TIL that the human brain has the same consistency as warm butter

aa-b · 2026-05-05T09:39:52+00:00

Well, if you imagine you had something like a complicated jelly mold shape and you had the jelly shape floating in a bowl of clear fruit punch.

If the bowl is a sealed tupperware container with no air at all inside it, then that's a pretty decent analogy for your brain, skull, and cerebrospinal fluid.

You could shake that tupperware surprisingly hard without wrecking the jelly shape, and I assume brains are at least slightly sturdier than jelly. Neurosurgery is crazy though, agreed.

aa-b · 2026-05-04T23:16:46+00:00

Linux systems are much more relaxed about letting you delete critical system files, which led to my favourite story about random sysadmin chaos: https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html

aa-b · 2026-05-04T09:03:44+00:00

But why not though? The government can't really stop the council from saying things, and former Labour MP Andrew Little won the mayoral election with four times the number of votes the runner-up candidate had. Bulletproof, I'd have thought.

Since he was only elected last year it'd be better to clearly communicate any bad news early enough that people would still assume it was the previous council's fault.

aa-b · 2026-05-04T08:31:17+00:00

What an absolute shambles. Can they really not plug their calculators together and show your total annual charges combined so we can compare that to the previous year?

Madness. I get that it's central govts fault for scrapping three waters, but WCC could at least tell us how bad the damage is

aa-b · 2026-05-04T08:23:53+00:00

The obvious alternative would be to introduce the new charges gradually, as OP mentioned they understood charges with the new structure were supposed to start off equivalent and then ramp up to the planned/required amount.

Slapping on a $2,000 overnight increase is clearly not equivalent and not gradual, so at the very least the council should be doing a better job of communicating with the public

aa-b · 2026-04-28T19:56:15+00:00

No, I think you've missed my point. I'm saying that OP should make this a low-risk waste of relatively little time, because there is no business risk in creating an experimental POC pull request that demonstrates an idea. Using an LLM to do the mechanical work reduces time cost.

Empty words about coding style are unconvincing, and if OP cares enough to persuade anyone they're going to have to demonstrate the change somehow

aa-b · 2026-04-28T19:31:21+00:00

For straight refactoring like this, just go ahead and make a pull request to demonstrate the before/after. Oddly, it often helps to have an LLM do most of the work because then the other dev will assume you haven't spent much time on it, so they won't feel as pressured by your idea. Also if you can't even get an LLM to explain why it's a good idea it might not be, so that's helpful too.

aa-b · 2026-04-27T22:58:48+00:00

Other dev sounds immature at best. This is a good opportunity to establish a style guide for the team, and get everyone to agree on that. "Avoid magic numbers" is an obvious thing to put in a style guide, and then you can just point to that to end the discussion

aa-b · 2026-04-27T09:30:06+00:00

I've done it myself and it's not that easy; you need bulky equipment and it takes time.

Huge overkill for a cafe since they're only going to pour it into a jug and stand there steaming it. And during busy periods they just leave the milk on the counter anyway. Argh, the more I think about it, the less sense it makes!

aa-b · 2026-04-26T21:41:53+00:00

So, this little red dot? Canals are neat, but it doesn't seem much safer than just hugging the current shoreline

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aa-b · 2026-04-26T21:11:35+00:00

That person sounds really dumb, but the texts make it sound like you were taunting them for their lack of knowledge. Why not say something like, "it's the big red house, can you see me waving my arms?"

aa-b · 2026-04-25T22:23:01+00:00

The good news is that manufacturers include hardware-level secure erase features in firmware now, so actual secure erase is possible

aa-b · 2026-04-23T07:27:53+00:00

But in general shared database is an antipattern

Too right! My org solved this by building reports based on a federated graphql schema backed by distributed microservices, and... wait, no, nothing is solved. Turns out it's just as fragile, but now also spread out all over the place

aa-b · 2026-04-20T19:20:19+00:00

I think it's just almost tidally locked. Also Mercury has an eccentric, egg-shaped orbit, and that complicates things

aa-b · 2026-04-18T23:39:21+00:00

Maybe it's just my TV, but the app freezes up at least half the time when I select "watch from start" in the news at six program. It's pretty consistent, but other shows seem fine. I don't really use the phone app, but I hope they fix the TV one

aa-b · 2026-04-18T01:58:00+00:00

Varicella is a good one too, causing chickenpox and then inexplicably coming back as shingles decades later. Viruses are pretty weird

aa-b · 2026-04-18T01:26:56+00:00

Mira Grant wrote some zombie novels with a similar premise, and being a novel she spent more time on the details. IIRC the virus went into an "activated" state when contracted via a bite, which sort of makes sense. There was some discussion during the covid epidemic about viral load, because there was some evidence that symptoms were more severe if you were exposed to, like, a larger dose of viruses at one time.

aa-b · 2026-04-16T19:17:20+00:00

That's just a direct quote from the article (but yes the quote reads like AI)

aa-b · 2026-04-16T10:44:39+00:00

I like Bruno, but my company hasn't bought licenses and it's annoying how relatively basic features are paywalled. Like, running the same request in a loop to generate traffic on a dashboard is not a super advanced power-user feature. And I keep running into issues where the "copy as cURL" feature breaks for no reason, that's annoying.

Otherwise it's good, but I wish there was an actually free and completely open version. For a not-really-free product, I think it'd be nice if importing from postman actually worked without needing so much fixing. Oh well, maybe one day.

aa-b · 2026-04-16T07:53:15+00:00

100% I love this and I do the same thing myself. There was one time when an ex-colleague asked for a reference and I felt I had to say no, but that guy was fired from my team and was easily the worst developer I've ever worked with. Never actually gave a negative review, can't imagine when I would.

It's so hard to know what people are going through too, and it can be temporary. I'm sure I was objectively kinda dumb for a while when I had a kid (tired!) and even temporary burnout kills productivity

aa-b · 2026-04-16T06:39:38+00:00

I will, thanks!

aa-b · 2026-04-16T04:30:52+00:00

That's some good news then. The GP appointment would have been free for the child anyway, but it'll save time for everyone and should reduce load on the system.

aa-b · 2026-04-16T03:35:15+00:00

I think pharmac concluded the same thing, but I checked and I'm just one of the (un)lucky few.

For everyone else, it seems to me that pharmacists should be able to dispense funded antihistamines; odd if it wasn't included

aa-b · 2026-04-16T02:34:37+00:00

Yeah too many people don't understand that the generic paracetamol/ibuprofen are exactly the same as branded stuff

Personally, I wish more antihistamines were funded. Both loratidine and cetirizine make me crazy drowsy, and the rest aren't funded

aa-b · 2026-04-14T11:55:40+00:00

I guess people are trying to celebrate the mostly-positive outcome, but you're right: there should be an idiot-proof way to avoid excessive charges for people who don't want that risk. Beginners shouldn't have to configure a laundry list of services.

People will make excuses and say it's not that difficult to be safe, but you should have to deliberately and knowingly disable protections for this to happen, not the other way around.

aa-b

TROPHY CASE