rjmunro

Not sure if this counts, but someone I know made a javascript interpreter that runs on ESP32, ported it to a smartwatch and wrote a whole open source operating system. He put it on Kickstarter and reached the goal. He now sells the result, and a second one for a different smartwatch: https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2

There's an app store here: https://banglejs.com/apps/, but all apps are free and open source in a single github repo.

The problem with that is you might still get a huge bill if something goes wrong, then they try to charge it to your card at the end of the day/week/month/whatever, and it fails.

Now you still owe them the money, but haven't paid, so they tell you to pay on another card. If you refuse, they start debt collection against you and you could end up with your credit rating being affected, and maybe court cases and so on.

I want give the company an amount of money, then know that it's run out and I have to pay for more. You can set monthly limits (https://github.com/settings/billing/budgets), but if you are like me and have personal projects that you work on for a week or two a few times a year, that doesn't really work.

My experience of vibe coding is that the agent makes as many mistakes as me, it just types faster than I do. So using the most safe and typed language possible is still a good idea.

Also I want to understand the code as much as possible - sometimes the agent overcomplicates things and I can make suggestions to simplify. But if it's writing in a language only it can understand, that's going to be harder for me.

> solar and wind are now cheaper than hydro in many places.

It's not possible to run a country entirely on wind and solar, you need backup for when it isn't windy or sunny.

It is possible to run a country entirely on Hydro. The lake on a hydro electric dam will last for a while - in some cases several months - between needing to be topped up by rainfall.

It's not a database, it's just files. And they are hosted by Cloudflare so they can cope with a lot of downloads.

I think he should make the files smaller my removing the second half of the hashes, i.e. reduce it from 40 hex digits to 20. This increases the change of a false positive (i.e. I enter my password, it says it was compromised but it wasn't, it just has the same hash as one that did) from 1 in 10^48 to 1 in 10^24 (per password), but that's still a huge number. (There's less than 10^10 people in the world, they only have a few passwords each). This will approximately halve the download, maybe more because the first half of each hash is more compressible (when sorted) the second half is totally random.

I think Microsoft Office 2007 moving to a "ribbon" rather than normal menus and an optional toolbar for certain things was the major break in usability. Mac OS has kept the menus, and added a really useful menu search thing in "help", and this is huge.

I think sublime text was one of the first to bring the TUI style super-powers into the modern desktop UK, where you press some random keyboard shortcut (e.g. cmd-p in sublime) and you can instantly start typing a command.

Another thought I have had for a long time is that when GUIs like Mac and Windows were taking off, they were often described as more "user friendly" than TUIs. I always thought this depended on the kind of user. A lot of effort went into prioritising making it possible for an untrained user to use a system, but making it fast for someone with experience was no longer important.

Why is it that when I travel to certain places I need to ensure my passport has at least n months before it expires? So what if it's due to expire next week if I'm only staying until next week. Even if I'm staying 2 weeks and it expires tomorrow, why does that matter? I guess I might not be allowed back into my home country, but that should be my concern, not the worry of the immigration of the country I am going to.

What kind of illegal immigration / criminal activity does a country prevent, or economic benefit / any other advantage does a country get by enforcing this kind of rule?

If your job is travel, like you are an international truck driver or maybe aircrew, these kinds of things might affect you a lot sometimes.

There's probably special rules for those people in some places, which makes the situation even more complicated.

> The internet seems resilient enough...

The word "seems" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

This. I wouldn't try to instantly failover to another service if AWS had a short outage, but I would plan to be able to recover from a permanent AWS outage by ensuring all your important data and knowledge is backed up off-AWS, preferably to your own physical hardware and having a vague plan of how to restore and bring things up again if you need to.

"Permanent AWS outage" includes someone pressing the wrong button in the AWS console and deleting something important or things like a hack or ransomware attack corrupting your data, as well as your account being banned or whatever. While it does include AWS itself going down in a big way, it's extremely unlikely that it won't come back, but if you cover other possibilities, that will probably be covered too.

You can use mermaid format instead of graphviz, then paste it into a markdown file and github will render it inline.

I'm not sure about this bit:

> As I get to grow compound interest on my money, I will come out much better in the long term.

You will pay the capital gains tax rate either way. Either when you buy 15% less additional shares, or when you sell them at the end and pay the 15% then.

If you start with 15% less and compound it, you still end with 15% less.

(15% is just an example)

You might be placing a bet that at some point in the future there will be a reduction the capital gains rate, but, as far as I can see, you are not earning more due to compounding.

The whole point of owning shares is to share in a company’s profits. In simple terms, you make money through dividends or buybacks. Without that, there’s really no reason to own the stock. Sure, prices go up and down, and you can try to profit from that, but if a company never plans to return money to shareholders, there’s nothing real behind the price. Eventually you’d just be holding on until the company fades away or goes bankrupt.

Buybacks are just another way of giving profits back to shareholders—an alternative to dividends with different tax implications. Their purpose isn't to "allow companies to reward executives directly", they are just an alternative way for shareholders to share in the profits.

A company could tie executives compensation to the amount of dividend if it wanted. That might be a good idea.

The article "Mother Earth, Mother Board" by Neal Stephenson (https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/), written in 1996 says "The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over."

That totally freaked me out when I re-read the article a few years later.

The other way to look at Crowdstrike is that it prevented probably thousands of attacks by ransomware and other adversaries. Then it had a bug which meant you had to visit your computer and manually reboot it, with no data loss or leakage.

Would you rather have to deal with criminals who have invaded your systems wanting ransoms with no guarantee they will restore the data, or not leak private information, or would you rather have to reboot your machines with a complete understanding of what happened and how?

There are boxes that can KVM to multiple servers at a time. You don't need to switch cables. They probably cost similar or less than BMC cards on a per-port basis. You might have to combine with some sort of network boot to set up a machine from scratch.

Another tip: Use `git log --first-parent` and `git log --merges` to hide the intermediate commits. `--first-parent` also works with `blame` in modern git. These mean you don't have to look at all the small commits when browsing history, only when you want to dive in deeper.

I think Elo style rankings would be good for rating e.g. Uber rides and restaurant reviews. Instead of asking to rate out of 5 stars or similar, where everyone basically ends up giving 5 stars, just ask was it better or worse than your last experience.

Is this a common way to use Claude? Is it how Claude desktop normally works?

The share buybacks enable and encourage investors to move their money to invest in other things for the future. That's usually a better idea than e.g. Intel, who know nothing about other wind farms, building their own.

This looks really cool. I'd see it being useful as a headset to talk to camera people and others during a live stream. We already have hardware for this, but if we didn't it would be great.

For my use, I'd like to be able to join and monitor multiple groups at once (cameras, presenters, certain others individually), and select which I talk to (including being able to talk to several or all groups at once).

Another feature idea, if you are out of range, it would be good if there was an option to save the message until you come back and replay it.

  Location: Oxford, UK
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: NodeJS, React, Typescript, Docker, Python, PHP, SQL, Java
  Résumé/CV: https://arjam.net/cv.pdf
  Email: rjmunro@arjam.net

Highly experienced Senior Web Developer with 20+ years of expertise in full-stack development, specialising in Typescript, React, and NodeJS. Seeking a hybrid or remote senior role.

I'm available for immediate start, either local to Oxfordshire, hybrid in the UK, e.g. 1 day per week in London, or fully remote.

I'm most interested in working in live production and video streaming and I have experience that area from volunteering at my church. I'm also interested in net zero and the energy transition, so jobs involving that are also of particular interest to me.

Feel free to book an appointment for an informal chat on https://calendar.app.google/s4aHgFLJHz8eQxPF6

Surely if you ban targeting ads they'd have to catch up the revenue, and that would mean serving you more ads, worse ads and using stronger algorithms to ensure you stay longer. I don't think it makes any difference.

In terms of energy supply, air conditioning works pretty well with solar power. Normally hot days and sunny days are very correlated.

If you are worried about the local heat generated by the air conditioners themselves, there are new coatings and panels that can radiate that heat directly to space, for example https://www.skycoolsystems.com/. Also just removing a few parking spaces and replacing them with green space can help at a city wide level.

Surely it's a performance nightmare because whatever is behind the frosting has to be rendered in full. Without this it can see that it's occluded and not have to render. Or does MacOS not do that?

"Back to the Future: The Ride" was also an Omnimax dome system, but with moving platforms instead of seats. It was installed in 3 locations, with 2 screens at each, so a total of 6 screens.

I'm not sure if any later similar rides used a similar system, (for example Disney's Soarin') or if they are new enough to be digital from the start.

It might be that if they sent you the "here's all we know, please add anything else" thing, people would not add things that costs them more tax, safe in the knowledge that they don't know about it.

But why couldn't they just dedupe the refs from the command line before starting the actual bundling - surely there are never more than a couple of hundred of those (one per branch)?

Don't some internet providers to large scale NAT (CGNAT), so customers each get a 10.x address instead of a public one? I'm not sure if this is a problem or not. It sounds like it could be.

I've made a couple of silly browser games, http://matchmoji.arjam.net and http://matchmoji.arjam.net/minesweeper