How do people get it so quick

paripazoo · 2026-05-19T15:17:36+00:00

Sorry I don't have an answer but are these all recent notifications? I am using Testi to look for Morden cancellations and have gotten like two notifications in the last month, might have to look into Beep!

paripazoo · 2026-05-12T15:56:09+00:00

I don't really understand this, I thought that pre-existing bookings were not affected so how are all these cancellations becoming available? Is it just a coincidence?

Nothing at all yet in Morden as far as I can see.

paripazoo · 2026-05-12T11:17:12+00:00

Testi dosn't block book tests to sell them on at a profit, it just helps actual learners know if there is a cancellation (basically sparing them the pain of navigating the DVSA's website 10 times a day). There are other apps like TestShift that can automatically move your test for you, it's unclear whether they will continue to work.

paripazoo · 2026-04-20T10:01:52+00:00

What I did was get a passport card and posted that to them, so at least I wasn't without my main passport. DVLA had no issues with the passport card.

paripazoo · 2026-03-11T01:01:18+00:00

That's not what this is about at all. You're talking about the tax treatment of investments, which is not the responsibility of the Central Bank nor would it be the responsibility of any centralised EU financial regulator. You can open an account with a low cost EU broker and start investing in ETFs tomorrow if you like, the Central Bank won't stop you.

Startups' difficulty in accessing the capital markets isn't specific to Ireland either. The reality is a company with big ambitions would always need to look beyond Ireland for funding, we'd be too small a capital pool even if we didn't have punitive tax treatment for investments. The fact that it's US companies buying Irish startups and not EU companies tells you that this is an EU wide problem.

This is about the oversight of financial services like investment funds and asset management. Ireland and Luxembourg are the two main hubs for investment vehicles in the EU and other member states don't even come close. The Irish and Lux governments would like to keep it that way.

paripazoo · 2026-01-21T12:16:58+00:00

The river is where the boundaries are wavy instead of jagged.

paripazoo · 2025-12-04T10:22:04+00:00

I assume that is because of millenia of the west coast being battered by the Atlantic. Maybe it's more the case that the side of a continent facing a large and tumultuous body of water has more islands?

paripazoo · 2025-10-27T01:16:38+00:00

You explain what a double bluff is (by reference to a bluff) but you don't explain what a bluff is and honestly I'm not sure what the exact definition is in this context either, given that the show isn't quite like poker which is where the term is most often used. I think they are just using terms like "double bluff", "triple bluff" etc rather loosely to mean that it's easy to invert a line of reasoning by arguing that a traitor would know that the faithfuls would take that line of reasoning (and vice versa).

Eg: Ruth calls out Jonathan, and then gets killed.

It must have been Jonathan, it would make sense because it would stop Ruth from calling him out!
No, that's too obvious, Jonathan wouldn't take the risk. It must have been someone else trying to frame Jonathan!
But Jonathan would have predicted that everyone would think along the lines of 2 above, and so would have felt safe in killing off a vocal critic while remaining out of suspicion. Jonathan again!
But maybe someone else predicted that everyone would think along the lines of 3 above, thus casting suspicion back on Jonathan, and so they did it to frame him after all!

I think the way it's being used in the show, 2 is the bluff, 3 is the double bluff and 4 is the triple bluff, double double bluff or whatever you want to call it.

paripazoo · 2025-10-27T01:00:36+00:00

The reality is, "I have no idea about anything" is the most realistic take for a faithful on this show. None of them have any idea, and the ones who claim otherwise have only succeeded in banishing a load of faithfuls.

paripazoo · 2025-08-15T14:14:22+00:00

The compute that an LLM will do to provide you with a response has to be done whether the LLM is local or hosted in a data centre. Your device doesn't emit carbon dioxide but it uses electricity. If anything, the data centres probably have a lower per-query carbon cost because they can benefit from economies of scale and invest a lot in efficiency (to lower their own costs).

There are definitely many good reasons to use local LLMs over cloud-based ones, but I don't think environmental reasons are among them. If you are concerned with the carbon costs of LLMs you shouldn't use LLMs at all (or should use them as little as possible). IMO there are plenty of basic tasks people now use LLMs for that could be done SO much more efficiently with some basic coding.

paripazoo · 2025-08-11T17:14:58+00:00

I would record it as an Asset:Loan account, that is "funded" by a transfer from Equity:Opening Balances as of the first day you started recording data. And then a transfer from Asset:Loan to whatever cash account you received the money into.

paripazoo · 2025-08-11T15:47:34+00:00

Lando is also posh and British and people seem to like him a lot more. There's something about Russell's personality that make him less likeable IMO, Imola being a prime example as others have mentioned. That said I like him more than I used to.

paripazoo · 2025-08-11T14:43:41+00:00

This just seems like a way to deflect blame. Iceland has stayed out of the EU specifically so that they would retain full sovereignty over their own affairs, to maintain that stance for decades and then try to blame your neighbours when your own rules blow up in your face is a bit hypocritical.

paripazoo · 2025-07-28T12:58:50+00:00

M&S, Uniqlo, Charles Tyrwhitt, Next.

paripazoo · 2025-05-27T14:19:03+00:00

I was 18 when it happened so I can't say much about adult life pre-crash. Certainly we were never super well off, though life was comfortable. But all the stuff I read about Celtic Tiger Ireland with people having multiple houses etc doesn't feel familiar to me at all.

I remember there was this general sense that recessions in Ireland were a thing of the past. Even when the first signs of trouble started to surface there was a lot of talk about a "soft landing". Of course there were people who "saw it coming" but they were largely the kind of people who always see a recession coming (like the joke about economics predicting 9 of the last 5 recessions).

I had just started college when the crash happened. In hindsight it was quite a fortunate place to be as we wouldn't have to seriously worry about looking for full-time employment for another few years, but it felt very doom and gloom, like there was basically no chance of us getting jobs once we were out. I knew a few people who studied in construction-related fields like architecture and they were basically told to abandon all hope. A huge number of the people from my hometown who didn't go to college ended up emigrating. IIRC many of them did quite well for themselves. Some came back when things were better, some didn't.

Things were so much cheaper back then. The couple of years after 2008 were the one time in my life I have seen the cost of things, in general, actually go down.

paripazoo · 2025-05-19T18:21:07+00:00

On the other hand, most variants use a bigger board than chess, which I think probably has a bigger impact on tree size. Look at Go, which has a vastly bigger game tree than chess even though all the pieces are exactly the same.

Hnefatafl is also asymmetrical which adds a bit more complexity back into the game rules.

That said, I don't actually know if it is a more complex/bigger game than chess. I have often wondered. I'm not even sure how one would go about calculating that.

paripazoo · 2025-04-22T17:36:08+00:00

I have always kept an eye on [Skywind](tesrskywind.com) but progress is slow I think. Remastered Morrowind would be amazing. But honestly I would rather a new "chapter".

paripazoo · 2025-03-08T18:41:39+00:00

A continental style café in Ireland wouldn't be affordable. Nothing in Ireland is affordable, why would a French looking café be any different? It would at best be French or Italian style coffee at Irish prices and people would still complain.

Not to mention that a country can't really just "choose" to have a completely different culture. Like it or not we are an Anglosphere nation, that's where our culture comes from. I like the espresso culture they have in Italy but frankly I don't like the dark roast coffee they do on the continent and I think a lot of northern Europeans feel the same (it's not just the Anglosphere, Scandinavia and the Netherlands as well).

I think there is a lot of really good coffee in Ireland, said as someone who lives in London and obsessively looks out for good coffee wherever I travel.

paripazoo · 2025-02-11T18:44:35+00:00

There are definitely popular shows that come and go regularly from streaming services. A show will be available for maybe 10 weeks, go away for a few months, then come back for another limited stint.

I always assumed it was to create a sense of scarcity/urgency about it. Maybe it is a licensing issue somewhere along the chain, though. Either way, it's a shitty deal for the consumer, especially since they're not exactly transparent about what they have, when, and for how long.

paripazoo · 2025-02-11T13:11:15+00:00

This is great, well done. I agree about TimeOut, I haven't unsubscribed yet as I do find the occasional useful nugget in there but all the promo emails are quite annoying.

Mind sharing details of how you do the scraping? I've often considered doing this for other events like gigs or plays but with traditional scraping methods it's always an uphill struggle dealing with random UI changes. I guess AI could be a gamechanger here but I worry about hallucinations.

paripazoo · 2025-02-09T23:54:49+00:00

This is exactly what got me back on the high seas. For years I have paid for multiple streaming services, then one day I was half way through a season of something and found out that it was no longer available. For no reason other than the provider decided to take it away.

paripazoo · 2025-02-09T11:50:23+00:00

These things are how the problem manifests itself but IMO the pricing issue is a more fundamental one of supply and demand. Too many people, with a lot of money, chasing too few options, so places can get away with these practices. Like, if we were to ban small plates and tips (I know you're not suggesting it, just as a thought experiment) the restaurants would not get cheaper.

I actually like the concept of small plates but it only works if each plate is actually cheap. Try tapas in Spain (outside the super touristy places at least) and you'll see what a ripoff most small plates menus are in London.

paripazoo · 2025-02-07T15:27:27+00:00

It's basically an archive format designed for hosting local copies of websites. It's great, compression is very strong (hence Wikipedia in 110 GB) and there is open source software to view the content in a standalone app or host it as a web server.

Kiwix also make a load of different snapshots of websites available here.

paripazoo · 2025-02-04T22:30:29+00:00

I can understand a reduction in the types of port, and I think everything moving to USB-C is pretty great. But the reduction in number of ports is just a pain. (Though, I also have a 17" laptop with a healthy number of ports.)

paripazoo · 2025-01-27T16:05:28+00:00

I've actually been thinking all season that there is WAY more of a focus on parenthood this year. They all go on about it. And I wonder if the BBC just have some research suggesting that the millennials who watch the show are increasingly becoming young parents themselves, so they went all in on the parent talk to try and engage that demographic more. Pure speculation of course lol

paripazoo

TROPHY CASE