jonathanlydall

> Before you tell the agent to start building anything, you go there and read and understand it first.

The sentence is maybe ambiguous, but it sounds like it's saying to not use the AI at all until you understand what's happening in the area that needs to change.

I don't agree with this as you can spend quite a bit of time digging around to first find the correct place which needs to be updated and then more time reading the code (likely in multiple files or places) to build up a mental model of what's going on.

I typically have more than one AI conversation on the go at any given time, so I'll always start by asking it to make a plan to solve a problem and while it's busy exploring to make a plan I review some other AI conversation's work in the meantime, when the AI's plan is ready I review it.

If at this point there is anything that is unclear to me about its approach to implement the plan, or I don't already have familiarity with the part of the system it's proposing to update, I start questioning the AI on how the system works. I will scrutinize the AI's plan until I'm absolutely sure that it's going to implement something that is sound from a system design perspective and as a senior software developer with architecture level experience I am capable of making such judgments.

I'm not sure what it might be like for comparitively inexperienced developers, but I would expect that AI's capacity for infinite patience allows them to ask as many questions as they need to get a clear mental model of what's happening, so if I were mentoring such a person in this age of AI I would drill into them on how to interact with AIs to ensure they have this clarity before the AI starts implementing anything.

The difference between vibe coding and highly accelerated agentic development is having the expertise and judgment to ensure you're building properly sound software.

> Your country is not allowed to access this resource

What’s the issue they have with South Africa?

My wife (also of Indian descent and from Durban) was happy when I forwarded her a BBC link of this news.

She remembered her late mother used to talk a lot of her as she managed to become a lawyer despite being an Indian in apartheid South Africa.

These emails also tend to end with something like “if you’d rather not be emailed, simply reply with stop, no hard feelings” and are invariably followed up a day or two later if you simply ignore them.

Because adding to a blocklist is generally more effort than it’s worth to me, I have an email signature which simply says “Please stop emailing me”, nothing else, no “hello”, no sign off, just an (appropriately) completely cold one liner response to them.

Not memorable enough that I’d burn any bridges in my future, but also uses as little of my time as possible while they get a completely unambiguous message of what I want them to do.

I then use my mail provider’s report spam button.

Not really menus, but related to the “programmability” of DVDs, my “favourite” “feature” was unskippable videos which would show before the feature.

This was used to reward people who had actually paid for the movie with being forced to endure obnoxious and long “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy appeals before they could watch the main feature.

An interesting effect of them doing this is that it made the pirated version of the product objectively better than the legal version. Great thinking by movie studios.

Just an anecdote, but my mother forgot my 11th (I think) birthday, I’m 44 now and I think in just the last year or two she mentioned again she still feels guilty about it.

In her defense, I had my birthday party just a few days before and it was an unusual year in that school had started by (maybe even on) my birthday.

I remember feeling a bit disappointed on the day, but certainly not distraught or traumatised. I also never found myself randomly thinking about the incident after except for when my mom mentions it or from stories like this.

My point is that it depends on the person on how big a deal it was. Also, perhaps the parents do feel guilty about it, hence sometimes sharing it as a “funny story”, but I wouldn’t know.

My own 6 year old child seems to be neurodivergent (I suspect I am too) and is struggling a bit with pre-school, even now at a bridging school.

We first had to confront it about 2 years ago when the highly regarded mainstream school she was at said she would have to repeat the year.

At least for me as a parent, the possibility that my child won’t grow up to be a self sufficient is terrifying, so it was quite a bit to come to terms with.

Fortunately we weren't in denial and she’s getting exceptional assistance, but some parents definitely find themselves in denial when confronted with this situation.

We generally run on Microsoft 365 and use SendGrid for transactional emails such as password resets.

Main domain has SPF set up correctly as per MS docs.

We have the CNAME set up for a like em1234 sub-domain as per SendGrid’s docs which their docs say should cover SPF even if the emails we send have a from address of our main domain (eg noreply@example.com), this is apparently because receiving servers are supposed to do SPF checks against the replyTo address which sendgrid does populate with an address on the subdomain.

This has worked fine for years, Gmail for example is happy and looking at mails from us says everything passes.

However, we recently onboarded a large corporate whose server was blocking the SendGrid emails because it was checking the SPF against the from header rather than the replyTo.

Only way to let the email through was to either add SendGrid SPF records to our main domain, or change the from address of the SendGrid emails, neither of which was 100% ideal.

Not going to try tell the client they’ve configured their server wrong, but have they?

I can’t imagine working without a plan first.

Firstly I find it’s an excellent way for me to get very good clarity about what will be built and whether it’s going to be done in a sensible way.

Very often I don’t really know what the work will need to look like until I’ve explored the problem with the LLM towards first making the plan.

Without a plan I find myself having to do the initial understanding through code review of its generated code which is much harder than reviewing a plan, and then I invariably need the LLM to fix up what it did which is much slower when it’s doing code than working on a plan, never mind the next review I need to do.

And when the plan is good enough, I clear the context before telling it do it, which I’ve found vastly improves the quality of the LLM output.

Can confirm as this is what I do with my PHEV, has about 50km battery range (13kWh) but advertised range of about 900km overall.

AC charger is plenty good enough and charges at about 2kW.

Last filled up my tank on July 11, since then have done about 3000km and, checking the car app now, the tank is 87% full.

Not everyone has the same typical daily commute distance, but I chose our PHEV based on ours, BYD has PHEVs with more battery and of course full EVs.

Amount of battery capacity significantly affects cost so for us the ~USD 35K for a SUV made sense. We also got it just after the Iran war started figuring it made even more sense in terms of reducing petrol costs.

Speaking for Johannesburg, we can't have shorter yellows because too many people treat them is "last chance to speed up to make it through before it's red for too long!" and JMPD is beyond useless at law enforcement.

Sounds like you're living in a country where local government actually cares to improve things rather than doing as little work as possible while also self-enriching themselves as much as possible.

I think you mean "robots" ;).

Seriously though, speaking as a South African living basically next to Sandton, there are plenty of traffic lights near to me which cause complete chaos when they are out. They will cause significant delay for the entire working day on certain routes, e.g. anywhere on Winnie Mandela (formerly William Nicol) Drive.

There is however one intersection (Stirling and Balmoral Ave) on the way to my kid's school on a non-major road which definitely works better when its traffic light is out, and this is at any time of day in my experience.

Some traffic lights definitely should rather be mini traffic circles, e.g. on Peter Place by the one office park and had the exact same frustration for the one on Grosvenor Road near to Bryanpark.

As the Johannesburg Road Agency (like all City of Johannesburg Municipal companies) is so incredibly incompetent, our traffic lights are incredibly unreliable, I shudder to think how much it sucks out of our economic output all the people sitting in traffic longer than is needed simply due to an out of order traffic light.

And the local police also don't help with regular roadblocks while at the same time being terrible at law enforcement (yes, you'd think roadblocks are a sign of law enforcement, in practice though they're more for soliciting bribes while screwing up traffic).

This comes across to me as judgmental (and you don’t know the situation of my kids and their screen time), my view is to each their own, it’s an option you can turn on/off as per your own preference.

"impolite" is probably an understatement in the context of discussing details about the development of defense systems outside of work.

I don't really mind their unification efforts making me have to install a new app which for me on its own is only a minor annoyance and absolutely not worth getting at all upset about.

It's that they made no effort to bring over profiles and their associated watchlists, "continue watching" is my most used section of all the streaming apps (which they love moving every time I relaunch the app, but that's a different topic) and they didn't even apologize for essentially throwing away years' worth of tracking what the last episode I watched was.

In South Africa (and I imagine other countries) they're currently force migrating subscribers over to a "new" app (at least on iOS and tvOS) and your profiles with their respective watchlists is left behind in the old app, no way to migrate / import it into the new one. This isn't even mentioned on their FAQ for the process. A absolutely terrible user experience.

On the bright side the "new" app (which I assume is actually the same as used in the US) seems to not have the following annoying issues of the old one:

- It was impossible to enable auto play on a "kids" profile. As my kids can't use a remote yet I had their profile set to "adult".

- An episode would never be marked as "fully" watched, but this wasn't just a mild annoyance, it would "break" autoplay when re-watching a series because when it started auto playing a next episode which was previously watched, it would "continue" from where you had watched upto (minus about 30 seconds). This results in it cycling through the last 30 seconds of every episode of a show. The easiest way around this I found was to make a new profile every now and again for the kids.

Someone I know has developed radar hardware, specifically around signal processing, and while they couldn’t say much, my impression from them was that due the very large amount of data involved using off the shelf CPUs would be very limiting, which is why his job for a period of years was developing a design to be put on an ASIC which is significantly more effective at the task.

I know on my Windows if I sign into icloud.com I have the option of using a passkey which I do by scanning a picture with my iPhone and it also using Bluetooth, presumably to prove physical presence of it.

I don’t think they’re proposing remotely controlling it, just so that the guest would experience being unable to change the temperature to outside the allowed range.

Of course any guest is free to write in their review “can’t make temperature lower than 18°!” but the number of people choosing not to book for that reason in any given year is likely 0 or very close to it.

There are a lot of people who don’t “get” thermostats and their intuitive model of ACs is like that of getting a bath to a particular temperature by turning a faucet to full hot or cold to get what they want.

And if these people are out of the room when it reaches the actual temperature they want (and would change it), then the AC is left possibly for hours working full time, burning maximum energy and related wear and tear by trying to hopelessly achieve an unattainable temperature.

For some people they may only opportunistically (perhaps they have excess PV production at that moment) run their AC or temporarily turn it off when they temporarily have other power demands at that moment (eg running dishwasher, washing machine, microwave, kettle, etc) and don’t want to pay for grid energy while doing so.

“HVAC” is essentially not a thing in houses in South Africa likely due to having a mild climate, this also makes insulation in houses optional and mostly not done.

So most people with AC here are probably using it as a luxury and will happily have it be off a little if it meaningfully reduces energy usage while still making their house noticeably more comfortable.

> I was surprised when it hung my computer and of course asked "Does it do that every time?"

A true scientist! (see https://xkcd.com/242/)

I watched The Shining for the first time about 15 years ago (at about age 30) and when my friend asked what I thought I said it was good, but seemed pretty typical of horror films, to which he pointed out that it’s because all those films were inspired by The Shining.

Thank you so much for sharing on a website, as someone who started LAN gaming in the 90's it was a real joy to read, especially with the FAQ.

Regarding the lack of patch panel, while not ideal it probably isn't going to make any difference as the cables can probably survive being handled 100s or 1000s of times without any real chance of issues.

I think the new version is a net positive value as creates a better "vibe" to prospective patients than just a Google Business listing would, and I expect will age well.

The domain's used for email anyway and is on a very cheap local hosting plan, probably all-in-all like ZAR 84 per month and ZAR 200 per year for the domain, so ZAR ~1200 (USD ~75) per year.

Old website was built in a different era, Google Business didn't exist, "HTML5" wouldn't be a thing for another 5 years, web design styles were completely different and was before iPhone meaning that modern day "mobile friendly" was not even a thought.

When my father started running guest suites over 10 years-ago I made a single page website with essentially the same goals but using a Hugo template. The website still feels "modern" today, so I expect this new one of my mother's will age well too.

In this case, because spending it was more hassle than any time she would have saved by doing so. If she had no choice, then spending it would not have been an issue.

I've responded to your other comment too, but regarding anyone's assumption that it's worth paying $20 to have it done quickly, but there was no urgency as it's been a thing she's been wanting to do for years.

She probably put it off because the need to actually contact other people to kick off the process was way more of an impediment than anything, whereas on a Sunday afternoon when I was visiting, we kicked off the process on a whim.

She was able to "work with" ChatGPT during after-hours and in <15-minute sessions, between her doing other things, so it's not like she was likely to have used the time productively anyway.

You're pretty much right about the reasons.

But as for the "value of her time", despite having to wait due to the rate limits for free users, this was probably still less time consuming for her than paying someone else to make the website.

She basically just did maybe half a dozen (probably less) sessions of less than 15 minutes each. This was a very a low-priority thing for her and did it between other things and after hours, so it didn't really use up time she was likely to use productively anyway.

If she had dealt with a web designer, she would probably have used up more of her time with several back-and-forth interactions with them, which also probably would have had to be done during business hours. Chances are that ChatGPT was better at intuiting what she wanted in a case like this and gave her quicker feedback loops despite the waiting for more "free tokens".

Would $20 have been worth spending on this? Absolutely. But the scope and priority were so minimal that the hassle of doing the once-off sub was more for her than just doing little bits between other stuff. If it wasn't available for free we would have used my Claude sub or she would have just paid.

If anything, it was a bit of a chore while keeping in mind that chores aren't necessarily a bad thing, e.g. tidying your kitchen after a meal is a chore, but it's satisfying to complete the chore as the alternative is not only a messy looking kitchen, but the hygiene issues which come with it. It's just something which needed to be done.

The once off nature, scope and priority were so minor that it wasn't worth the hassle of actually paying, but if free wasn't an option we would have either used my Claude sub or she would have just paid, no big deal.

The new web page (since it's a single page website now) is also mobile friendly and intentionally not "flashy".

Another goal with the website I didn't note before is that its "quality" or "style" should generally not be consciously noticed, it shouldn't stand out for any bad reasons, people see it, get a good impression, do what they were looking to do with ease, success.

I got this philosophy from my interior designer (not to be confused with decorator) brother who told me how when he's done a good job, no one notices, but when he's done a bad job then people either almost instantly notice or simply feel uncomfortable without necessarily being able to exactly identify why, e.g. first impression of your hotel room should instantly be "feels nice" (and same with a public space in a building) and then you remain feeling comfortable throughout because the space is actually big enough for its purpose and laid out practically.

After 20 years, her new business is mostly word of mouth, but website was very dated and potentially a minor liability.

Scope of work and urgency were so minimal that it was simply not worth the hassle to actually subscribe and then have to unsubscribe later.

If there was no free option we could have done it on my Claude sub or she would have just paid.