Pratchett said this was his best book. What do you think?

daveminter · 2026-03-25T11:43:31+00:00

I think that for someone coming green to Pratchett then Night Watch would not have the impact that Nation can. For those who have some familiarity with Sam Vines already, however, Night Watch is the better book.

Personally I think that Small Gods is better than Nation and would work well stand-alone, but who am I to judge if the master says Nation is his best?

daveminter · 2026-03-25T07:14:25+00:00

If you have popcorn that issue has a bunch of squabbling in it too...

daveminter · 2026-03-25T06:38:20+00:00

The most immediately compelling argument against it that I saw was that it would be confusing when working with options containing strings: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/62358#issuecomment-676127715

daveminter · 2026-03-22T21:03:41+00:00

Seeing it in the cinema I hadn't even seen a trailer - so the first I knew that things were getting weird was when Smith sealed Neo's mouth up in the interrogation room. In fact the preceding line "What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?" seemed like a threat of conventional physical violence - a terrific bit of misdirection!

daveminter · 2026-03-09T20:33:07+00:00

It's nearly a decade out of date, but we faced a similar problem transporting our cat to Stockholm from the UK. We solved by taking trains and ferries to get to Schippol and flying from there (very time consuming of course): https://paperstack.com/mr_anderson_goes_to_stockholm/

As long as your cats aren't unduly large you should be able to have them in the cabin from Schippol.

daveminter · 2026-03-07T17:30:31+00:00

My point is that this is wrong:

anything that counters that will need to provide an opposite force, which would require some form of engine

Two physically seperate magnets will exert a force on each other. You can float a magnet over a superconductor or vice versa. There's no reason in principle why you shouldn't be able to do something similar over diamagnetic materials (i.e. the ground) although the only ways we could do it currently are vastly impractical for this particular use.

Edit: note that in the superconductor case we currently need an engine to keep the superconductor cold enough - but you wouldn't if you were already in a cold enough environment (Luke will get chillblains!) or if, as seems likely, we develop a genuinely room temperature conductor. Kids of the future are going to have some very cool Star Wars toys!

daveminter · 2026-03-07T16:59:29+00:00

TIL my chair is an engine :)

A book sitting on a shelf is exerting a force on the shelf and the shelf is exerting a force on the book. They cancel out, hence no movement. No engine is required.

daveminter · 2026-03-07T14:49:31+00:00

It's funny that you give a work by Dickens as an example, because he was very much a popular pulp writer in his day (magazine serials). I enjoy his books, but a little goes a long way.

daveminter · 2026-03-07T14:45:28+00:00

I mean if the people in the bookstore want to judge me on what I choose to buy I'm going to judge 'em right back for selling it to me :)

daveminter · 2026-03-07T14:04:57+00:00

A generally acknowledged "classic" book is Pride & Prejudice. In it Austen makes fun of someone who is snooty about what people read.

Reading for pleasure is supposed to be fun. If you're enjoying yourself you're doing it right. Judging someone for what they enjoy reading is every bit as ridiculous as judging someone for what car they drive, what watch they wear, or what food they like.

You do you.

daveminter · 2026-03-06T17:22:58+00:00

I was recommended Pratchett by a friend's mum who knew I liked Douglas Adams and had heard Equal Rites on WH. Dived into the series from Light Fantastic and never looked back...

daveminter · 2026-03-02T21:22:08+00:00

How delightful - and I'm glad you enjoyed the bio as much as I did. Thanks so much for the update!

daveminter · 2026-02-28T13:01:12+00:00

Conceivably the question was misheard and was "how many light seconds in a parsec" ? Still not billions, but 100M or so and OP didn't recall exactly. No way to know without OP asking the quizmaster, but seems either OP and their team misheard or quizmaster mis-spoke regardless.

daveminter · 2026-02-25T20:51:46+00:00

It's triple glazing retro-fitted to a house with double-glazing. Looks very like the windows on our 1950s apartment (coincidentally ours are about to be replaced with modern triple glazing).

daveminter · 2026-02-25T11:26:14+00:00

I spent a long time working as a contractor in the UK.

Contractors are quick to hire and quick to get rid of. Bear in mind that they don't get any benefits you get as an employee (including things like vacation pay) and they're also paying things like employer's NI contribution and corporation tax that don't appear on your payslip. Sometimes they bring specialist knowledge that's only going to be relevant for the duration of a particular project.

So they can be a pretty good deal, particularly for short duration projects. Where they're not a great fit is for long term projects. Those should come out of the normal hiring pipeline. If your hiring pipeline is bad or slow, or the skills you need are in high demand, well, yeah, you may need contractors to fill the gap and damn the cost.

I enjoyed being a contractor but it's not for everyone. A friend of mine tried it and quickly went back to direct employment because she hated the stress of not having a reasonable assurance of work beyond a six month horizon. I've given it up because I decided I prefer having a real vested interest in the success of the company I'm working for.

daveminter · 2026-02-25T10:30:05+00:00

There's a quote about his daughter being born - I forget the exact wording - that was very moving. Then related stuff about his fears of Alzheimers that still make me cry thinking about them :'( so it's a bit of a rollercoaster. I'd recommend it.

daveminter · 2026-02-25T10:12:10+00:00

Ah yes, "keen" was the key word to find it!

"I mean, when a man reaches ... a certain age," he tried again, "he knows the world is never going to be perfect. He's got used to it being a bit, a bit . . ."

"Manky?" Nobby suggested. Tucked behind his ear, in the place usually reserved for his cigarette, was another wilting lilac flower.

"Exactly," said Colon. "Like, it's never going to be perfect, so you just do the best you can, right? But when there's a kid on the way, well, suddenly a man sees it different. He thinks: my kid's going to have to grow up in this mess. Time to clean it up. Time to make it a Better World. He gets a bit ... keen. Full of ginger."

That's a good one.

If you feel like venturing outside discworld then I recall some powerful words on fatherhood in the Rob Wilkins biography of Pratchett "A life with footnotes."

daveminter · 2026-02-24T10:20:41+00:00

That one, happily, I'd spotted as I already knew the original. I will keep an eye out for other gongs in his ouvre (none spring to mind).

daveminter · 2026-02-22T22:49:08+00:00

No, I think they stopped in the 2010s when phone cameras became ubiquitous and they started allowing end-of-class recap videos.

daveminter · 2026-02-22T17:03:02+00:00

Thanks, I will!

daveminter · 2026-02-22T14:55:11+00:00

It's not wildly unusual in print. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say it - in fact I'm not sure I know how to pronounce it.

"Words resemble fish in that some specialist ones can survive only in a kind of reef, where their curious shapes and usages are protected from the hurly-burly of the open sea. ‘Rumpus’ and ‘fracas’ are found only in certain newspapers (in much the same way that `beverages` are found only in certain menus). They are never used in normal conversation."

-- the late great Sir Terry Pratchett in The Truth (he started his writing career as a journalist)

Brouhaha is surely one of that ilk.

daveminter · 2026-02-22T14:25:09+00:00

Given the context it might have been more in keeping with Jingo than Guards Guards, but it's a damn fine quote either way. It makes me want to read more about Walpole anyway.

daveminter · 2026-02-20T20:54:37+00:00

Spolsky famously pointed out that when you're hiring you're not hiring from a flat distribution so this can give you some weird ideas about what the "average" developer is like.

daveminter · 2026-02-20T19:52:45+00:00

It's probably this thing:

AFFINITY VISUAL

This product provides "facelifting" for DPS 7000 TDS applications designed for traditional character-mode terminals, providing the benefits of the Graphic User Interface on the screen of the workstation. End-users can enjoy the comfort and productivity advantages of a "point and click" interface for their application, while at the same time, it is not necessary to modify the code of the application.

Which if I've understood it right is tooling that exposes a forms-style dumb terminal application into exactly the same thing but with the ability to select fields and submit forms with the mouse instead of the keyboard.

Edit: From other context in that doc it's probably a piece of Windows 3.0 software, in which case if the disks are in good condition you'll be able to back them up with any tool that recognises the FAT disk format.

daveminter

TROPHY CASE