jonathanlydall

VWs are decent cars, but they've been somewhat "premiumly" priced since at least 2000, in my view the brand is irrationally overvalued by South Africans.

When I looked at a Polo around 2018, the finishes were a bit nicer, but compared to the Honda Jazz I went with (with CVT, cruise control, climate control) it was considerably more expensive.

BMWs and Mercedes are apparently having a really hard time here right now. Chinese cars are really comparable in terms of features and finish but for like half the price, the only other reason to buy a luxury German car is as a status symbol, but for the genuinely affluent here, a Mercedes or BMW isn't exclusive enough.

They're not dead yet as there are still quite a few South Africans who deem it essential to their social status to have the nicest possible car at the absolute limit of what they can afford. My theory on why they do this is because others can see the car they pitch up in, but don't see that each night it's parked outdoors of a rented apartment worth barely more (possibly less) than the car.

I appreciate the warning, will certainly do some homework here.

Here in South Africa I’m seeing more and more BYDs all the time, the high fuel prices due to the Iran war is making their entry level EV pay for itself for people with any kind of commute.

I’ve been super happy with my Sealion 5 (PHEV) I bought in May, tank is still over half full since last filling it up mid July and having done about 4,500km since.

I have had two minor software issues. One time the one parking sensor warning indicator kind of got stuck on the centre screen (no noise though). The other was my wireless CarPlay refusing to connect. In both cases they self corrected once the car had been turned off (and unplugged) for a little while. A bit annoying at the time, especially as there seems to be no manual way to force a reset, but super isolated.

It has etymological roots in the Arabic word, but is spelt differently and it has no meaning or use except as a slur of which there is nothing more offensive to say to blacks (“blacks” is a completely acceptable term here).

We don’t have much of an Arabic community here.

I'm South African so wouldn't really know culturally how African Americans would see it, but wondered at the time if the changing of the Git default branch name to "main" was an initiative by European Americans worried about offending rather than actual offense taken by African Americans.

It is interesting how different locations find different things offensive. Only when I was living in Europe for a while (doing Blizzard Customer Service) did I became aware of how big a deal the usage of N word was, as over here the K-word (look up "South Africa k-word" if you don't know it) is the word of choice for the, unevolved, die hard racists.

Was similarly unaware, (but not really surprised in hindsight) how World War II references were much better left avoided and Nazi references an enormous no-no. Over here references to Nazism are very rare and while South Africans did fight and die for the Allies in Europe, the impact of WW2 over here was no where near what it was like for most of the rest of the world.

Sounds like SVGs would work well for this.

In some situations it is most convenient/practical to have your router do dynamic DNS updates and depending on your router the options may be limited giving you no "great" options.

Regarding your valid concerns about the PSL, as long as you have a domain already, you can just make a CNAME record to a free dynamic DNS provider's sub-domain record, I've done this for years with a No-IP ddns.net record. I don't especially recommend No-IP as the 30 day verification is a bit annoying, but at < 1 minute of work per month, it's tolerable for a free service and $2.50 a month is an order of magnitude more than what I feel a single dynamic DNS record is worth.

Since I moved to having a pfSense box at home, I'm using Cloudflare for dynamic DNS, no extra fee and works perfectly, but like I said above, probably not available on typical home routers without a regular machine behind the router having to poll your IP to detect needed updates of a dynamic DNS record.

As I was on Namecheap, I was initially going to use their dynamic DNS option, but it turns out it's behind a higher fee to enable full API access to administering your domain, totally stupid, but with their having been bought out by the PE entity I wouldn't want to stay with them anyway.

My father runs a few guest suites and he explained to me why the cleaning fee is really helpful in terms of keeping a room's price reasonable per night but him not getting a bad deal for a single night guest.

The more often you wash linen then the faster it wears out and needs to be replaced.

While he has a cleaner who daily makes the bed and does basic cleaning (labour is far more affordable in South Africa), on checkout rooms need a more proper clean with additional use of a cleaning detergents.

Without a cleaning fee which is charged per stay, you'd have to increase the per night fee to cater for single night guests.

With the cleaning fee he can still keep per night rates as low as possible with single night guests still covering their actual overheads.

Makes a lot of sense.

My father runs a few guest suites out his house and the cleaning cost, wear and tear of washing linen makes single night stays really impact his bottom line, hence him having a cleaning fee which is per stay rather than per night.

Prospective guests can then choose for themselves if they feel the overhead of the cleaning fee for such a single night is worth it for them and my father doesn't land up with uneconomical stays.

Comes across as double dipping to me if the cleaning fee is exorbitant AND the guest is expected to make an accommodation spotless before checkout.

I'm not in any way saying it's respectable to leave "a mess" in an accommodation which charges a cleaning fee, but a small amount of dirty dishes in a sink (if there is no dishwasher) or not having washed linen is not in my view leaving a place "in a mess" as the host is expected to do a certain amount of cleaning regardless since trusting guests to do it would be reckless and this can be unreasonably time consuming for guests and challenging if they have small kids.

If there is _no_ cleaning fee and the terms were clear that full clean-up of the accommodation is expected, then fair enough, guest saves on cost by doing the work themselves and if they don't they deserve a negative rating.

I guess AirBnb has found that many hosts use it as an excuse to penalize guests or to claim it's not the host's fault if the place was not clean on arrival of the next guest, so it's just simpler for AirBnb to set a baseline of host service expectation.

My understanding is that hosts optionally specify cleaning fee charges.

I didn't say they did, I just remarked in general that using AI is not itself a bad thing.

Nothing wrong with getting help from AI as long as you’re applying good and qualified judgment on what parts of its help is decent.

You can see my other comment, but short version is that I think it’s just content for the sake of content without the person actually really understanding the topic much more than most of their readers.

The article’s content is generally quite weak, could probably have been covered in an old school tweet with screenshots and nothing of value would have been lost.

The only positive thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t appear to be written by AI.

I don’t think this person truly understands what they’re writing about, they did a little research, made some screenshots and put enough words in the article so that it will show up in search engines.

It’s reminiscent to me of many articles on Windows error codes, almost all of them are basically generic, generally quite long with drivel, and steering you to install some “fix it” software. Any technical person coming across these just finds them annoying as they clearly gamed the search results with unhelpful content.

It comes across as really uncaring to the probably 99.9999% of people outside of the US who have no idea offhand what UTC offset it is, it almost feels hostile.

If they at least included “(UTC -7)” after PDT, while still a bit annoying, at least people could work out what time that is without having to lookup PDT from somewhere first (as I just had to).

I've never been involved with Linux kernel work, but in terms of the "You, as a person, not the AI, are responsible for the quality" policy, this to me is a just an "obvious" policy that should be applied to any non-vibe-coded software.

It's just another way of saying, you can't have AI submit things on its own and you can't "blame" AI for anything you submit, you're expected to understand and be able to explain anything you're putting forward, if there is an issue with your submission, doesn't matter at all if you go back to AI to address it, so long as all issues are properly addressed.

The code is either of sufficient quality, or it's not, doesn't matter whether you or AI wrote it, it's your name on it, you're responsible for it and its your reputation on the line.

> 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.