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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.

    Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.

    The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).

    Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.

    Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.

    It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.



  • Nvidia drivers don’t tend to be as performant under linux.

    With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.

    Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.

    Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.

    Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.

    AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).

    The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of “Nvidia optimised” games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce “good” vulkan calls.


  • This advice isn’t grounded in reality.

    Management normally defines ways to track and judge itself, these are typically called Key Performance Indicators.

    KPI’s are normally things like contract value growth, new contracts signed, profit margin, etc…

    So if the project manager is meeting or exceeding their KPI’s and you walk up to their boss telling them the PM is failing as basic job functions, the boss won’t care.

    This is because the boss might have set the KPI’s or the boss might also be judged on them. In either situation its to the bosses advantage to ignore you.

    The boss will only care if there is a KPI you can demonstrate the PM failing to meet.

    Every person/group will have various incentives and motivations. To affect change you have to understand what they are.



  • A project manager has responsibility for delivery of a project but they typically lack domain specific knowledge. As a result they can’t directly deliver something, merely ask subject matter experts for advice and facilitate a team to deliver.

    Most PM’s cope with the stress of this position poorly.

    This cartoon is an example of micro management (a common coping mechanisim), the manager has involved themselves in the low level decisions because that gives a sense of control. If a technical team then tell them its a bad decison the team are effectively attacking their coping mechanisim.

    The solution isn’t to tell them their technical idea is terrible, when you’ve fallen down this rabbit hole you have to treat the PM as a stakeholder. They are someone you have to manage, so a common solution is to give them confidence there is a path to delivery, a way to track and understand it.


  • I have always had 1 question.

    In voyager we see the Borg have thousands of ships of varying sizes and control a vast area of space. Voyager is able to take down spheres and small cubes.

    Yet in Wolf 359 a single cube attacks and destroys hundreds of star fleet vessels. If a single cube is able to have that level of effect why didn’t the borg commit a larger fleet?

    You have the same issue in First Contact, they only commit 1 cube.

    Considering how difficult the federation finds holding them back, attacking with 3-6 cubes would seemto assure victory


  • During the pandemic I had some unoccupied python graduates I wanted to teach data engineering to.

    Initially I had them implement REST wrappers around Apache OpenNLP and SpaCy and then compare the results of random data sets (project Gutenberg, sharepoint, etc…).

    I ended up stealing a grad data scientist because we couldn’t find a difference (while there was a difference in confidence, the actual matches were identical).

    SpaCy required 1vCPU and 12GiB of RAM to produce the same result as OpenNLP that was running on 0.5 vCPU and 4.5 GiB of RAM.

    2 grads were assigned a Spring Boot/Camel/OpenNLP stack and 2 a Spacy/Flask application. It took both groups 4 weeks to get a working result.

    The team slowly acquired lockdown staff so I introduced Minio/RabbitMQ/Nifi/Hadoop/Express/React and then different file types (not raw UTF-8, but what about doc, pdf, etc…) for NLP pipelines. They built a fairly complex NLP processing system with a data exploration UI.

    I figured I had a group to help me figure out Python best approach in the space, but Python limitations just lead to stuff like needing a Kubernetes volume to host data.

    Conversely none of the data scientists we acquired were willing to code in anything but Python.

    I tried arguing in my company of the time there was a huge unsolved bit of market there (e.g. MLOP’s)

    Alas unless you can show profit on the first customer no business would invest. Which is why I am trying to start a business.



  • I don’t think its aged well.

    This game looked incredible for the time and introduced a rail gun sniper rifle you could one shot kill people with.

    This map let you camp out and be a sniper but it was possible to overwhelm the sniper so the game stayed fluid and teams had to support their sniper.

    Quake, HL2 Deathmatch, Counterstrike had similar weapons but quickly filled with people who could launch themselves 100ft in the air and headshot someone half a map away through a window which is why single shot weapons faded out of FPS games.

    If you try multiplayer on some of these games, the skill level of opponents is even higher, they know every trick and execute them flawlessly. This destroys the reason the map was so good.

    Playing the sniper in 4 player borderlands story is probably the closest you would get to the original experience.


  • Tesla actually market it as a positive.

    Car manufacturers have to setup different manufacturing lines to provide different feature levels. Tesla argue this makes them more expensive. Tesla cars have all features installed, just disabled and the optional extra packages are cheaper compared to their rivals as a result.

    To be honest there is a certain logic, if you’ve ever been in a Ford Focus LX (bottom range) its pretty clear they had to spend quite a bit of money on more basic systems. I honestly thought each LX was sold at a loss


  • It never quite finds its grove.

    Season 1, 2 & 3 all had fantastic premises I would have loved 7 seasons of but were all unrelated and concluded within a season.

    Season 4 actually demonstrates the missed opportunity, they deal with the fall out of season 3

    For example if you think of the scene set in “A Vulkan Hello”, you would have ended up with an Action focussed version of DS9.

    You didn’t need a spore drive, Jason Isaacs could have stayed the same and we could still have watched scientists struggle to become soliders with the war causing the type of fall out we see in Season 4.





  • The big argument for mono repos is checking out multiple repositories is “hard” while checking out one repository is “easy” but…

    Service Oriented Architecture became a thing because monolithic code bases were often becoming spaghetti. I worked on a project where removing an option from a preference window (max map zoom), broke a message table (because the number of visible rows in a table (not its size in the UI) was linked to the max zoom you supplied to a map library, for no reason).

    Thus the idea you should wrap everything you do as a self contained service, with a known interface. The idea being you could write an entirely new implementation of a service, implement the interface and everything would work. Microservices are a continuation of this idea.

    Yet every node/python based mono repo I have seen will have python files directly imported filed from inside anouther component/service. Not simply common aretfacts but all sorts of random parts. Subverting the concept of micro service (and recreating the problem).

    Separate repositories block this because each repository will be built in isolation on a CI, flagging the link. This forces you to release each repository and pull things in as a dependency. Which encourages you to design code to support that.

    A common monorepo problem is to shove everything in a docker image and call it a day. Then if you need a class from one monorepo in anouther one, you don’t have an artefacts so lazy devs just copy/paste files between monorepos.

    Monorepos aren’t bad practice by themselves, they encourage bad practice. Separate repositories encourage good practice (literally the need to manage them separately drives it).