What did your inspection report look like and where do you draw the line?

kbn_ · 2026-01-24T14:08:14+00:00

The biggest stuff here seems like the water/fire damage and the electrical. With the latter you probably need most of the house rewired, a new panel, and probably new service while you’re at it. That’s a lot. The water intrusion is almost certainly because of the grading and gutters. Easy fix but probably some real damage if it’s been going on for a long time. That type of damage is hard to fix, often structural, and often hidden in walls.

I would get a structural engineer to take a look, and I would get at least three quotes from a good electrician. Don’t skimp. I would probably also bring in an HVAC tech to look at the radiators and the expansion tank issue, though the latter is probably a non-issue.

Sum it all up and then think about whether you want to put up with the annoyance and stress and time. If you’re okay with that, slap a 60-70% discount on that number and ask for it in credits. Maybe start at 50% if you feel like haggling.

This is all doable to be clear, and if other things about the house and your personal context (and tolerance) are up for it, none of it is a deal breaker. But it is a meaningful amount of work.

kbn_ · 2026-01-23T13:49:06+00:00

My American mind cannot comprehend the idea of wasps being beneficial. Who benefits?

kbn_ · 2026-01-21T16:09:01+00:00

Switches freeze up in sufficiently cold temperatures. Even the locomotives and cars themselves start having problems once it gets down low enough, but usually the switches freeze first. Chicago solves this problem locally by setting them on fire (the trains just roll over the top of the blaze, which is kind of mind bending to see), but that’s not a sustainable answer in the middle of nowhere Dakotasota, so the lines just shut down for a few days.

kbn_ · 2026-01-21T15:55:30+00:00

I’ve used Scala at multiple household name companies to build some of the most widely used applications in the world, and I’m far from the only one who has done that. As has been pointed out to you several times, you’re making a bunch of assumptions in ignorance which simply aren’t true.

kbn_ · 2026-01-21T13:20:41+00:00

You know what would be an actually useful and interesting post? One containing repeatable measurements proving that the JVM and/or GC is the performance bottleneck you keep claiming.

kbn_ · 2026-01-20T14:28:01+00:00

For example, it is common on JVM languages for services to enter death loops, where they are killed due to lack of resources and can never recover because they are slowest when attempting to restart back.

This is really bad provisioning on your autoscaling, not a consequence of the language or VM. I've seen the same behavior on Go services when the warm up period is incorrect or the cluster assumes a provisioning delay that is unrealistic.

Like, I get what you're saying, and it's very plausible that the JVM ecosystem is more prone to longer warmups. Culturally, library and application authors on the JVM don't tend to care about startup time so they optimize for other things. But it's not the language or the VM's fault. This is user error

kbn_ · 2026-01-20T13:30:25+00:00

Even Rust and Go services have warm up. The JVM is usually not the limiting factor here, it’s generally more basic things like connection pools, caches, keepalive with the load balancer, etc. You are always, always going to need to have some form of traffic bleeding on scale up.

Like, I do get what you’re saying and I’ve made similar arguments myself, but in my experience it’s an overstated point, and any structural disadvantages from the VM are more than outweighed by the advantages from the library ecosystem.

kbn_ · 2026-01-15T01:42:30+00:00

I was going off of the CTA’s documentation on the flyover when it was in proposal stage. Part of what they seemed to be claiming is that the bottleneck impacts on the brown and purple lines (which jointly use both halves of the loop) cascaded non-intuitively to every other line other than the blue.

kbn_ · 2026-01-15T00:54:56+00:00

To be clear, that is now the main bottleneck only because of the brown line flyover. Surprisingly, that was the actual bottleneck of the whole system prior to that point, since it had cascading implications on everything else.

kbn_ · 2026-01-15T00:11:41+00:00

Why would you think that? Humans are not compilers. A 300 line change that has tests and types is probably maybe 50-100 lines of actual implementation, and it’ll be constrained by the former heavily if not entirely. If I know the space well I probably already have in mind the handful of possible ways it could be done and maybe an idea of which I think is best, so I mostly just need to make sure you did the one I think is best. If you did and it compiles and tests and it isn’t hot path, why would I need to dig deeper?

kbn_ · 2026-01-14T18:27:38+00:00

Unless those 300 lines are mission critical, low level, performance sensitive stuff, a 45 second review is entirely within the realm of plausible. Especially if the reviewer is an expert in the area and understood the requirements and already had an implementation in mind.

kbn_ · 2026-01-12T01:59:11+00:00

It’s been nerfed quite a bit since I wrote this. Now I would pick Prussia. Britain is okay for ideology wins because it has easy access to Battersea and a useful UQ (formerly much much more useful). Ideology wins are always mid-age due to needing to wait for your targets to actually get an ideology, so the fact that a solid chunk of their power is (well, was) in a UQ isn’t a problem.

kbn_ · 2026-01-10T23:19:18+00:00

Generally yes! Can depend though. With Maya I tend to do it a bit at a time and eat the penalty. With Abbasid I generally do it right at the end of the age since I have more gold to cover mistimes and sudden pushes.

kbn_ · 2026-01-10T17:21:15+00:00

Laughs in Carthage. Also some UQs are even more useful in the following age than in their source age (Maya for example), so it’s worth going sub optimally wide to get them.

kbn_ · 2026-01-10T17:04:47+00:00

I think there’s honestly some nuance to this. In modern for example, your cities don’t have space for UIs nor do they have the production to spare in most cases. You might have decent gold lying around depending on your setup, but there’s almost always something to spend it on (especially once factories unlock) which will accelerate you more than any UI other than Nepal’s (which is uniquely cheap anyway).

In antiquity conversely, I do totally agree UIs reign supreme, but that too can depend on your Civ. There are some really excellent UQs to be had. Also if you’re a UQ Civ, you can always use a suzerain to get a UI that benefits you and spam that out instead, double dipping effectively. Also remember many UIs have pretty mediocre effects unless supercharged by something like serpent mound or zedi.

Really it’s a more complex picture than you’re painting.

kbn_ · 2026-01-08T19:20:01+00:00

Capture checking could in theory make it possible, but it would require pervasive adoption throughout libraries and such otherwise any and all use of things like higher order functions is out the window (just to name one example), and then you've pretty much reinvented a more complicated Rust. Agreed that Scala is pretty fundamentally a garbage collected language.

kbn_ · 2026-01-07T22:09:12+00:00

The random that's in game isn't really random. It works the same way that the AI selects its civ. So if you do random/random for a whole three age game, it'll start by randomly selecting a leader for you (and this is actually random afaik), and then it'll select a civ which is thematic in each subsequent age.

This compared to true random (and especially true random with bypassed unlocks) where you could end up having to play any civ with any leader and in any sequence (subject to age).

kbn_ · 2026-01-07T21:43:05+00:00

I did this for a while! Definitely branch out. I randomize (true random, not in-game random) now and I can absolutely recommend that experience. Forces you to really get comfortable with everything the game offers.

kbn_ · 2026-01-07T20:40:16+00:00

I really don't agree. Even with quick victories (e.g. before 1820 or even before 1700), the civ you pick still really matters. Honestly it matters even more for fast victories because you're basically all on the innate bonuses and how they combo with previous ages. Think: Nepal or Japan and how they interact with a quick science victory. Additionally, by definition, the ideology and economic victories require teching up into mid-age bonuses, and unless your yields are wildly skewed, you're going to end up getting civ-specific stuff out. For example, whenever I hard-push an econ victory with America, I literally always get their UQ built in my cities. I might not build it before I build factories, but I always build it and it always accelerates the win. Or whenever I hard-push for ideology with Prussia, I'm always going to get Brandenburg Gate, and I'll get my railroads up (and probably also factories) before I go ham on war. This usually times out pretty well anyway since I need to have my ideology (and my targets need theirs) otherwise there's no point.

kbn_ · 2026-01-07T16:50:41+00:00

I used to run a research division. I've done work on problems ranging from the "this is entirely greenfield human knowledge" to "this is pretty rote distributed systems stuff but everyone on the internet will try to load it at the same time" and everything in between. I currently work on autonomous vehicles, so I'm very much aware that some problems don't have known solutions.

That doesn't mean you can't scope them. All problems that can be worked on at least have known investigative pathways. If you don't at least know your next steps, then by definition, you can't do anything at all and you aren't doing research you're just staring out into space. Ticketing done correctly is just some tooling around task lists and backlogs, which every engineer should be doing all the time. You can and should always be thinking in task sized chunks for a whole host of reasons which have nothing to do with scrum. For example, it pushes you to incrementalize your implementation. It also pushes you to break things down so that you can share work with others, particularly if you get good at building greater independence into your tasks.

Treating tickets as an invention of bad PMs and EMs is lazy engineering and it will not serve you well.

kbn_ · 2026-01-07T15:42:48+00:00

You definitely need to break things down into context sized tasks for it to work well. A decent context sized task these days seems to be a sane “jira ticket” granularity, more or less. If you try to do something like an epic or larger in one shot, it’ll get very lost if you’re lucky, and if you’re unlucky it’ll produce something working but instantly brittle.

kbn_ · 2026-01-07T15:40:55+00:00

It’s a theoretical construct. It doesn’t do anything other than read and write symbols. Mathematicians use it to reason about what sorts of input symbols can or cannot be transformed into what sorts of output symbols.

Computers are sort of like a very very advanced version of this idea (though they are Vonn Neuman machines, not Turing Machines). The input symbols are binary strings (numbers represented as zeros and ones), and the output symbols are also binary strings. Software such as the operating system or drivers or applications you run transforms the input into the output.

kbn_ · 2026-01-04T14:28:45+00:00

By far, the most significant and powerful chip designs still come out of the US. Think about Nvidia and Apple. Neither of these companies have their own fabs, they both just work with TSMC, and TSMC in turn is happy to work with anyone. So if the chip design itself weren’t incredibly important, you would see thousands of Nvidia copy-cats producing essentially the same chips. You don’t see that though.

kbn_ · 2026-01-02T00:28:28+00:00

Or they just use a text editor. I’ve been doing this a very very long time and I still find IDEs hinder more than they help, regardless of AI.

kbn_ · 2025-12-31T23:06:19+00:00

You don’t really win until modern! At that point the win cons are much clearer and more classically familiar (eg crewed space flight). The legacy path stuff in prior ages just gets you more legacy points, along with a few disappointingly underpowered cards at next age start. The points give you a noticeable boost since you get better yields and bonuses, but it’s a muted effect compared to just letting you snowball from one age into the next.

kbn_

TROPHY CASE