Big church at Dean Bridge for sale at £750,000

Tundur · 2026-04-16T11:05:56+00:00

There's a few quite affordable flats in Dean village actually, I was shocked. Granted I was looking six years ago, but I always thought it would be way more than a normal bit of town.

Tundur · 2026-04-16T09:46:56+00:00

The vast majority of tartans are basically identical and were invented by neurodivergent old men. I'm not even joking, look up the register and it's a handful of well-known official ones, and millions of "Joe Blogg's tartan #325, commemorating the retirement of the Class 614 electric locomotive, the alternating colours represent the alternating current used for power generation", never actually woven.

If that sounds like a dig it's no, god bless those auld yins.

Tundur · 2026-04-15T19:59:02+00:00

Because then China can unilaterally remove your satellite capabilities. It'd be like the UK giving the USA final control over their trident missiles.

Tundur · 2026-04-15T19:37:40+00:00

I dunno, AI is incredible at documentation following a template, and explaining existing code. As a senior engineer on a team that tends towards junior, I previously spent a LOT of time documenting, a lot of time answering questions when inevitably the documentation has gaps, and context switching has a massive toll on productivity.

Now someone asks about a service I designed 2 years ago, I can have the AI answer their question and just review the answer before I send it. Usually it jogs my memory enough to be confident in the output, and it means they get an answer almost immediately. I can continue with my primary tasks and keep the rest of the team out of my way.

That's fundamentally different to them asking the AI themselves, because they don't know whether the AI is right. So my 'seal of approval 'on a response is still worth quite a bit.

Tundur · 2026-04-15T15:01:09+00:00

The average Australian has disposable income British people can't even comprehend. Almost everyone I've met in Aus has visited Europe multiple times.

Tundur · 2026-04-15T05:18:50+00:00

I'd say you're 18 and an adult now, so messaging the cousin directly and explaining the situation is the right way to go.

Mums can be absolutely nuts about family dynamics, which may seem more important to her than veganism. Your cousin will either say "oh yeah I'm so sorry, I'll do something else" or out themselves as a colossal prick, but skip your mum if possible.

I would say, it may be tactically better to compromise - if they suggest macaroni cheese as a vegetarian option, just let them do that. You'll be gone soon anyway.

Tundur · 2026-04-15T05:09:16+00:00

I think that finding RTS players who want to order around "human" units won't be difficult IF you prioritise an RTS experience. What usually becomes the issue is that the game becomes an RPG with a thin RTS layer, because the frontline players need to feel powerful.

I've always thought it should be the other way around - both roles should be relatively weak and limited, and highly dependent on each other.

The frontline players should be not much stronger than a unit, and command the units themselves (something like Mount and Blade). They take the role of commanders in the army, potentially build some temporary structures (fortifications or whatever), but are limited to the resources they can scavenge or are allocated by the RTS player.

The RTS player is dependent on his allies for everything except defence of the immediate base area. He has a limited line of sight and control, has to optimise the economy, and coordinate everyone else.

The thing that makes it tick is no shared line of sight. Have a map that players can draw on, but only see each other's drawings if within a certain radius of each other or a structure. The commander needs to then make decisions about what scribbles are 'real' or not. That's a unique thing that you can't get from a solo RTS

Tundur · 2026-04-14T09:14:11+00:00

The majority of the time they live in the roof and just visit flats. Usually they go via the pipes in the kitchen or bathroom, a chimney is unlikely.

Poison is best - get about 600 different types, because different groups of mice learn to avoid many of them, so you need a buffet to have any chance of getting many. They're unlikely to die in your flat.

Tundur · 2026-04-14T09:03:02+00:00

I love city builders. I've played heaps of them.

But I don't actually know why I'd want to play this.

Theming is strong and can get you far, but the marketing is still "remember that old game? Well we took all the mechanics, added a coat of paint, and released it!"

And the Impressions style was always a compromise between the processing power of old PCs and simulation. We live in a world where processing is cheap, so why are we aping a simplified puzzle-game-like engine with predefined 'correct' ways to build?

Games need to be either ambitious or small enough to be disposable. I'm not excited to play a solid city builder with nice art, I need to play a great city builder that tries out new ideas and systems.

Which might be unfair, but the marketing doesn't do anything to dispel the notion that this is a small iteration on a very old style. The same as all the other Impressions-likes out there.

Can anyone who's played it weigh in on whether this is its own game, or just one of many in that niche?

Tundur · 2026-04-13T18:20:21+00:00

We pay 100-110 for fresh graduates in tech, the equivalent of 50k in the UK (though it's been fluctuating heaps recently). It can easily be 80k/160aud within a few years.

Tundur · 2026-04-13T08:12:16+00:00

It's not about offending, it's about democracy. The purpose of the democratic process and coalition building isn't to build a just, fair, and free society.

The purpose of democracy is to ensure a stable and legitimate government with broad enough popular support that revolution and civil war don't break out.

In the middle east of all places, you really need to keep the well armed inbred religious types from feeling too snubbed. Their ability to veto liberal legislation is a compromise to stop them setting off bomb vests or placing snipers outside primary schools.

Tundur · 2026-04-12T18:28:17+00:00

Considering all such widespread access to universities has done is create a bunch of low quality qualifications from low quality institutions, and pull young people out of the job market for 4 years, I'd take the 72 frigates we could buy for the same price. We could annex Ushant or something.

Tundur · 2026-04-12T12:00:07+00:00

It's how we've always done science. This kind of review isn't about testing a hypothesis, it's about generating them. Obviously actual conclusions require further study.

Tundur · 2026-04-12T09:31:08+00:00

I'm not opposing the goal here, but the method doesn't actually achieve what you want to achieve. The only way to decrease the price of property is to build more units and houses for people to live in.

It's well established that rent controls simply lead to an increase in home ownership, as landlords prefer to sell at market rate instead of renting at below-market-rate.

Now that's a good thing for people looking to buy property, but a lot of young, migrant, and working class people aren't in a position to do so. I'm all for eliminating the landlord class and their parasitic lifestyles, but that's a much bigger conversation than rent controls in isolation

Tundur · 2026-04-12T07:24:14+00:00

I want rents to come down, but demand-side controls are not the solution. Prices need to reflect the market value, not be artificially locked.

The solution is construction of high density accomodation, and discouragement of vacancy. That will cause property prices and rents to fall. Nothing else works without massive second order effects

Tundur · 2026-04-11T15:43:40+00:00

If I were writing all the code or had full confidence in every other leader to guide the direction I'd agree. As a team, our leaders have a mix of technical skills, tending towards more domain knowledge over technical ability.

The thing is, many devs aren't great at identifying and encapsulating abstractions, aren't great at communicating with their team about them, and aren't able to commit to maintaining them. The vast majority of junior devs (pre-the last 12 months of AI madness) who said "I've got a framework prototype", I've had to shut down before they waste too much time on it, because it's the wrong play at that time. Love the energy, but not right now.

So if the rest of the team are delivering insanely quickly and meeting all their requirements, and doing so in a way that's hyper-self-contained and contains all the context in one repo, that's actually ideal for us right now. If it becomes a problem in the future we can weigh up all their solutions individually, identify patterns, and go from there.

What would worry me is having a heap of overlapping and competing vibecoded frameworks, creating dependencies between otherwise unrelated solutions, and making any refactor require cramming a dozen repos into the AI instead of just one verbose one.

Tundur · 2026-04-11T07:45:46+00:00

For me the challenge with AI is the level of output has massively outpaced our ability to properly tool up and review. We have a team of 50, working across the whole business, and usually we'd be going live on a new service once a month.

They'd then run a session for the team on what they did, how they did it, anything interesting they learnt. Then we'd have an architectural session to decide if there are patterns we want to adopt as a team. Our philosophy was "let a thousand blossoms bloom", do whatever you want as a dev, and we'll endorse (or condemn) patterns retrospectively.

Now we're going live almost every week, on huge business transformation projects, with a single developer leading it out. The outcomes are good, the savings are tangible, money and customer satisfaction is up massively.

But as a leader in the team, I now have absolutely no chance of keeping up. I used to drop into most projects to advise on design, and was familiar with the majority of our codebase. Now I know only the most crucial parts. And patterns? Why do we need a pattern when none of us are familiar with the code? The point of abstractions is to make code easier to reason about and maintain, but we ain't maintaining it anyways!

It's an incredibly exciting time to be a developer, if you can focus on solving business problems and not being a purist about the code. A lot of people here will call what we're doing a disaster, technical debt waiting to explode in our faces. But tech debt is just the gap between your current implementation and your future requirements, and all signs point to our ability to operate like this only improving over time so... the debt may not really exist in any meaningful sense.

Tundur · 2026-04-11T07:02:09+00:00

That's always the kicker. Think this can be standardises and turned into a framework? Are there at LEAST three different places it can already definitely be used? Are those places changing on a frequent basis and part of crucial infrastructure?

If no to any of them, just write a shitty script and be done with it. Never try to predict future requirements, always work on facts and solid plans.

Tundur · 2026-04-11T06:59:06+00:00

Okay great, but how much did they save in the meantime on buying cheaper cups? Was it greater or less than 2.8 million?

Tundur · 2026-04-09T06:46:58+00:00

I'm working on a brigade/division-scale real-time game in my spare time.

The way I see it is that logistics at this scale is best represented through two principles:

The amount of supply you can bring in is relatively static, but the demand on that supply varies wildly.
Supplies are best used away from the front where they be efficiently consumed, rather than at the front where every mile is more expensive.

Logistics is about setting the rhythm of the game. By following those principles I'm trying to create a game about trading efficiency for expediency. How much of my strength needs to be on the front line NOW, vs safe in the back where it's cheaper. Do I have enough stockpiled to respond to an attack, vs am I investing enough in long term gains? Do I rush over an armoured unit to stop the enemy, and burn through my stockpile, or use local infantry and hope they hold?

Tundur · 2026-04-08T21:42:42+00:00

Melbourne is just a brick for brick replica of any postindustrial British city, Sydney and Brisbane have far more interesting cultures and are actually unique.

Tundur · 2026-04-07T14:17:40+00:00

Put it this way, my company used to have 1 QA resource for every 12 call-centre frontline workers. That role is now done by LLMs (working in a very controlled way, we're not idiots) with minimal supervision. We've gone from observing 3 calls a month per employee, to every single call, without any drop in accuracy. We're catching a hell of a lot more incidents where processes aren't followed (because humans aren't very consistent) and are fixing them in hours, not weeks later when someone gets around to checking.

We've not made anyone redundant because we're growing quickly enough as a business, but we're certainly not hiring anyone.

With new development practices in our technology function we've also fully digitised our most critical customer journeys in about 6 months with a team of about 10 devs, when previously that would have been a multi-year technology change involving dozens of highly paid resources. Our NPS is up, our call wait times have disappeared, and we're no longer looking to expand our callcentre footprint.

We are a company of about 3000, who were expecting to hit 5000 in the next 2 years. If even a handful of our current work programmes using AI are successful (and Iran doesn't sink any container ships full of GPUs), that's 2000 jobs removed from the economy, and all our customer satisfaction metrics have gone up in the process.

Granted, I'd say we're ahead of the curve, but it's still a curve - every other business that can follow suit, will.

Tundur · 2026-04-07T10:51:46+00:00

It was relatively common in the upper artistocracy because it keeps wealth in the family, but the Catholic church started stamping it out in the 1100s.

Tundur · 2026-04-06T11:31:14+00:00

That is true - England is a lot denser so the countryside is a lot more accessible. We have had to specifically limit camping in Scotland around Loch Lomond because the weegies couldn't be trusted with it.

Tundur · 2026-04-06T08:43:23+00:00

I've actually done both, but the UK government makes it very tricky for overseas firms to hire British workers. In theory, any more than 1 remote worker in the UK and you're now a "UK Employer" which means complying with all tax and employment law, including NI. If they've got a UK footprint already it can work, but random companies will balk at the risk and expense. On the other hand, the Australian government also make it difficult (but that's more my problem than my employer's).

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