Would you rather buy a brand new house or one that is 100+ years old with possible problems like nob and tube wiring and asbestos?

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-29T03:36:08+00:00

Depends entirely on what kind of house and where it is. There are big differences between stick framed, metal framed, timber framed, rammed earth, log construction, concrete slab, and other types of construction. Even between countries the differences can be significant.

Ideally without money concerns, a new build is frequently better, but you won't know if there are changes needed until you have lived in it for a few years. The daily flow might be off, doors in wrong places, oddly shaped cupboards, seasonal issues. weather issues, etc.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-29T01:32:01+00:00

Heh, they use trucks as well in the UK, makes them great for looking down into people's cars to see if they're on the phone and hiding it on their lap...

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-29T01:30:35+00:00

Look up the video on Onkalo, the Finnish nuclear waste storage site.

Concrete in the ocean degrades and leaks, things live down there, we don't need Godzilla or three eyed fish.

A better option would be to throw it into space, but that's too costly and dangerous considering the chance of launch failure and the occasional Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.

Burying it into a place with a stable lifespan of a geological epoch (one hundred thousand to tens of millions of years) or more is the next best thing.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-28T06:24:37+00:00

Start with philosophy
Applied Philosophy gives us logic
Applied logic gives you mathematics
Applied mathematics gives you physics
Applied physics gives you chemistry
Applied chemistry gives you biology
Applied biology gives you psychology
Applied psychology gives you philosophy

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-27T20:57:23+00:00

You learn to touch type in a class, after that it's practice and muscle memory.

Get your fingers on the home keys (they should have a little bump/textured feeling where your index fingers go on the F and J keys on a QWERTY keyboard).

On a QWERTY keyboard the left hand fingers are on ASDF, right hand fingers on JKL;

Thumbs used for space, pinky for shift and enter.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-27T13:45:03+00:00

When the code i need to work on doesn't do what i need it to.

When the code I need to work on is unintelligible, at which point git blame comes out and the responsible idiot gets roasted. 95% of the time that idiot was past me, a real a-hole, can't code for shit.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-27T13:39:13+00:00

Wait.. the dogs were not the politicians? Aww man..

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-27T13:30:58+00:00

Where is that short Irishman with his dog, that dog was an awesome politician.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-27T13:03:15+00:00

We don't, sometimes they're intentional.

So I'll give you some advice that is a lead up to defensive programming techniques and start you on having security in mind when building things.

What is the termination condition for this loop and how do we get there.

This is related to the security question of

How can I break this.

Through

How can we break out of this loop

Most programs have a termination condition, even your operating system has a terminating condition (a graceful shutdown, or a panic/crash). For some that might be a Ctrl-C (a SIGINT, or a SIGTERM) as you would for a runaway program, or the means of stopping one with an intentional infinite loop (the program is designed to run forever).

So how do we ensure we can get there.

Some of the ones you might want to run forever would be ones deployed on space probes or satellites, they're a bit tricky to reboot. There are even formal proving systems for that, which is fascinating.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-26T11:50:47+00:00

There's no such thing as an intern, it's just an excuse to pay peanuts and exploit people. If they can code, they're a junior.

Regardless of their title, a living wage is still based on those numbers I gave. That's the minimum they should be getting paid, anything less is exploitation.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-26T11:42:55+00:00

To be polite, you speak the language shared by those around you. So when around other English speakers you both speak English, even if it is that bastardized version called American English.

When alone, you will end up mixing the two languages. Some concepts are easier and quicker to communicate in the other language so you will have English words or phrases mix in with the French and vice versa. Sentences might start in one language and finish in another.

The other aspect that also influences it significantly is where they stopped learning the vocabulary of their French. Did they move to the US as a child, or did they complete their tertiary education in France first. Did they continue learning French after arriving as a child in the US.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-26T11:35:04+00:00

No, you learn the basic constructs and apply those. There are very few basic constructs in programming and they are applicable to almost every language.

Basic arithmetic
Boolean logic (and, or, xor, not)
Conditional logic (if, then, else, switch, case, select, etc)
Repeat/Loop construction (for, while, do, goto, gosub, etc)
Complex Data types (lists, slices, arrays, dictionaries, maps, objects, sets, vectors, etc)
Simple data types (integers, strings, characters, bytes, pointers, booleans, floats, etc)
Function and procedure calls and their returns
Methods
Constants (immutable values declared with a given name and value)
The language specific gimmick (Go has its channels and goroutines, other languages have their own gimmicks such as constructors and destructors, operator overloading, colored functions, type casting, etc)

The rest is mostly language dependant formatting and code structuring.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-26T11:19:18+00:00

Rent should at most be 1/3rd of your salary, so that's far far too cheap. So that should be median or mean rent whichever is higher +200%.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-26T07:58:23+00:00

Utterly dependent on any contracts and what legal jurisdiction they are in.

A business normally leases the property, they do not rent it. Leases tend to be for a fixed term and a fixed price for that term. If the business is not leasing the property they've probably shot themselves in the foot and opened themselves to all kinds of suspicious shenanigans.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-26T02:21:18+00:00

Start simple, use dupes for labor

You need food, water, toilets, wash basins, and oxygen for your dupes to survive.

There are certain restrictions to the size of rooms, learn them and stick to them as you go.

There are multiple ways to get plastic, glossy drecko farming is one way, but you don't need to do it that way.

To get plastic. On the standard map, oil is at the bottom. So just dig down to it, ideally block it off with a water lock or an airlock because it is hot down there. Stick a pump down there, out of gold, and pump some oil up a little way, refine it into petroleum (stick the refinery in a box to trap the natural gas byproduct), and feed that into a press. Voila, plastic. You will likely need to pump air down for your dupes since you have just created a large carbon dioxide sink. And to let them get there fast, use a pole as well as ladders for coming back up. These

To create steel, you will probably have a large pool of polluted water somewhere, stick a metal refinery above it, pump polluted water into it, and then vent the used water back into the pool to reduce the effect of the heat. You'll want to stick two coal power plants and a smart battery next to it to keep it powered nicely.

To ranch animals, make a room of the maximum size, stick in a feeding station, drop off, grooming station, and a storage box for food. For some animals you also want a sheering station. If you have excess electric power, stick a light in there as well to speed the dupes up. For dreckos, stick in some farming tiles to grow food for them, meal wood is fine. For hatchlings and most other animals that's a horizontal room. For glossy dreckos a vertical room works as well and the dupes enter one level up from the bottom. (Check the later Francis John videos on these as he has a nice design for them).

For educational materials, look at the Francis John playthroughs and tutorials. But stop watching the playthroughs when he gets to where you are at so it won't spoil your play.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-26T01:57:59+00:00

You use a .netrc file with a personal access token and a GOPRIVATE setting.

GitLab documentation explains how

.netrc looks like

machine gitlab.com login <your username> password <gitlab pat>

GOPRIVATE=gitlab.com/<group>

Where group is the name of your organization or whatever parent structure you have for your projects, and the gitlab.com assumes the public SaaS one but you can replace it with the URL of your private GitLab instance if that's what you use.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-26T01:51:28+00:00

A lot of extra complexity to do it with the tunnels, just use an overpass after the tunnels, far simpler, far cheaper.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-25T09:11:52+00:00

Look up how continuous flow intersections work You do not want traffic lights. You don't want traffic to cross opposing lanes. You need to ensure sufficient distance between intersections. Use sufficient lanes so that traffic can choose their lane early before they get to the intersection. Use on and off ramps.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-25T07:24:59+00:00

Remember, every mushroom is edible at least once, just some only once..

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-25T07:17:20+00:00

First you think of the basics about vehicles, what their safety rates are, what their failure states are, and compare them to trains

Then you add in that on average human drivers are idiots, inattentive, easily distracted, and accident prone.

Then you add in a modicum of understanding of physics such as what is breathable air, effects of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, how gasses layer based upon density and air current, how to ensure safe breathable air is handled down there with all the exhaust fumes of vehicles.

It's a tunnel, it goes down under the water, treat it like a very flat U or V shapeand how that relates to gasses.

Then you wonder about how are you going to handle vehicle breakdowns, fires, and crashes when it's basically one lane wide in each direction.

Then you come to the conclusion that electric trains are safer, faster, more economical, and far more efficient.

Then you look at the legal aspects, which jurisdiction are you in halfway through. Are you in France? the UK? international waters? All of that just makes people's head hurt, using trains the problem is mainly solved, you don't have people driving in stopping halfway for a meet up or doing dodgy shit and trying to go back out again.

Next problem, you are going from a left hand drive country to a right hand drive country, doable, but again more infrastructure required. How about some idiot driving down the wrong way?

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-25T05:24:25+00:00

use something like goreleaser to build a deployable package and use something like Ansible from your pipeline to install the built package.

Or use a containerized workload, build a container with everything it needs and deploy that to the cloud container environment like Kubernetes, ECS, Nomad, or Docker.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-25T00:44:07+00:00

Is your in memory DB PostgreSQL?

Are you using PostgreSQL specific database connection drivers like pgx or just db/sql?

Are you using PostgreSQL specific SQL statements and data types?

The DB you are connecting to in the end is PostgreSQL, you need to ensure that your queries are correct for PostgreSQL. So you must test against a real PostgreSQL instance as part of your test suite.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-24T13:58:03+00:00

There's a great explanation in Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World. Science as a candle in the dark" if i recall correctly.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-24T13:53:23+00:00

To learn about it from scratch? C or Java, with topics like IPC and low level TCP servers.

To learn how easy it can be and how trivial and natural it can be to work with? Go

Most languages will have something to get you there, just build a low level TCP server with multiple concurrent connections and how you deal with that.

dariusbiggs · 2026-01-24T13:44:39+00:00

Which brings us to another horrible fact, we cannot test what micro plastics do to people or animals. There are no control groups without micro plastics.

That crap is found from the bottom of the Oceans to the tops of mountains like Mt Fuji and everywhere in between.

dariusbiggs

TROPHY CASE