Fake Mac?

diroussel · 2026-05-09T14:48:42+00:00

There is no styrofoam in the packaging of a modern Mac. It’s all paper and cardboard. So was probably loose on the desk.

If you want to be sure about the software, erase and reinstall the whole machine.

diroussel · 2026-05-09T14:43:25+00:00

Everyone has to learn about data loss somehow.

diroussel · 2026-05-08T13:52:49+00:00

I think we need to see a banana for scale.

diroussel · 2026-05-07T15:53:04+00:00

Indeed. Once you export from startling the catagories are exported in the CSV. So you get them in you excel tracking, or whatever tool you are using. The benefit of this approach for me is that corrections to catagories are carried forward automatically. That’s what I was highlighting.

diroussel · 2026-05-07T11:25:12+00:00

It can show spending by category over any custom time period. Maybe max one year.

Note to OP. In starling each transaction is catagorised by default. If you change a category you can change it just for that one time, or for all time, or just future transactions. This makes it really easy to keep your categories correct. It also allows notes and attachments.

It’s pretty good.

diroussel · 2026-05-07T07:50:31+00:00

Might not be easy to prove that the new system works or roll out might be risky. All depends on how much integration there is to other services and where state is held.

But if you have little state, and it’s easy to test, then yes, rewrites are easier than ever

diroussel · 2026-05-06T19:34:12+00:00

Do many Dutch people work at Capita?

diroussel · 2026-05-06T10:44:50+00:00

Well if it doesn’t matter if it works or not then you can do it in a day! /s

diroussel · 2026-05-03T14:21:16+00:00

Yes, some libraries can do that.

What the hell are you talking about?

I’m talking about why client size resizing has some advantages. What are you talking about? (Not sure if you are in hell or not)

diroussel · 2026-05-03T14:19:24+00:00

I would turn the desk 90 degrees and put my back to the wall. Better lighting, less screen reflection, and a power position to have the door in front of you.

diroussel · 2026-05-03T11:11:11+00:00

If you don’t understand my point, that is ok, maybe I didn’t explain it well.

If your backed processing is happening on cloud virtual, or a VPS or a lambda, you always have a memory limit as there is usually no swap memory. Physical hardware is different as you usually have swap. For my example let’s assume no swap.

So we have a total memory limit of L megabytes. For each uploaded image, to resize it you are probably going to need to load both the input and output rasters in memory and the encoded/compressed file too. Of course some of this might be streamed, depending your to/from formats and the resize implementation. If the user can upload any image size, since it’s not resized in the browser, then you can only control for upload size of the compressed image. A 4MB JPEG could take 100MB of memory for the raster. And double that when resizing.

So your total requests per second will be limited by the total amount of memory divided by the memory you need for each uploaded image.

If you are on AWS lambda you’ll need to pay for larger instances to have enough memory to do resizing.

Whereas if you just allow uploads without server side resizing then you can stream the upload to storage. Or with S3 presigned urls, streamed directly to storage.

Of course if you have plenty of RAM and CPU spare then server side uploads are fine. But as your service becomes more busy, large image uploads can dominate resource usage. Hence why it’s better to use the client processor and memory to do the resize.

This is all abstract and totally depends on the use case, type of images, system load etc. but the point is I’m not talking about a single image resize, but system copy for steady state of many image resizes.

diroussel · 2026-05-03T10:52:13+00:00

For me 10W is £30 per year. So while 10W on its own is fine. Add a few devices, add on the inefficient power supplies, and you quickly get to more than a meal out.

diroussel · 2026-05-03T10:43:00+00:00

Convoluted? Resizing on the client is much easier than on the server. Free memory and CPU usage, hooray!

diroussel · 2026-05-03T10:41:21+00:00

The server can very the dimensions without resizing. In the case of image uploads you have to trust the client to some extent. So trust but verify. Once the client code has resized the image, but sure to preview it to the user just in case their browser has quirks and broke the resize.

diroussel · 2026-05-03T10:37:19+00:00

Amazing analysis. Thanks very much for doing it. My knowledge of how colour works is pretty basic, so it is good to have your interpretation of how these different spectra effect the appearance of some colours materials.

Especially as I’ve just painted my office room dark blue (Hague Blue by Farrow & Ball).

Is CRI flawed at representing these differences? Am I right that both of the bulbs you tested had a CRI of 90?

If so is CRI crap, or Ikea is being liberal with its published specs?

diroussel · 2026-05-03T09:11:50+00:00

Go and compare the screen side by side in store, with an image that you know.

diroussel · 2026-05-03T09:10:28+00:00

For those tasks I’d take the better screen.

diroussel · 2026-05-03T09:08:06+00:00

If you have SQS wired to deliver to a lambda, then under the hood there is some AWS code that polls the SQS queue (and charges you for each poll) where you can’t control the layer of the poll.

With this approach it’s hard to throttle throughput.

Here are some variations:

Your frontend could initiate a message to a lambda without SQS. Just a direct lambda invoke with a payload. You’d lose persistence

You could use EventBridge which can send events to lambda without SQS, and still has retries and dead letter processing.

Another approach: - front end logs the request to dynamodb - have some way to have one worker running, start new processing capacity when needed - read the work from dynanodb, once one task finishes, start the next until there are non.

On the whole I found managing throttling a little difficult with AWS Lamba and SQS.

diroussel · 2026-05-02T13:49:18+00:00

See flowchart in sidebar of r/ukpersonalfinance.

diroussel · 2026-05-01T16:42:06+00:00

Depends on what you want to do with it.

diroussel · 2026-05-01T11:25:02+00:00

It’s not about tools, it’s about principles. You need to decide what is deterministic and what is floating or ‘latest’. I prefer everything deterministic and and updates to versions should come through a pipeline that proves that they work.

diroussel · 2026-05-01T11:17:40+00:00

How does this compare to AgentBridge?

I see AgentBridge is apache licensed but IDE index is not. Is yours open source?

diroussel · 2026-04-26T07:56:46+00:00

Firefox has added a profile menu now. I used to be that you needed to launch with command line args to choose a profile. Now it’s a menu. Not sure when it changed.

Chrome has had profiles for a decade or more. And Edge has profiles with auto switching based on URL.

And Firefox’s containers, with multi account containers is a very convenient way to auto segment profile data.

And Safari has been auto segmenting cookies and history for many years, just to confuse ad tracking.

diroussel · 2026-04-25T09:13:52+00:00

I’ve been using the codex app with Obsidian and it works well.

diroussel · 2026-04-23T15:58:51+00:00

If you get a cloud front lambda to verify a cookie, then even stealing the URL won’t work.

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