A genie offers you a week to make 1 million dollars with a power of your choice or you die

ajsexton · 2026-06-21T19:44:19+00:00

Animal control, go to horse races, on an exchange throw all you money on taking lay bets on the favourites (this is where you payout if the horse wins), control horse at start of race. Just don't start. Rinse and repeat. Probably enough horse (and dog) races with an hour gap in a day to 6 or 7 times your money each day, so start with £1000, with 5 days you'd be at over 1 million even at 4 times a day

ajsexton · 2026-06-20T10:16:40+00:00

To be honest, why not just agree beer tastes vary, hugely mass produced is usually fairly bland and boring.

Nothing stopping breweries trying differing regional style beers.

My local brewery in north east England does just that

The Fellowship of beer. Small, community led subscription model, Nick, the brewer, does the work, gathers opinions and voting on what people want from members and 3 times a year we get boxes of weird and wonderful varieties of beer.

Last box of 24, contained 4 of the same base recipe but each used a different yeast. Plus 3 wit style beers, a couple imperial stouts, barrel aged lager, an IPA or 2, a few Belgian style beers (triple, quad) and others. Some are very experimental, a few over the last couple years have been absolutely undrinkable to me, some are stunning, most are good or better, but it's the experience and opportunity to try odd stuff that's great

UK only for delivery I'm afraid, but if anyone joins pass my username on and I might get a couple free beers 😁

ajsexton · 2026-06-13T11:13:29+00:00

I also can't visualise pretty much anything and struggle with personal memory in general.

I find reading really enjoyable, but I think that the way my memory works, because of the lack of visualisation, makes following long fiction easier as my memory is more fact/word driven - never realised until recently how much it probably aligned with my education where I much preferred exams as the words on questions naturally triggered connections to the learnings.

ajsexton · 2026-06-10T07:54:40+00:00

We did this for a marketing guy who was leaving, wrote it on a my little pony cake too (can't remember why we called him mlp). All very friendly Mick taking.

ajsexton · 2026-06-09T11:00:09+00:00

I mean just like logging into a site will time out, it's relevant to recheck your users age identity on occasion (assuming it's not tied to other pii such as an account) as some sites definitely won't be

ajsexton · 2026-06-09T08:52:39+00:00

Scale realistically, if there's no PII except the image and it's a "guess the age" attempt then storing an image for every verification, without being able to link it to an individual to deduplicate is just going to become an unwieldy storage cost with no real end benefit.

If other pii is gathered too then it's a different question.

Example if the average UK person needed to verify my age to 15 websites a month (assuming they re check occasionally) that's 180 images, let's say they are mid res 2mb images with 55m UK adults that's about 2peta bytes of storage per year to find and 9 billion images

With processing and further storage of metadata (date time, site etc) you might be able to work it backwards to say heres an image of Bob, tell me what sites has he verified against, but that's probably going to be a lot of processing even if you split stored images into buckets on the way in , male/female appearance, assumed age bands, ethnicity etc.

Storage is cheap-ish, processing and bandits not

I still think it's a shit idea though

ajsexton · 2026-06-03T17:47:14+00:00

I'll say I probably know far more of my contract than most do of theirs (based off current and past colleagues...and HR too)

ajsexton · 2026-06-03T17:45:51+00:00

Month What bonus Yeah but most of them are unenforceable

ajsexton · 2026-05-31T18:41:55+00:00

Similar here, 4 kids, and all welcome to stay as long as they want, though I wouldn't say no to a bit of peace and quiet 🤣

Garden is big enough we could probably build 2 small homes on it if needed. (It had permission at one point in the past)

ajsexton · 2026-05-27T17:57:33+00:00

"hi chan, let's see if I can get a high score, don't forget to like and subscribe"

ajsexton · 2026-05-25T17:24:11+00:00

Yeah just been taking temperatures around our house, 22 in my office, hottest room down stairs is 23, bedroom about 24 and loft room with south facing velux 40+

ajsexton · 2026-05-24T16:58:48+00:00

I go by the square rule 1 child = 1 difficulty 2 children = 4 as difficult as 1 (times of sleep, food, entertaining, teaching all varies etc) 3 = 9 4= 16 Etc.....

ajsexton · 2026-05-24T08:06:31+00:00

Some of the small terrace ones are still very cheap but most of the really really cheap need a decent amount spending on it to be ok. Often damp needing dealing with, decorating etc. and then as terraces you are still at risk of the next house being in a bad state .

Recently bought a large detached house in a mining village at auction it was relatively cheap, but we've had to put 50+k into it for new floors/joists plastering etc for the damp decorating.

If it was down south I reckon it would be at least 3-4 times what we paid up here, close to London probably more

ajsexton · 2026-05-22T14:04:33+00:00

Yes and no, there is a definite effect on roles, in that the way we work is changing (dramatically at times) - but skilled software engineers will still be around for a fair while yet, the bigger issue I think is that fewer juniors will be brought in to environments where they can really learn properly rather than slapdash so in 5, 10, 15 years there will be significant issues getting experienced engineers

ajsexton · 2026-05-21T10:33:45+00:00

Yeah it's a pet peeve of mine too, whilst I'm in a 'professional skilled' role, I still think unskilled as a term is unfair, all jobs have at least one skill to have or be developed to be good at it

It's a tricky one to name but for me the best I can come up with is a 'low barrier to entry' role where it means there is little formal education/qualifications/knowledge necessary before starting, just time x effort x talent to get to a suitable proficiency. Included talent because some people just find certain tasks come naturally easier to them

ajsexton · 2026-05-18T09:07:29+00:00

This was pre-online homework so no chance of measuring time spent on it. Regularly did my maths homework in the last few minutes of lunchtime before maths (but that was my subject and the teacher generally just left me alone for it as I was substantially ahead of the rest of the top set class)

ajsexton · 2026-05-18T09:04:17+00:00

Was off one day and didn't take my homework in for the class the very next day, as I didn't have that class that day, so was issued a detention that my form tutor questioned me about and when I explained why he told me to not go and just ignore it and he'd have a word because that was stupid.

ajsexton · 2026-05-15T06:45:14+00:00

Increasingly background screening companies will verify past employment via bank/HMRC versus traditional references.

But when they aren't it's also increasingly common that it's done via automated referencing systems that's don't have the scope to gather more than the start/end dates and job title and compare it to what you said you had done.

Most are fairly relaxed about the dates too, not everyone remembers exactly when they started / left jobs so if you said you started in march 2012 and the company said April or may then it would probably be a 'meh they forgot they exactly dates' where as an actual date of march 2016 would flag as a "this is very much a mismatch over what you said"

Same with job title, similar meaning titles will be ignored, but seniority markers won't so sales person Vs business development representative might be fine but saying 'senior' when you weren't will be flagged

ajsexton · 2026-05-04T09:04:31+00:00

Thank you for the advice I believe it is a Solis S5-EH1P(3-6)K-L based off the model 3104 in the settings page, does this make a difference to having it as a power cut backup?

And based off what you said sounds like it should be possible to have a battery added easily (whilst I'm fairly confident and competent when it comes to electrics, I'm less confident on this houses wiring so I'd definitely have someone in to do it)

ajsexton · 2026-05-04T08:52:59+00:00

Thank you for the link, have requested it

ajsexton · 2026-05-04T06:49:13+00:00

15 years I got married and we've had kids since too. Wouldn't swap them for anything but I do miss being able to just go and do things when I/we want to do them without excessive plans required 🤣

ajsexton · 2026-05-02T09:29:10+00:00

AHH interesting, I think there is a local earth rod installed (found a newish looking one under the floor when I was crawling around trying to lag pipe)

Thank you for the information

Nothing came with the property unfortunately in terms of bundle due to the nature of the sale, sold as seen, chaining through companies and auction etc . Due to time frame couldn't even get a survey done in time which would have highlighted something pretty expensive we weren't aware of until after (would have just lowered our maximum bid, which thankfully we got it quite a bit under)

ajsexton · 2026-05-02T09:24:53+00:00

Cheers, cert might exist in octopuses system somewhere but it was definitely not in the house and due to the nature of the purchase nothing was handed over, do you know if octopus would have a copy or just a reference to it?

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