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pards

1,307 karma · joined August 9, 2013

craigpardey@gmail.com https://www.craigpardey.com
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pards··on Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself
Got any youtubers you'd recommend?
pards··on Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself
Ed Sheeran used to be bad at singing [0]. So was Jon Bon Jovi.

In-person vocal lessons and consistent practice have dramatically improved my voice from terrible to half-decent.

[0]: https://youtube.com/shorts/I05Ahr0tpAc

pards··on I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
I assume all social media ads are also scams.
pards··on List animals until failure
Yep - dodo worked for me
pards··on A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
> I happen to rent and can't keep

This is my fear - what happens if the AI companies can't find a path to profitability and shut down?

pards··on A list of fun destinations for telnet
My first introduction to the internet was through the telnet-based EW-too talkers like Foothills (Boston U) and Forest (UTS). I have very fond memories of staying up late talking to people from all over the globe. It was truly amazing to me.

The best part was how the users moderated behaviour - bad actors were ejected swiftly but rarely permanently.

pards··on I'm 34. Here's 34 things I wish I knew at 21
This represents a fork in the road that becomes apparent by your mid-40s.

Those who ignore it will be overweight, unfit, and on daily meds. Those who change their lifestyle will not.

The fix is:

> Leading a healthy life is simple: sleep well, exercise three times a week, have an active social life, eat a variety of vegetables and whole foods, avoid sugar, processed foods, alcohol and drugs. That's 90%. Everything else is optimisation.

pards··on Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15
A 1980s Toyota Hilux would give it a run for its money

https://youtu.be/Yl1FNX08HFc

pards··on On Getting Hacked
Name and shame

Tangerine (formally ING Direct) in Canada only has 6-digit PINs and SMS 2FA

TD Canada Trust only supports SMS 2FA

PC Financial only supports SMS 2FA

pards··on Introduction to Software Development Tooling (2024)
> The third, Build, will teach you about how to reliably build your software with Make.

Make? In 25 years as a professional developer I have never encountered make in the enterprise.

At least cover the various generic _models_ behind a few of the modern build tools so students can understand both the commonality and the differences between say NX, NPM, Maven, Gradle, go build etc.

Maybe a class on CI/CD pipelines, too.

pards··on Read Something Wonderful
Yeah, really bad UX. Unreadable.

I zoomed on Firefox on MacOS and the two finger scroll stops working. The scrollbar appears momentarily so I grabbed it but it jumps to the next article and scrolls left, which pushes the next article off the page to the right.

pards··on The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source
Is there a link that doesn't require me to agree to give up my first-born?
pards··on Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
>> But because it can also be used to bypass paywalls

> How? Does the site pay for subscription for every newspaper?

Someone with a subscription logs into the site, then archives it. Archive.is uses the current user's session and can therefore see the paywalled content.

pards··on Honda: 2 years of ml vs 1 month of prompting - heres what we learned
> Over multiple years, we built a supervised pipeline that worked. In 6 rounds of prompting, we matched it. That’s the headline, but it’s not the point. The real shift is that classification is no longer gated by data availability, annotation cycles, or pipeline engineering.
pards··on Phone numbers for use in TV shows, films and creative works
+1 is also the prefix for Canada
pards··on We need a clearer framework for AI-assisted contributions to open source
> code is getting less and less important in our team, so we don't need many engineers.

That's a bit reductive. Programmers write code; engineers build systems.

I'd argue that you still need engineers for architecture, system design, protocol design, API design, tech stack evaluation & selection, rollout strategies, etc, and most of this has to be unambiguously documented in a format LLMs can understand.

While I agree that the value of code has decreased now that we can generate and regenerate code from specs, we still need a substantial number of experienced engineers to curate all the specs and inputs that we feed into LLMs.

pards··on Roc Camera
I try to look at my music as something that I do because I enjoy it. I play in a casual/amateur band and I regularly have to remind the guys that I do it for no other reason than because I enjoy it; I'm not interested in playing gigs. Not everyone sees it the same way.

I know a few musicians that tried to make a living out of music similar to your story. Most have now stopped making music and are both frustrated with the music industry, and angry at listeners for not valuing their work.

pards··on Liquibase continues to advertise itself as "open source" despite license switch
This is a shame. We use Liquibase on my project and I have a few bugfixes / functional gaps that I was planning to contribute back but I doubt my large enterprise client would sanction contributions to a commercial codebase.
pards··on The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain
My parents had a off-peak hot water system when I was growing up. The insulated tank would fill and heat up during off-peak hours (i.e. late at night), and merely keep it warm during the rest of the day.

The downside was that once the hot water was gone, we had to wait until the next day for more. The last person to shower occasionally got a cold shower.

On-demand systems win here.

pards··on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
Tiny Thief [0]. My kids loved that game.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Thief

pards··on Show HN: Sober not Sorry – free iOS tracker to help you quit bad habits
For alcohol, there are modern alternatives to quitting cold turkey that use science instead of willpower. Look into the Sinclair Method and Naltrexone if you're interested in such things.
pards··on Hackers leak Qantas data on 5M customers after ransom deadline passes
And yet later in the article it states:

> global data was stolen between April 2024 and September 2025 and includes personal and contact information of the companies’ customers and employees, including dates of birth, purchase histories and passport numbers.

which contradicts the previous statement

pards··on California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches
Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken [0]

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1039004911

pards··on Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report
> clients would generally take some time to actually commit and it's not feasible to keep a team on standby for every sales lead

This is an important reality in consulting. The consultancy cannot keep their best people sitting idle while the clients spend months completing the paperwork.

And it's not just a billability issue. The A team people don't like being underutilized and will find seek employment if they're kept idle too long.

That said, savvy clients will include "named key resources" in the contract to ensure continuity between the sales team and the project team.

pards··on Play snake in the URL address bar
Such a unique, innovative idea. Well played.
pards··on How to make sense of any mess
The random word highlighting makes it hard to read for me.
pards··on The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review
> and to ignore my PRs when I don't

PRs should be optional, IMHO. Not all changes require peer review, and if we trust our colleagues then we should allow them to merge their branch without wasting time with performative PRs.

pards··on Why your outdoorsy friend suddenly has a gummy bear power bank
There are better options out there. I recently bought the INIU 10,000mAh 22.5W powerbank from Amazon for $29.69 CAD [0].

It weighs 205g/7.2oz.

[0]: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09176JCKZ

pards··on At a Loss for Words: A flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)
Summary: The current system of 3 cues (pictures, context, syntax) is ineffective because kids don't actually read the words. SIPPS is a better way.

> Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS.24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.

pards··on Researchers map where solar energy delivers the biggest climate payoff
> In some areas, such as California, Florida, the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, Texas and the Southwest, small increases in solar were estimated to deliver large CO2 reductions, while in others, such as New England, the central U.S., and Tennessee, impacts were found to be minimal
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