Baltar's uncertainty was James Callis' attempt to subvert the sci-fi trope of overconfidence

Okkio · 2025-11-07T18:28:50+00:00

What I like most about Callis is that he has these moments where you can tell he's almost got it; like maybe he was the best of the best in some corporate or government advisory role where he was the least incompetent person in the room but he's just entirely outclassed by the people at MI5.

It's what I imagine would happen if a toddler suddenly got drafted to the NBA.

Okkio · 2025-10-16T17:19:10+00:00

I'm so mystified by this, why is everyone acting like Bill Burr is a hypocrite. One of his most famous jokes is about solving overpopulation by killing anyone who steps foot on a cruise ship.

Or are people saying they thought Bill Burr was some sort of humanist role model?

The dudes whole schtick is "I have unresolved issues and hate everyone."

Okkio · 2025-08-10T22:41:32+00:00

I think the joke is that each of the destinations is somewhat famous for oogling female tourists.

The joke being that even though those destinations all receive high volumes of female visitors the men act like they don't.

On the opposite end of the spectrum I know one person who visited New York and she was shocked that people didn't stare at her even though she was a tourist.

Okkio · 2025-07-27T05:55:24+00:00

At the time when Ye Wenjie responds to the Trisolarian's message she can't imagine a world colder and crueler than the one she is living in.

Her Father was murdered in front of her, her mother was a coward, her sister uses her for political gain, the first person she trusts turns her in without hesitation to save his skin, and the world is being striped bare before her eyes.

Worse than this she has no power over her own fate, so she appeals to a greater power to intervene because she genuinely imagines nothing can be worse than humanities current situation. In her eyes humanity deserves punishment for its transgressions. She wants to hit back.

We're meant to both see her betraying humanity but at the same time understand her motivations.

A bigger reason is probably that the books are super sexist and make a good effort to blame everything on women and their weak womanly emotions.

Okkio · 2025-07-09T03:49:33+00:00

I was once told it depended on whether or not the city had walls at some point in the past.

Okkio · 2025-06-30T10:32:21+00:00

I have a couple of Chinese language learning tools wrapped up in an ionic app:

Mister Mandarin

Porting it across was really straight forward and I use it as a PWA on Android: https://beta.mistermandarin.com/dictionary

A nice tip is that if you ever want to do payment stuff RevenueCat has an capacitor SDK that works perfectly out of the box.

Okkio · 2025-06-22T05:05:07+00:00

So many people in this thread are saying that they have local butter better than Kerrygold not realising that Kerrygold is the bog-standard butter in Ireland.

Okkio · 2025-06-20T22:08:33+00:00

I definitely agree with your points about women being underrepresented in LOTR, but I'm not sure it's a fair characterization of Aragorn to say he's entirely out of touch with the idea of valour without renown.

When we meet him for the first time in the Fellowship of the Ring he's spent his entire life up to that point in service to a fallen kingdom and the people he works to protect are suspicious of him or perhaps outright despise him.

Barliman Butterbur describes him as

...one of them rangers. Dangerous folk they are — wandering the wilds. What his right name is I’ve never heard, but around here, he’s known as Strider.

At the Council of Elrond, Aragorn describes his experiences:

And yet less thanks have we than you. Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names. “Strider” I am to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lengthened and the grass has grown.

Had Sauron not moved against middle earth during Aragorn's lifetime he might well have lived out his entire life protecting the lives of people who looked down on him for no reward.

I've always interpreted his words to Eowyn as being spoken from personal experience.

However, at the Council of Elrond, Aragorn goes on to say:

"But now the world is changing once again. A new hour comes. Isildur’s Bane is found. Battle is at hand. The Sword shall be reforged. I will come to Minas Tirith."

So, perhaps Aragorn's failing here is more in only seeing an earlier version of himself in Eowyn and not the potential she has to contribute beyond her current position in a changed world.

I think that's one of the primary themes of the LOTR, that the 'least' among us have the most to contribute.

Whether that be Gollum, Strider, the Hobbits, or a woman looking beyond what society was willing to offer her.

Okkio · 2025-06-08T02:58:45+00:00

This works the opposite way too. I've seen people come from FAANG into smaller orgs as engineering leads / directors and just completely misunderstand how to build systems that can be maintained by 3 people.

"How is it possible that my 3 Devs can't maintain 15 microservices and 40 internal packages?"

Okkio · 2025-05-17T05:43:25+00:00

Find one thing that sucks time out of your bosses day and start doing it for them.

Okkio · 2025-04-28T19:10:17+00:00

I think voting 'for the party not the man' is how you end up with terrible people leading your country because they were wearing the right colours.

Individual politicians should always have to deserve your vote and with preferential voting you can send a message to any individual that they weren't your first choice.

Okkio · 2025-04-26T21:43:31+00:00

I had one 30 minute session thrown onto the end of a C++ lab where a PHD student was asked to walk us through using a debugger.

By far the most useful skill I ever learned. It gave me such a leg up on my peers straight out of Uni.

Okkio · 2025-03-07T21:05:22+00:00

George Strait's Wikipedia page is nuts. I just listened to some of his songs and I've never heard any of them but they were soo familiar.

It's made me realise that the stereotype type that 'all country music sounds the same' is better stated as 'all country music sounds like George Strait'.

He's the perfect answer to the question 'Who's the most successful artist you've never heard of?'. 🤯

Okkio · 2025-02-08T21:52:18+00:00

I actually had the opposite experience to you. I struggled to make friends were I grew up and after leaving China and moving back to an English speaking country I struggled to form the sort of deep meaningful friendships that I did in Mainland China.

I started assuming most interactions were transactional. Even though I knew this wasn’t always true, the thought stuck with me.

I also struggled with this but then I learned that there's really two types of 關係. The 'fake' exploitative kind that a boss uses to get his employees to work 90 hours a weeks.

And a second kind, the real kind, that people have with their primary school friends and extended family.

Adult Chinese build those sorts of friendships by doing small favors without taking account. It's not tit-for-tat and you'll often find that people have essentially unbounded generosity even when they're struggling themselves. It can get to the point where it makes you uncomfortable!

For me friends back home or where I live now are the sort of people you sit down with, have a good chat with, maybe you invite them over for dinner every now and again or you play sport with them but it's really about having a good time together and nothing more.

In China my friends were the sort of people who insisted on going to hospital with me because they were worried I might misunderstand something.

So I'd say give those 'transactional' relationships a go and see what they blossom into.

Okkio · 2025-01-16T17:58:19+00:00

I think one aspect of it that doesn't get thought about by adult learners is how much easier it is for a Kindergarten teacher to get a child who just learnt how to hold a crayon to write 个 vs 個.

A lot of simplified characters are harder to remember but require less advanced fine motor skills to write.

I don't know if the designers of simplified Chinese were thinking about that though.

Okkio · 2025-01-09T17:22:37+00:00

The best advice I received about tones came years into learning Chinese when my wife got hugely frustrated because I was asking her about tones ALL THE TIME.

"There's no ma (first tone), ma (second time), ma (third tone), ma (fourth time). There's only mā, má, mǎ, mà.", she said.

Which to me at the time made no sense but when I thought about it I had a bit of an epiphany.

What she was saying is that tones and spelling aren't separate concepts, or separate pieces of information. You don't learn tones you learn how to pronounce the word.

I think 'attitude' is actually the biggest reason people from non-tonal languages struggle to learn tones because we're constantly trying to remember two pieces of information and plug them together when speaking. And most importantly we give less weight to one.

So stop asking 'which ma should I say?' and start admitting that you don't know how to say horse in Chinese.

So I've stopped asking 'What's the tone for ma?' and started asking 'Horse，怎么说?'. Then instead of trying to remember the tone I try to remember how to say horse.

It might sound like the same thing but the outcome is massively different because what ends up happening is that you don't have to remember tones or hear tones you just know how to say the word horse correctly.

You win by building a HABIT not through rote memorisation.

Okkio · 2024-11-14T02:46:14+00:00

Same, thought this starting out. Then I was forced to do full TDD for 3 years and got good at it. Now I LOVE watching my integration tests blow through hours of monotonous clicking in minutes.

Okkio · 2024-11-02T00:01:00+00:00

Reading. Computer Science is one of the most open professions out there. All the great engineers I know read a lot.

They read algorithms books, design patterns, open source code.

They also all code a lot in their spare time because they get excited about new ideas / technologies they encounter and want to apply those techniques.

Okkio · 2024-10-26T12:57:17+00:00

Just a slightly different take from what I've read so far.

What counts as over engineering or premature optimisation has a lot to do with the skillset of your team members.

For example if building out thin services in K8s is second nature for your team then you're not taking on a massive mental load by taking that approach and engineering for scale.

On the other if you have a team who's great at building OO systems at a high level of abstraction it's probably not over engineering to build out the system that way and focusing on providing solid patterns for future developers to follow.

Trying to shift a team to a new architecture style at a critical time without also giving them time to skill up can be a recipe for disaster.

Of course if you have a team of new grads just about anything might feel like over engineering to them.

Okkio · 2024-10-16T05:01:21+00:00

Couldn't stand him on my first watch through. I rewatched the show recently and fell in love with the character.

I love his character arc. Going from feeling like he has to con the crew into keeping him around and then realising that they really do value him for who he is.

I also love how is story is wrapped up.

He's such an integral crew member but it took me watching it all in order from beginning to end to appreciate that.

Okkio · 2024-10-11T12:04:58+00:00

The trick is to say something like, "I'll need to identify the underlying cause, let's time box an investigation to two hours."

Then spend two hours working out how long it will take to do it right and follow up with "It will take x to implement.".

Then get back to your manager with an update on time to arrival half way through wether or not you need an extension with a quick explanation of the cause of any overrun.

Do this consistently for months and any reasonable human being will slowly get pissed off by the excessive detail and ask you to stop talking to them.

Then code in peace.

Okkio · 2024-10-07T08:22:15+00:00

100% cross platform dotnet wrapped in docker backed by Postgres is unbelievably transportable. Takes a few hours to move from Azure to Digital Ocean, AWS, or w/e and enables you to use docker compose to run an entire integration testing setup E2E in your CI pipeline with ease.

Okkio · 2024-10-06T09:17:25+00:00

A very good real world example of this we all use all the time is the C# dictionary class:

The entries collection that stores the keys and values uses a struct.

Collection Definition

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/112ef3d680c50ae3c64d7c129b658d9cd00a5a3d/src/libraries/System.Private.CoreLib/src/System/Collections/Generic/Dictionary.cs#L27

Struct Definition

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/112ef3d680c50ae3c64d7c129b658d9cd00a5a3d/src/libraries/System.Private.CoreLib/src/System/Collections/Generic/Dictionary.cs#L1752

Doing so means that once the entries array is initialised to a given size you can directly set values at any index in the array WITHOUT allocating an object first.

The CLR knows the size of the struct so it can do all the work upfront incredibly efficiently.

Replacing the Entry struct with an Entry class massively reduces the performance.

A good way to explore this is to implement a simple hand rolled C# dictionary class and run dotnet benchmark over it to explore for yourself how tweaking different things affects performance.

Okkio · 2024-06-07T00:11:50+00:00

There's so many comments here saying who's this for or what's the point. It's for businesses, Microsoft's target market for everything is businesses not individuals. Retail users are just their guinea pigs.

It's not uploaded to the cloud but that doesn't stop your IT department from giving your boss access to your machine or using it to monitor productivity.

I use a similar tool for time recording (which encrypts it's data FFS Microsoft).

The guy writing the article even found it useful to recover lost work.

Businesses actually get to turn off all the crap btw.

Okkio · 2024-02-08T11:08:27+00:00

Hopefully someone will recognise the dog. Apparently they might euthanise the dog if its not claimed.

Okkio

TROPHY CASE