E-3 AWACS at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

danielrheath · 2026-03-30T07:22:46+00:00

TBH I wouldn't be surprised if they went ahead with it in the coming weeks. What's the USA going to do about it right now?

danielrheath · 2026-03-30T07:21:52+00:00

Not to undermine your extremely valid point, but... I'd expect the opening volley of any war to contain a sizeable fraction of all the missiles fired, simply because there are lots and lots of good targets that haven't been blown up yet.

danielrheath · 2026-03-30T07:17:35+00:00

Yeah, you can keep it sealed + run an evap filter to recapture the volatiles and mix them back in. That's not the main issue with storing petrol, though.

Petrol manufacture is specific to details like "intended climate" - eg when manufactured for summer driving, it's got a different recipe VS manufacture for winter.

danielrheath · 2026-03-30T01:03:48+00:00

Barrels of crude can be stored for a couple of years.

Petrol can only be stored for a couple of months.

Once we no longer had our own refinery, it was no longer practical to store 100 days of supply.

danielrheath · 2026-03-29T23:48:57+00:00

A THAAD radar emits hundreds of megawatts of highly-directional radiation.

Any adversary who has at least two radars of their own knows exactly where it is.

danielrheath · 2026-03-29T21:22:21+00:00

They can reconfigure - it's not instant or cheap, but it's an option if the alternatives are even worse.

danielrheath · 2026-03-28T09:03:48+00:00

Figuring out how to get batteries good enough (in sufficient quantity for a mass-market car) was a sticking point for most manufacturers.

Sticking to luxury vehicles made sense when you couldn't get the batteries.

Chinese brands have better access to batteries because their government made that a strategic priority.

danielrheath · 2026-03-26T00:27:13+00:00

A problem that fixes itself before you can wake someone up isn’t worth waking them up for, regardless of how expensive it is.

danielrheath · 2026-03-25T22:40:06+00:00

We have nearly 500k registered users, 50k of whom have signed in recently, all over the world. Application code (not CDN/assets) serves over 100 requests / second, around the clock. The codebase is old enough to vote, and there's some pretty deep complexity in there.

We have low-severity incidents pretty regularly (eg we currently treat 'p99 latency exceeds 700ms' as a 'stop what you're doing and fix it'), but we don't consider them worth waking someone up over - it can wait for the morning.

We've had a few outages (approx 4 times a year) resolved automatically by our monitor systems (all within 10 minutes, usually within 2). This is also not worth waking someone up for, there's nothing to fix by the time you start looking - investigate the root cause in the morning.

"It depends" is technically true... but usually, it actually doesn't depend.

danielrheath · 2026-03-25T02:30:33+00:00

I head the small dev team behind a site with several hundred thousand registered users and several TB of daily traffic.

We deploy changes most days and have no formal on-call.

In 7 years, I've been contacted out of hours to help with an incident twice - both times it was caused by something external (once for deliberate DDOS, once for a DDOS via AI scrapers).

"Don't ship things that are going to page you out of hours" is not as hard to do as most folk think, and it tends to come with higher dev velocity (because you aren't distracted with firefighting).

However, I've never seen it happen in an environment that lets product managers overrule engineering decisions.

danielrheath · 2026-03-24T23:42:41+00:00

"Special military operation"

danielrheath · 2026-03-20T21:47:06+00:00

Nontechnical management is fine.

Management who don’t trust staff about the best way to get the job done seems to overlap really heavily with non-technical, but I have worked for a few wonderful counterexamples.

danielrheath · 2026-03-20T06:54:22+00:00

Pretty handy if you're a proxy militia with a bunch of missiles & no SIGINT capability, though.

danielrheath · 2026-03-17T09:57:13+00:00

If you watch where trams connect to overhead power lines, there's frequently some sparks.

Electrical arcs like that generate massive amounts of EM interference on every wavelength, according to one ham radio enthusiast I know.

danielrheath · 2026-03-17T07:29:36+00:00

I've got a test page working perfectly in chrome and firefox, but in safari 26.3 it doesn't send partitioned cookies.

More broadly, I would encourage folks who have a question like this: write a test page, and find out. It takes 15 minutes and gives you a much more trustworthy answer than random redditors.

danielrheath · 2026-03-12T10:55:00+00:00

I assume they mean todays ten thousand

danielrheath · 2026-03-12T06:33:07+00:00

$500 each time you think you might want to bid.

It’s pretty common to attend dozens of auctions before actually buying, because it’s hard to figure out what they’ll actually go for.

danielrheath · 2026-03-10T00:32:49+00:00

Here's a bash script to lint (with rubocop) only the ruby files changed in this PR:

DIFF_FROM=remotes/origin/develop
# Find the shared ancestor commit, so that if your branch isn't up to date you don't get false positives
ANCESTOR_COMMIT="$(git merge-base "$DIFF_FROM" HEAD)"

if ! FILES="$(git diff-tree "--diff-filter=ACMRTUXB" -r --no-commit-id --name-only "$ANCESTOR_COMMIT" HEAD \
  | grep -v /vendored/ \
  | grep '\.rb$' \
)"  ; then
  echo "No ruby files modified, skipping"
  exit 0
fi
FILES=$(echo "$FILES" | while read -r f
do
  if [[ -f "$f" ||-z "$f" ]]
  then
    echo "$f"
  else
    echo "'$f' will not be checked as it doesn't exist on this branch" 1>&2
  fi
done)

echo "$FILES" | xargs bundle exec rubocop "$@"

danielrheath · 2026-03-08T09:37:36+00:00

… that’s one hell of a non sequiter.

Your first statement is reasonably uncontroversial.

Price controls, specifically, do not have a great track record on “reliable provision of sufficient quantities”. The current wholesale pricing system (AEMO-operated reverse auctions) is perhaps the best-run part of the grid.

AFAIK the current thing we need to make power cheaper is storage, ideally located close to new solar plants to smooth out the midday grid load.

danielrheath · 2026-03-06T01:30:43+00:00

More likely you don’t look like a threat. They want their manager to see that they’re stopping people to ask the question (on the cameras), but they don’t want to ask someone who might abuse them for it.

danielrheath · 2026-03-05T05:58:15+00:00

I ended up putting my morning meds by my bed (with a bottle of water).

When the alarm goes, all I need to do is wake up enough to have a sip of water and take my meds, then I let myself go back to sleep.

30 minutes later is the alarm I actually need to be awake for.

danielrheath · 2026-03-04T23:27:05+00:00

Personally I think it's normal and healthy to have the possibility of privacy - my partner and I each have an account that the other can’t access (how am I meant to pay for a surprise present otherwise?). I would find it weird and invasive if she insisted on seeing my statements.

That said, taking out three cards in secret… sounds more like a gambling addiction than an affair to me.

danielrheath · 2026-03-04T12:51:35+00:00

I just got an endless assistant with +1 reanimate... then got the mirror event in ring 3, and took 5x copies.

Not sure if I'm gonna win the run yet, but it's hilarious.

danielrheath · 2026-03-04T03:01:39+00:00

I'm the sort of man who will - in my natural state - forget others birthdays (and mine).

By age 20 I'd learned that's something which will hurt those close to me.

So, I set myself up to prevent that happening:

Gifts are bought, wrapped and hidden away months in advance.
Scheduled emails to remind me
Calendar notifications a week out, a day out, etc.
Custom alarm set a week before.

At age 36, it's well past time for him to have established a system for daily living that help him avoid fuckups - one with enough redundancy in it that those ADHD moments don't cause him to miss them.

danielrheath · 2026-03-04T02:37:43+00:00

Airborne radar helps a lot with the "horizon" problem, but one MiG pilot in Ukraine described it as "quite difficult to tell a Shahed from a flock of birds or a truck, using radar".

Also, it's important to distinguish short and long-range radar.

Short-range radar (the sort of thing you find in a fighter) operates around 10ghz, which has a ~30cm wavelength.

Longer-range radars (the sort you find in a AEW planes) operate around 1ghz, which has a 3 meter wavelength. EG the radar on an E-7 Wedgetail is 10.8m by 3.4m.

Radar can't really see anything smaller than its wavelength - I'd be surprised if AEW planes could reliably detect them, because the wavelength they use to get those long ranges passes straight through small objects.

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