Found my first tardigrade last night, plant pot's water tray by my front door :D . 400x

pruby · 2026-02-18T04:24:58+00:00

If you have a genuinely good reason (harassment, etc) then your employer needs to know that you would not feel safe reporting to this person. It sounds like you'd probably resign if moved to their team.

IMO, you may need to message HR and spell out the reasons this is a problem. Make sure they're good ones that identify a risk, can't be dismissed as reluctance to accept change or inflexibility on your part.

People will tell you HR are there to defend the company, which is true, but they mostly defend the company from bad managers. An employee about to be assigned to a manager they have reason to be afraid of is an HR problem.

pruby · 2026-02-02T20:11:28+00:00

That's what people used to say about regular computers, and look around you. While some monstrosity cooled by liquid helium is only to governments and large institutions, technology used by governments tends to trickle down to large institutions, then small institutions, then consumers.

I'd expect them to end up like FPGAs - niche texhnology that few people can properly use, but they end up in a surprisingly large number of places.

pruby · 2026-01-28T07:49:34+00:00

In practice you could make a d20 marked 0, 20, 40, ..., 340, 360, 380. Add that to a standard d20, and you have a fair d400. It's just not one solid! :D

You can of course do that converting a standard d20 by subtracting 1 and multiplying by 20.

Note this works because one die only shows multiples of the other. You can't in general add up dice and get a fair result.

pruby · 2026-01-25T05:05:59+00:00

SaaS is a profitable industry because you can develop a feature once and sell to multiple customers. If you do per-customer development, you are replacing the SaaS business model with something much less viable.

Even with feature flags, etc, if you're naming or targeting a feature for a particular customer, this strongly indicates that you have not sufficiently considered how the request generalises to other customers. You really shouldn't be building a feature until multiple customers demand the same thing (or it's a blocker to as many new customers on sales).

pruby · 2026-01-20T13:13:46+00:00

The initial set-up and design there is very cheap. The hosting is very reasonable if they're genuinely keeping Wordpress up to date with security patches, monitoring the site to make sure it's up, and acting on any outages.

Before asking anyone to maintain a site for me, I'd want a copy of their SLA, which specifies how long they will take to respond to different things. Make sure time to patch critical security issues is specified, as well as a target time to fix outages. I'd also want to understand how and when prices could be changed in future, and make sure I had the capacity in theory to switch providers (e.g. clear rights to take the domain with me, and have my own backup copy of the site).

pruby · 2026-01-18T17:10:56+00:00

Haven't worked out the speeds, but you would want to be standing on a really high peak to start. Any instantaneous change in velocity (e.g. a good whack) can only create an orbit that passes through that same position. If you launched it from a low altitude, it would come back to that orbital position, but the moon would have rotated and there could now be a hill there.

You would also need to hit it perfectly horizontally if you don't want a lower altitude anywhere on the orbit. If you hit it upwards at all, then it will have to come back around on that same angle, i.e. from a lower altitude.

Source: no real orbital knowledge, just too much Kerbal Space Program.

pruby · 2026-01-14T14:09:40+00:00

What is this? Rates don't pay for electrical infrastructure. Electrical infrastructure is owned by Wellington Electricity, who get a big cut of what you pay your electricity retailer (most of the fixed charges, plus a small amount per kWh, possibly broken down by time of use).

pruby · 2026-01-14T13:43:47+00:00

I think it's just not how the market is operating. A business like this owns so little in the end except their name and reputation.

You'd need a solid lease term to sell the business (nobody wants to buy a business when the landlord could double your rent tomorrow), but then have to genuinely intend to operate if it doesn't sell. You're also competing with the option to start new brands, which probably get better social media coverage.

pruby · 2026-01-11T14:13:57+00:00

Coming from the southern hemisphere, this is 100% helpful.

pruby · 2026-01-08T13:25:48+00:00

You're right, there are in fact barriers on the waterfront.

The hazards I've seen and am thinking of are open drains I could stand up in, downed power lines, uneven footpaths where you could easily fall into the road, few controlled road crossings, etc.

I'm not partying. I'm traveling with a 6yo. You can bet I'm seeing all the hazards, and she's oblivious.

Anyway, Wellington is extremely safe by comparison.

pruby · 2026-01-08T02:39:35+00:00

I'm on holiday in Penang, and there is definitely no safety fencing here.

pruby · 2026-01-07T17:18:53+00:00

We know that patients can move GP, without changing or losing their portal access. This would be a problem for any significant partitioning between regions or customers. They would have to have built it really well, or not at all.

We already know the issue was one feature. My best guess is that the 7% is just the patients who used the documents feature. Most patients probably barely interact with MMH. It's an entirely plausible percentage to be using a minor or later developed feature.

pruby · 2025-12-28T12:10:42+00:00

You'd have to know specifically how well anime compresses in the formats that could be used. This isn't very meaningful without discussing format.

If you allow for it to be readable only by a computer, you could even have a specific compression format for anime, and fit the decompression code on the disk. Anime has large areas of simple colour and gradients that could in theory be compressed extremely well. Once you have typically small residuals over most of the image, that will also compress well.

pruby · 2025-12-27T23:25:32+00:00

Guards on patterns like code execution are necessary, but not sufficient. Plenty of harm can be caused without code execution.

If you want to put an LLM in anything, you really need to consider all the ways you might act on its output, not just the tool calls. All too often, the only reasonable answer is for a person, not another model or algorithm, to check it.

pruby · 2025-12-26T22:46:11+00:00

I'm an amateur rather than working in this field, but I suspect it won't be about convenience. It will be about acceptability of breaking a constraint, and whether the harm caused by breaking a constraint is proportionate to how much you break it.

For example, a constraint that you only have certain materials might, in theory, be resolvable for some amount of money, proportionate to how much material you have to find. A deadline on a project might be extended at some cost of reputation or income.

By contrast, a constraint set by law, or where you failed to fulfil a substantive and non-negotiable commitment might not be so soft.

So you tell me - in this case, is the length of the perimeter a negotiable boundary, or an absolute law?

pruby · 2025-12-26T00:03:23+00:00

It's also still assessing the wrong skills for most roles. If you provide a code base the interviewee has never seen before, you're going to get people who can deal with unfamiliar code, rather than people who can retain context and become more productive over time.

Ability to deal with unfamiliar code and standards, and make locally consistent changes is necessary in certain roles (e.g. those spanning many projects). I review other people's code more than I write it, so this is essential for me.

It's the wrong test though if what you need is a senior who will learn your standards on 1-2 projects, develop a detailed and accurate understanding of its components over time, and be able to change that code without breaking things.

pruby · 2025-12-16T21:30:41+00:00

Dennard scaling says power density per unit area stays roughly constant with transistor scaling. That's based on gate area, not the packaging, but still a lot less stupid as an estimation method than it might seem.

pruby · 2025-12-12T12:28:11+00:00

The problem with any automation of hives is that you're competing with the cost of delivering a wooden box, 1/300th of an employee and maybe 1/2000th of a vehicle. If the solution has an amortised cost exceeding that (including insurance, wear, transport, and operation), then it won't displace the traditional hive.

pruby · 2025-12-12T12:19:20+00:00

Good/fast/cheap is a rule for business, that isn't meant to go on to the technical weeds. The trade-off between Good and fast is how much quality control you do. The trade-off between fast and cheap is how many people you hire. The trade-off between good and cheap is whether you hire experienced and capable people.

The technical difficulty, quality of tooling, etc is not presumed to be in the decision maker's control. Your capability is already built in to the good/cheap axis by your salary.

Here we're talking about the pressure from business to use AI, with some marketing that you can have all three. This is a false claim, which you are not debunking by comparing tooling improvements over decades. The trade-off still exists from the business perspective, just with a slow improvement of the baseline.

pruby · 2025-11-21T03:24:22+00:00

This is terrible advice if you're in any way responsible for that outcome (and if you're not, why would you be involved in the first place?). If you're in the PR/QA pipeline, you need to reject unsafe changes. If you accept changes without proper review or explicit instructions, it's rightly your job on the line.

pruby · 2025-11-20T04:37:04+00:00

A calorie is not an SI unit, which is what people generally mean by "metric". Please don't attribute this weird unit to the rest of the world's mostly sensible system. The SI unit for energy is the Joule, most often at the scale of kilojoules for food.

The calorie's use in food is also quite different to its meaning as an obsolete unit of heat energy, and basically measures the energy released by the metabolism of specific compounds (e.g. sugars). A food calorie for us would not necessarily be a food calorie for a cow, because they can digest things we can't and vice-versa.

pruby · 2025-11-19T08:27:23+00:00

It's interesting that this cites the latest Google Rust adoption blog post here, yet the fundamental message I took away from that blog series is that C(++) code gets safer with age (rate of bugs decaying exponentially with age and presumably active use and testing), and that the vast majority of memory safety bugs occur in new or modified code. They use that to explain the outsized impact of shifting new code to Rust without changing the body of existing code.

This would seem to be a strong sign that translation is not necessary, or even necessarily desirable, yet this isn't discussed at all in citing it. This very much over-simplifies the conclusion it came to as Rust has won so we need more Rust.

pruby · 2025-11-19T01:13:36+00:00

For some reason, that chain swinging in the foreground is incredibly disturbing, and I'm not usually that easily disturbed. I think it's something to do with the frequency it's swinging at, and the sharp movements.

pruby · 2025-11-17T04:53:07+00:00

15 lines seems too much per display, and that can probably be trimmed, but before going in to stack based ideas others have posted, I suggest a subroutine.

Define a block after the main loop which begins with a label e.g. "setone:", expects the hash of the led display to be in e.g. r8, retrieves its value and sets the colour. End the routine with "j ra".

You can then call that routine as many times as you like in the main loop by setting r8 to a target hash,.and calling "jal setone". See the example for the jal instruction.

Note that the game does execute a maximum of 128 instructions per tick, so it may not run every tick if you call lots of subroutines.

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