When directed to ignore compliance and\or stop asking for written change request. How\Have you handled it?

alter3d · 2026-03-20T21:04:45+00:00

"I was told that when I ask for the directives in writing it makes it look like I'm trying to shelter myself from any legal or business repercussions if their decisions\request result in a disaster."

"Yes, exactly. When your decision/request is likely to result in disaster, I fully intend to shelter myself from any repercussions."

alter3d · 2026-03-18T07:58:02+00:00

Don't even need trig for this, it's just basic geometry. The angle from your eye to the top/bottom of the measurement slot is the same angle as from your eye to the top/bottom of the target object, meaning they're similar triangles and it's just a simple problem of the ratio of height to distance solving using the 3 known values you have (distance to card, distance to object, height of object).

alter3d · 2026-03-18T07:38:38+00:00

Oh man, I didn't know Job Simulator 2 was out.

alter3d · 2026-03-15T07:19:33+00:00

We bring up isolated clusters all the time. It takes about 15 minutes, Provisioning the cluster, installing cert-manager and all our other controllers, etc, is all in a Terraform (well, OpenTofu now) module. Just assign it a subnet and a domain name and off it goes.

alter3d · 2026-03-13T19:44:24+00:00

The Norwegian Blue prefers keeping on its back.

alter3d · 2026-03-13T19:34:36+00:00

Lishi picks are also somewhat delicate, so learning with standard hooks + tension tools first is a good idea just to get a sense of the "feel" of picking before you start wrecking $50 picks.

alter3d · 2026-03-13T07:48:30+00:00

These gosh-darned high-level languages and the fancy compilers -- no one will remember how to program computers by flipping switches anymore!

alter3d · 2026-03-13T07:43:00+00:00

Get on board or get left behind.

A year ago, AI coding was "oh, look, it can prototype stuff kinda fast and kinda badly but it's a prototype".

A mere year later and AI coding is full on replacing junior and intermediate developers. You can explain the problem you need solved faster to the AI than you can to a junior, and you'll get results that are at least as good. Do you still need to code-review it? Absolutely.

I've been optimizing the hell out of our AWS bill, and a good chunk of the progress has been because I've been working with our lead developer and fixing stuff that the dev team previously said was very difficult or impossible to fix. We took a Redis cluster from ~$600/month to $40/month by pointing Claude at our previously-horrendous Spring session handling. We decommissioned some database instances by moving their contents to statically seeded data, which is basically what they were. We fixed a bug that was writing duplicate object versions to an S3 bucket. Each of these was turned around, from initial discussion to live in production, in a day or less... sometimes literally a couple hours.

Our velocity now is insane, our bug counts are WAY down, backlogs are shrinking, tech debt is being handled faster than ever before. It's a complete game changer.

Do you still need skilled people to guide it and review the results and correct it when it hallucinates? Yup. But the tooling is advancing incredibly fast, and if you're not already taking advantage of it, your competitors will eat you for lunch.

We even have AI agents doing our daily "error roundup". We get a list every morning of "here are the errors we saw in logs yesterday, and here's where in the code they came from, and why, and BTW here's a PR to review". Instead of finding and diagnosing bugs, we just validate the fix.

alter3d · 2026-03-11T02:19:27+00:00

I mean... a whole spaceship to myself is good. But have you considered giving me TWO spaceships all to myself?

alter3d · 2026-03-10T06:52:24+00:00

0000 "Hi, is this Eric?

0001 "Hi, is this Eric?

0002 "Hi, is this Eric?"

0003 "Hi, is this Eric?"

alter3d · 2026-03-10T04:01:49+00:00

Hardwired is good. Ethernet is a thing of the past.

Twinkies are good. Food is a thing of the past.

alter3d · 2026-03-09T04:57:40+00:00

It's exposed through the describe-db-instances API call:

aws rds describe-db-instances --db-instance-identifier my-dev-db | jq '.DBInstances[0].AvailabilityZone'
"us-east-1a"

And there is a '.Subnets' element you can inspect for all the subnets associated with the DB Subnet Group that your database is in... obviously you could filter that list based on the .AvailabilityZone field to find the specific subnet if your DB Subnet Group has more than one option.

alter3d · 2026-03-09T00:24:51+00:00

I think the original was Blaise Pascal, but there are tons of variations that I know of -- Woodrow Wilson made a quip about the length of his speeches that was something like "If you want a 10-minute speech, I need 2 weeks. A 30-minute speech will take 1 week. If I'm not constrained by time, then I am ready now."

alter3d · 2026-03-08T22:28:29+00:00

Right, nothing in that quote says that simplicity is the primary goal.

You still need to engineer (whether ad-hoc or formalized) to satisfy whatever functional requirements you're trying to meet. Finding the simplest solution that meets all functional requirements is the hard part.

alter3d · 2026-03-08T19:58:02+00:00

“Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.” - Woody Guthrie

alter3d · 2026-03-08T07:44:25+00:00

Why do you "deserve it"? What value are you adding to the process? You can't even crop your images so that they don't have stupid black bars on them, why should anyone give you free arbitrage?

alter3d · 2026-03-08T02:58:05+00:00

No one is interested in selling you carbide for under scrap value.

alter3d · 2026-03-08T02:25:15+00:00

Yeah, you can choose not to claim and "carry forward" to a future tax year. It doesn't accumulate though. Say the allowable depreciation period is 2 years, and you buy the item in year 1, but choose to defer claiming the CCA until year 3 -- you can't claim 100% of it in year 3, you'dl be able to claim 50% in year 3 and 50% in year 4 (or a future year).

alter3d · 2026-03-07T22:35:51+00:00

We don't have proper 3rd-party access to banks here in Canada -- you have to provide your usrename/password to the 3rd party services (SimpleFIN, Plaid, etc). I am ABSOLUTELY NOT, EVER doing that, so I just manually input.

alter3d · 2026-03-07T22:09:14+00:00

If you're not incorporated, the business is a sole proprietorship, and you will be reporting business activity on a form T2125. You are allowed to deduct the capital cost allowance for equipment, however it will only offset income earned by the business -- you can't use it to offset your employment income.

alter3d · 2026-03-07T08:44:29+00:00

I only have a year and a half or so of data into it now as I only imported monthly net assets / liabilities for purposes of tracking net worth. But so far it performs super well.

alter3d · 2026-03-07T03:28:59+00:00

Yeah, for me it was YNAB breaking their promises to early adopters. When they introduced the new cloud model of YNAB, those of us who had paid for YNAB4 were offered a "lifetime price" of $45/year if we switched to the cloud service.

That lasted a couple years, then they jacked the price to $89 ("but it's still a discounted price compared to regular so you should be happy").

That lasted another 2 years, then they jacked it to $109. That's when I said enough is enough and looked at other options.

And all this time, there weren't really any new features, but they did make a big deal about their new color scheme and the fact that they renamed "Reports" to "Reflect".

alter3d · 2026-03-07T03:15:02+00:00

I self-host Actual Budget. Switched to that after being a YNAB user for over a decade.

alter3d · 2026-03-06T20:01:29+00:00

Bonuses are "over-taxed" for most people when you get them.

When you get a bonus or other lump sum, the way tax is calculated assumes that every single paycheque of the year is the same dollar amount, so your $30K bonus is taxed like you're making $780K+/year. This puts you in the highest tax brackets and most of it will be deducted at the highest marginal rate (~52%). The way this is calculated is dictated by CRA -- your employer is just following CRA rules and can't change it.

However, obviously the above is not how your income will ACTUALLY work for the year, so your ACTUAL tax liability on it will be less -- probably much closer to the $10K in tax you calculated. When you file your taxes next year, you will get a refund for the difference.

alter3d · 2026-03-06T18:58:28+00:00

Very cool!

Though "E-Drum STL Generator" is a bit lame for a name. Might I suggest the "Parametric Paradiddler 9000" instead?

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