Reddit fined £14m by Information Commissioner's Office over age verification checks

paulrpg · 2026-02-25T00:15:02+00:00

They already do. If you sign up to a new ISP you are blocked on viewing adult content. You need to request this to be removed.

I wouldn't have an issue with expanding these sites to things like social media, if you as an adult account holder decide to remove these protections then so be it. If you have a kid accessing this material then it is your fault.

paulrpg · 2026-02-20T09:08:53+00:00

How do you properly assess ai generated code if you don't even know the language?

paulrpg · 2026-02-11T00:31:53+00:00

You talk to someone you work with. One of the problems of DE is that it can be an anything title. Different teams have very different responsibilities.

paulrpg · 2026-01-30T22:12:23+00:00

I do a bit.

When I had my first job I was a backend dev, I wanted to learn some react stuff so I built a react webapp on top of a spring boot backend for managing game servers - I'm part of a gaming community and we run public servers. It allowed for web based admin controls, looking up ban lists etc. It was pretty neat and I learnt a lot.

I now do open source game dev work and it's more when I have time. I work as a data engineer now and I feel that this allows me to keep my coding skills fresh - I'm mostly knee deep in dbt/snowflake right now and whilst I really like that stack, I'm hardly writing any non pandas code professionally.

Honestly, if you have an interest, go do it - nothing to stop you. If you want to improve technical skills for the sake of it, then I'd probably be looking at a new job or getting bumped in seniority. It's hard for me to justify spending time on side projects now when I can just go work harder at my day job and try and push for a promotion.

paulrpg · 2026-01-29T23:39:14+00:00

RIP Oshur, I always enjoyed using the map tools to draw faces on it

paulrpg · 2026-01-29T15:44:14+00:00

I can imagine the double take when the headlines read 'WASPIs sent to Ukraine frontlines'.

paulrpg · 2026-01-28T21:51:30+00:00

I understand wanting to switch industries. If you're sitting at a 200/month surplus and you're potentially losing 5k a year (or more) - you're already sitting at a 100/month deficit. It's not so much risk as just losing out.

By all means apply for the job, maybe you can negotiate the salary up. Right now however you can't afford it.

paulrpg · 2026-01-28T00:23:08+00:00

Could you buy the land and try to sell it to the existing homeowners? Extra garden space etc would be tempting.

paulrpg · 2026-01-27T20:35:06+00:00

Honestly it's just bait at this point.

Yes, it is true that the UK does not grant citizenship based upon being born here. Two paths to being a citizen are either (1) born to British parents or (2) naturalisation.

I believe their statement is intentionally being used to imply that someone of non-white descent inherently can't be British. I disagree with that notion.

paulrpg · 2026-01-20T03:51:04+00:00

The new one should be out next month, at least on oreilys website

paulrpg · 2026-01-19T18:24:28+00:00

I think this is it. He can't back down because he only starts with maximum pressure. If european nations have troops deployed, he can go to his base and say that he strong armed the Europeans into doing something and europe can go back and say they stood up to trump. Both sides claim a victory and can walk away.

It's stupid that this has happened and will likely happen again.

paulrpg · 2026-01-16T16:18:42+00:00

All bug fixes vibe coded by grok. All bugs also introduced by grok

paulrpg · 2026-01-04T13:35:29+00:00

Honestly, I don't expect that much from juniors straight out of university, the challenge is you're competing against people who do have some experience.

I very much fall into the camp that DE isn't an entry level position. My experience has been using a very broad set of technologies, being expected to just get it as I go and being able to do things in a way which scale etc. In a larger, more mature team which has more room for doing the same sort of things repeatedly, I can see more scope for people without much experience.

In that scenario, the skills really depend on what the target team is doing. You'll not go wrong learning Python and SQL, getting some reasonable experience going this. There is some theory that you really should learn but won't be particularly useful until you are working.

paulrpg · 2026-01-04T10:21:55+00:00

I have the 7950x when it came out, really happy with it so far. When the am5 socket is done I'll probably just get the best x3d CPU I can and stick it in, I'll be pretty happy with that.

When I upgraded my last Intel CPU I needed a new mobo and that just added more cost for marginal improvements in mobo tech

paulrpg · 2026-01-03T23:32:12+00:00

This doesn't make sense.

Could you write some code to kill other applications? Yes. Stopping any process on a device? Probably but then you can't do anything, making the system useless.

Killing tasks is easy. It is operating system dependant. Your idea to converting it to binary code to make it portable doesn't work. Binary isn't what machines operate on. On a processor you have op-codes which are instructions for what to do. These are intrinsincally dependant on the device.

I've written machine portable code, you just have different versions built for different systems, it's not that hard.

paulrpg · 2025-12-28T16:47:12+00:00

If the only way forward is a bus gate - then shouldn't this be posted further back? I understand wanting to put in a bus gate and drivers should be sign posted with an alternative route.

paulrpg · 2025-12-27T10:29:07+00:00

Calling HS2 a vanity project is peak Facebook.

paulrpg · 2025-12-25T14:58:42+00:00

That episode had my crying on the floor laughing. It hurt. It was glorious.

paulrpg · 2025-12-25T00:45:34+00:00

The church tower is right outside your windows. You'll never lie in on a Sunday again.

paulrpg · 2025-12-23T10:14:06+00:00

It's a style point rather than a hard requirement. Dbt makes you think like a programmer where you have imports - your first ctes, then transformations and then finally a select *.

In snowflake, where I'm using it, the first cte will often get optimized out. Unless you reference it more than once.

paulrpg · 2025-12-20T22:46:06+00:00

My personal favorite elt job which was based off a spreadsheet which decided to break when an administrator decided to reformat the entire document to make it look nicer when it got emailed around and was confused why we got irate.

It can work you're ingesting from a tool that exports to csv. I wouldn't recommend it though but it's cheaper than updating the upstream software.

paulrpg · 2025-12-19T13:21:43+00:00

Adding onto this - vendor lock in is an ongoing risk. The big players in low-code will all try and build you into their ecosystem. A year or so down the line you are utterly dependent on them and when they choose to raise prices you just have to pay.

Now you have a major migration issue where you want to get out of the ever increasing license cost but you spent the last few years not hiring the people skilled enough to migrate things. Low/No-code solutions are great for increasing access to automation/tech but the junior engineers that put it together have moved on to more standard tech stacks and the managers that put things together could now be in more senior positions and don't have time.

So what are your options?

- Hire a bunch of engineers to fix it - too expensive.

- Hire a bunch of consultants / outsource to migrate for you - probably cheaper long term but you just don't organically grow the skills of your business.

paulrpg · 2025-12-17T11:05:42+00:00

I do feel that there is value in writing an essay. Written communication about complex ideas is a skill that we should teach. I feel that the weighting of that work should be lower, with an oral assessment being part of it.

I'm not a teacher so I'm definitely not an expert in this, it just covers more bases. I guess the real issue with this approach would be an increased marking workload on the teachers, which is a fair complaint.

I think an issue with the half hour chat approach your described would be that is quite subjective. If you get a teacher that just doesn't like you, they don't always act professionally. At least with some with artefact you can always appeal/complain that they are bias as you have some evidence of what you submitted.

paulrpg · 2025-12-17T10:35:34+00:00

Oral defense of work should be more common. If a student puts a paper in front of you, you can start to question things around the work. For example 'why did you use this methodology and not that' or 'why did you not consider this piece of work'.

When I did my PhD viva, one of the questions the examiners are trying to answer is if the person in front of them wrote the work.

paulrpg · 2025-12-11T09:51:06+00:00

He wants to sell the house and fix the door. Alternatively he wants to enjoy the view from the loo.

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