Recent content by bigfield

This is giving strong Cult of Personality.

I can see why a BJP shill would be happy about this result. But when your opposition is this weak, there's little motivation for the government to do right by its people. After all, even if the BJP does a bad job, no-one's threatening to replace them any time soon. The best kind of democracy...

Perhaps not your intention, but it's funny that your productivity anecdote is a story about a place that produces nothing.

I wonder how much of this boring document writing is just bullshit work, and whether there's any value in making it more efficient.

If this was a deliberate reversal, then well done. This is exactly the problem with chatbots: They seem really intelligent when they're generating dashboard apps for project managers who can't tell the difference between good code and slop. I think you've got a point about news: most of it is...

I find it's very useful when trying to understand system-related problems, such as narrating the flow of a program executing a command. Once I can tell the story of a system's behaviour in adequate detail, I can often figure out a good way to fix or extend that behaviour. There are probably...

A video about trains in Adelaide:

I see non-biodegradable wet wipes getting banned in future.

It's a bit like watching a vacuum cleaner salesman use his machine to pick up a bowling ball, but he won't let me hold the ball, and all I want to know is whether it'll still be able to get dog hair out of my carpet after a year.

Yeah, vibe coding looks impressive to people who can't actually write and review the code themselves.

I've tried ChatGPT and Claude for plenty of things, and one thing became obvious very quickly: these tools write bullshit with enough confidence to shame a real estate agent. But these AI tools can perform at least one role with satisfactory results: memory aid. At some point you've had a...

When I work from home I get salmon makizushi or banh mi from the local shops. I eat it out of the bag on the walk back home. When I'm in the office I buy something from the street mall. There's a place that does penne bolognese that's probably only as good as I make at home, but just tastes...

I'm not sure what you're thinking of, but it isn't binary and ternary trees.

You can do that with binary computers. Your choice of m in your m-ary tree depends on what you're trying to do with the data structure.

Hopefully no theist points out that only two of those orbital paths have an electron drawn on them.