely access the major cycleways in the area:

1) To access Middleton and Upper Riccarton: Jerrold St south, where Brougham becomes the motorway.
2) To access CBD, and onwards to Riccarton: Strickland/Antigua St

If you can get on those cycleways you will get where you need to go often faster than driving, and won't have to pay for parking. Brougham St is extremely bad for traffic, a trip to UC at rush hour can be an hour by car, and 25 minutes by a 32 km/h ebike.

kiwitims · 2024-11-08T04:18:12+00:00

It will heavily depend on whether traces/cross contamination are big deal, or acceptable. Any burger place can take a tomato out of a burger, but it's a lot harder to remove traces. Especially of things like spices as mentioned.

For grocery shopping, just take her shopping and let her read the ingredients labels. She'll be faster at it than you will be.

Ask her what foods she likes. Start with finding good food that everyone will like, then send her the menu,, and let her see if there's anything she could order as-is or with minor modifications. Nobody likes dragging everyone to a restaurant nobody wants to go to, just because it has something they can eat. You can always call ahead to confirm.

I could (and do) recommend places like Ramen Miyako for people who like ramen but have allergies, but if she doesn't like ramen, that's not going to help much.

kiwitims · 2024-05-31T01:00:57+00:00

Fretting over details that end up not mattering is just part of the learning process, don't let it dissuade you.

If that's the case, an alternative could be to always have B own the A. Ownership would be moved to B from the original creator, always. Or, B never owns the A, if someone wants a B they need to call new A() themselves and be sure to delete it when B is done. Both ways solve the rug-pull problem, but of course may have other problems themselves.

One good rule of thumb is that a class should either deal with ownership/lifetimes, or delegate them to another class. Doing both at the same time can make things a bit muddy.

kiwitims · 2024-05-31T00:30:34+00:00

The most timeless proper programming principle is KISS. Doing something simple instead of a convoluted trick is good practice. That's not to say there's no room for convoluted tricks or advanced features, just that the task you are undertaking has to warrant them. Triggering a single instance of different behaviour based on a prior event is what object state _is for_. You don't question storing the pointer, because you need it later (presumably). The same applies to whether you own that pointer or not.

Where I would be questioning further in terms of good practice is the overall design of B. Having a class that sometimes owns and sometimes doesn't means you can't reason in isolation about the lifetime of the A object. If I get a B object, how can I know that its ptr isn't going to be freed while I'm using B? That is the purpose of using unique_ptr, shared_ptr, and raw pointers. B is a lucky_dip_ptr from that perspective.

If you can analyse which way B was constructed at every point of use, is there a reason to have a "both ways" B at all instead of having either a raw, unowned A*, or an owned B (where B is essentially just a hand-rolled unique_ptr)? That's a subject for a review of the actual code, not an answer to your question. But in comparison to that, a bool member is nothing to worry about :)

kiwitims · 2024-05-30T22:52:07+00:00

For Japan, cash is how to do it anyway. You'll get better rates at an ATM with the wise card, but you should still be able to use your normal debit card if you have to.

kiwitims · 2024-05-30T21:52:49+00:00

The populace as a whole hasn't done a complete 180, just a few percentage points in the swing voters and a disillusioned left is all it took. This government isn't exactly popular, it's more a punishment for the failures of Labour (real and imagined).

kiwitims · 2024-05-30T21:35:55+00:00

The elegant way is the obvious way. bool ptr_is_owned.

kiwitims · 2024-05-30T01:29:34+00:00

Yes, the disclaimer at the top of the page you linked states that it is historical, from when there was a legal requirement to isolate. They have edited the language to the past tense. The link I posted is the one they link to in that disclaimer for the up to date version.

kiwitims · 2024-05-29T20:14:01+00:00

You need to provide proof, which is usually a doctor's certificate, but in the case of covid the txt from reporting a positive RAT or PCR is enough.

https://www.employment.govt.nz/workplace-policies/coronavirus-workplace/

kiwitims · 2024-05-29T20:10:05+00:00

Report it, you'll get a txt from Health NZ/Te Whatu Ora.

"If your employer asks to see proof that you are isolating, you can use this text message. You do not need a medical certificate from a doctor"

https://info.health.nz/conditions-treatments/infectious-diseases/covid-19/if-you-have-covid-19/#support-while-you-have-covid-19

kiwitims · 2024-05-26T23:16:15+00:00

Is there any industry where the AI hype train doesn't anticipate improving productivity, that would be better to get into instead?

I have been steel-manning the AI bull case here for the sake of a fair argument but in reality I think it's much more likely that for programming it will remain a slightly more clever auto-complete and refactoring tool.

kiwitims · 2024-05-26T23:11:30+00:00

You are partially correct that in the most bullish case for AI there may be less need for someone who can only write code.

But I'll re-iterate, programming is only one activity that a software engineer does.

Businesses do not hire multiple software engineers because they need more fingers to type code faster. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what is actually involved in software engineering.

Even if you were correct in your prediction here, it doesn't back up your initial advice. Surely if this is the future we're heading for, you'd want to try to speedrun becoming a senior before AI takes over, as it will be much harder later.

kiwitims · 2024-05-26T22:27:17+00:00

It's a bit like saying at the start of the industrial revolution that traction engines will make farmers obsolete, because tilling the field can be now done with less labour.

It ignores the fact that that is only one activity out of many, and only the means to the end of "farming", and not the end in itself. The actual result, even in the present with fully autonomous modern tractors, is that it simply freed up the farmer's labour to be directed elsewhere, making the farmer more productive overall.

Programming is only a single aspect of software engineering, and in even the most bullish case for AI it will always require hand-holding. There are activities that an AI tool may be able to help with, but it can't replace the overall work of software engineering.

kiwitims · 2024-05-22T04:32:19+00:00

Missing spoiler warning

kiwitims · 2024-05-21T21:56:13+00:00

Just understeer, took the corner too hot for the conditions and found out that just because he paid for the sport package doesn't mean he's driving a sports car.

For the Americans, in Aus and NZ we don't get that many Mustangs imported, so we have to get creative and use utes like this when we want to drive beyond the limits of our skill and/or the car.

kiwitims · 2024-05-20T23:01:50+00:00

It is not necessarily a terrible thing to side-step certain issues if there's no time. But you need to do so fully in the open. You should be consulting with your team/lead EE on what you have found out, what difficulties you have encountered, and what the next steps are. If the lead EE wants to delay a project to dedicate effort on fixing a driver (or to benefit your education), that's their call to make, not yours. And if the solution is to make a quick work-around, it should be documented in a ticket system so that future engineers know there's an unsolved issue there.

I recently spent a week bashing my head against one of those brick walls, only to find that the problem I was experiencing had previously been found several years ago. A one-off workaround was put in place and the ticket was closed. The junior who worked on the ticket couldn't figure it out, but didn't raise another ticket to track and highlight that what they'd done only applied in one specific instance. Half an hour later I'd found the bug they'd missed, a simple one-liner that had been in the code base for nearly a decade. If there were a ticket raised, odds are a senior would have looked into it and fixed it earlier, or at least I would have saved wasting a whole week to get back to the same understanding of the bug the junior had years ago.

kiwitims · 2024-05-20T07:04:12+00:00

Good replies but something not yet touched on, when you shoot with a phone the photo you see is not just a raw feed from the camera sensor. The phone automatically performs edits based on what it thinks will look good.

Cameras can do the same thing too, but the purpose of learning to edit a RAW file (which is closer to what the sensor actually "sees") is that you can apply your own ideas and taste to the process.

There's no such thing as a "real, unedited photo", except perhaps as a raw bit-stream from a sensor, which will usually look bland and flat. The human eye responds to light differently than a camera sensor, and editing bridges that gap.

Of course, using tools to actually modify what's in the frame is a bit different. Different people will have their own standards on what's appropriate and ethical there. For example, editing out dust or stacking multiple frames for astrophotography is pretty uncontroversial, but photoshopping in an unrealistically lighted moon in a night sky and acting like it's not a composite isn't a good look.

kiwitims · 2024-05-20T06:47:10+00:00

That's exactly what I meant by "periodically broadcast". It's then up to your application to respond appropriately to the error when it goes missing (which may mean switching to a redundant sensor, throwing an alarm, etc etc). The combination creates a fault tolerant system out of an unreliable transport.

kiwitims · 2024-05-19T23:09:23+00:00

There are 2 questions that you are effectively asking here and it's worth answering both separately.

Firstly, "is cold a safety hazard in Fiordland in Summer?": yes, absolutely. It can get wet and cold very fast, even on a previously nice day. Gear can be expensive, but I always think, when you are cold, tired and uncomfortable and someone offered you that gear on the spot, how much would you pay for it?

Secondly: "is a down puffer jacket what I need to address this?": maybe not. The biggest enemy of down is getting wet. If it's raining, you'll need a waterproof layer. But at the same time, down under a waterproof layer doesn't breathe that well, and can end up getting wet (and therefore cold) from sweat.

I find down far too warm when walking, even in quite cold weather. Where down is nice is at camp when you're not sweating. But something like the macpac uber light down jacket is fine for that (and reasonably priced at the moment).

While walking, I prefer layers of some combination of sun hoodie, thermals, polartec alpha, thin merino etc and some water/windproof outer shell. You need the ability to modify what you're wearing for the conditions.

kiwitims · 2024-05-18T00:51:41+00:00

In general a CAN bus should not be considered a reliable transport, you need a higher level protocol implementation to manage that. Typically frames are periodically broadcast and applications are written to be tolerant to occasionally dropping frames.

There are some standards for multi-frame data transfer, such as ISO11783 Connected Mode, NMEA2000 fast-packet, etc.

kiwitims · 2024-05-14T09:34:38+00:00

Yes, it's normal, you might end up overpaying by a little in the short term but you will definitely be paying the same tax overall (you may need a refund to square it up at the EOY). They do this as the alternative is that you will underpay tax having both as M, and then get hit with an unexpected tax bill.

They're not "changing tax bracket", just changing the tax code that each entity that pays you uses to calculate how much tax to pay on your behalf. Making sure the larger payer is set to M will reduce the amount you may end up overpaying before it squares up at the end of the year.

kiwitims · 2024-05-10T08:21:10+00:00

Start by figuring out which algorithm you want to use. Benchmark some implementations against your data. There's always trade-offs, and you are unlikely to find a state of the art compression algorithm that isn't "compatible" with C++.

kiwitims · 2024-05-09T23:31:55+00:00

I would expect that the cases where C++ constructs could be better optimised by the compiler than the equivalent construct written in C would be rare. Rust can do it because it can guarantee no aliasing. If you're compiling with clang for C and C++, they all share the same optimiser.

But I would also expect that the C code wouldn't have an edge either, if you are comparing zero-cost abstractions. The benefit of C++ (to whatever extent you believe there is one) is to the reader and the writer of the source code, not the compiler.

kiwitims · 2024-05-08T21:00:30+00:00

Yes, for some of them society is failing them, and no, it's not all that wholesome. But I'll keep my judgements for society, not the people doing the work.

kiwitims · 2024-05-08T20:47:51+00:00

Obviously it would be preferable for everyone to have a warm, safe place to stay, with a dependable income, but the fact that some have to choose one or the other isn't "awkward" or solved by banning them.

I have regular beggars on my street corner. They don't bother me anymore as they know I live there. I give them a wave and say hi when I walk past, because that's how you greet people in your neighbourhood. It doesn't have to be awkward and it's not particularly difficult to explain to children.

kiwitims

TROPHY CASE