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

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  • I have a Model 3 at the moment. I’ve had it for almost 5 years and it’s generally been great - cheap to run, quiet and comfortable on longer trips but still fun to drive on back roads.

    Recently it had its first major breakdown, and although Tesla service did manage to take care of it, it’s got me browsing for new EVs - but now, buying a Tesla is not the foregone conclusion it once might have been.

    First, they have been making some truly stupid design choices in their latest facelifts (deleting the indicator stalks and gear selector).

    Second, their CEO has now gone completely mask-off fascist.

    Third - after a few years for the competition to catch up, we now have genuine alternatives from other marques which are just as good if not better EVs than Tesla’s offerings.

    I think my next car will likely be a Polestar 2.


  • I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.

    It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.

    Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.

    Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.












  • Not exactly crazy but just mysterious…this was at a software company I worked at many years ago. It was one of the developers in the team adjacent to ours who I worked with occasionally - nice enough person, really friendly and helpful, everyone seemed to get on with them really well and generally seemed like a pretty competent developer. Nothing to suggest any kind of gross misconduct was happening.

    Anyway, we all went off to get lunch one day and came back to an email that this person no longer worked at the company, effective immediately. Never saw them again.

    No idea what went down - but the culture at that place actually became pretty toxic after a while, which led to a few people (including me) quitting - so maybe they dodged a bullet.



  • I quit my last job because management wanted us back into the office at first one, then two, then three days a week - all so that we had to commute into an office pointlessly and then either spend the entire day on Teams calls, or just sit at desks writing exactly the same code that we would have at home.

    When I accepted my new role, I made very sure that my contract of employment was explicitly set up for full time remote work only.

    I wish the best of luck to anyone attempting the same switch at the moment, the job market in general (and especially in tech) is in a crazy situation at the moment.


  • In Voyager, he’s shown to have pips. In fact, switching him over to Command mode shows a deliberate animation of pips showing up on hid collar.

    The EMH is never shown with pips on Voyager. The “ECH” was shown with pips appearing on its first appearance, however:

    spoiler

    The entire ECH subroutine was created as the result of The Doctor’s daydreaming, so the visualisation of a rank appearing out of thin air makes sense in that context.

    The only other time the ECH mode was used in a genuine emergency (Season 7, Episodes 16/17), he did not have pips.


  • There was an entire TNG episode (Season 6, Episode 12) whose plot centered around this:

    spoiler

    Moriarty was reactivated by mistake, and took the ship hostage, demanding to be able to leave the holodeck.

    Geordi and Data spent half the episode experimenting with beaming (inanimate) holographic objects off the holodeck, to no avail. With that said:

    spoiler

    Their transporter turned out to be a holographic fake (and so was Geordi), so who knows if the results were valid.



  • Even without an official rank, on Voyager he was still considered a Department Head and (more importantly) the CMO, which gave significant authority (even exceeding the Captain on certain medical matters), regardless of whether or not he was ever given any pips. The same thing would likely apply on subsequent postings.

    If he ever had to be assigned a rank for clerical/administrative purposes, it would probably be the default required rank for a Starfleet CMO candidate for the class of ship he was serving on.


  • I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

    To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

    Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.