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Merad

2,734 karmajoined 11 years ago

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Merad
·8 days ago·discuss
The average car in the US is about 13 years old. Just like with phones, some people upgrade every few years even though it's a poor financial decision. Many frugal or less wealthy people only buy used cars and drive them until they die.
Merad
·9 days ago·discuss
Serious electric aircraft are really gated behind major advancements in battery technology or some alternative power storage tech. The energy density of batteries is an order of magnitude less than fossil fuels, and you have to carry the heavy batteries with you the entire trip (vs burning off fuel as you fly).
Merad
·21 days ago·discuss
It was built in 1898, for starters.
Merad
·26 days ago·discuss
Are you trying to split it with an axe? You need a sledgehammer and a few splitting wedges. The sledge lets you apply a lot more force than an axe and striking the wedge focuses that force onto a small area. The first wedge will open a crack, then you use additional wedges to expand that crack until she splits.

Source: grew up in a wood burning family, helped split many stubborn hardwood trees (all by hand).
Merad
·last month·discuss
> I enforce CC on my projects because I don’t have the energy to police horrendous commit messages.

And does it actually accomplish that goal? I've been on several projects where someone pushed CC on the team with this reasoning. Every time my experience has been that you get the same crappy messages with a tag that may or may not be accurate.

BTW, AI absolutely knows how to bypass pre-commit hooks and will do so when they come up with some reasoning why their situation is an exception to the rule. I've watched them do it. The only way I've found to strictly enforce things on an agent (tests, linting, whatever) is to use a claude pre-command hook that will block git commit if the checks don't pass.
Merad
·last month·discuss
> Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will

Absolutely not harmless if you're the executor of an estate forced to deal with a screwed up AI will. I just handler my dad's estate this spring. It's a frustrating and confusing process even with the simplest of estates.
Merad
·2 months ago·discuss
Not 100% sure if you're serious, but it's a piece of Hershey Kisses candy which predates the existence of emojis by at least a century.
Merad
·2 months ago·discuss
Basically all modern fighters since the 1980s are aerodynamically unstable and require a computer to fly. A collision like this is almost certainly going to do major damage to the airframe (screwing up its aerodynamics) and maybe flight controls as well. I suspect the plane will be well outside the parameters that the flight controls software can deal with, making stable flight impossible.
Merad
·2 months ago·discuss
You aren't wrong, but the _overwhelming_ majority of "full stack" devs I've worked with only know CSS at the most basic level and have little interest in learning it in depth. I myself have been programming for more than 20 years, doing web dev for almost 15, and I can't find the motivation to learn it well. There are too many technical skills to keep up with and CSS is pretty low down on my priority list. I would prefer to rely on specialists who are experts but companies aren't willing to hire dedicated front end devs.
Merad
·2 months ago·discuss
I've been in a similar situation as the GP. 15 years ago my first job after college was at a large Fortune 500 building LOB apps. The company was full of departments that were run entirely out of a massive Excel spreadsheet (hundreds of MB or more), or better yet a totally custom thing built on Access97 and VB made by a guy who retired 10 years ago. More than a few of the people in these departments had been in the same job for 20+ years and literally done the job the same way the whole time. Our mandate was not to modernize their business processes or make them friendly to automation, it was literally to indulge their stupid whims. But at least at the end they would be on an app where IT had access to the source code, could ensure databases were backed up, etc.
Merad
·2 months ago·discuss
> intelligent autocomplete

I'm curious how much value others are finding in this. Personally I turned it off about a year ago and went back to traditional (jetbrains) IDE autocomplete. In my experience the AI suggestions would predict exactly what I wanted < 1% of the time, were useful perhaps 10% of the time, and otherwise were simply wrong and annoying. Standard IDE features allowing me to quickly search and/or browse methods, variables, etc. are far more useful for translating my thoughts into code (i.e. minimizing typing).
Merad
·2 months ago·discuss
Definitely have mixed feelings about whats become of CNN and how the 24 hour news cycle has affected the world, but I'm very grateful that Turner financed the movie Gettysburg [0]. One of my favorite movies, based on one of my favorite books. I've probably seen it at least 50 times.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_(1993_film)
Merad
·2 months ago·discuss
I had a TI-83 in high school and upgraded to a TI-89 for college circa 2002. Used the heck out of those calculators because I did all the math and physics prerequisites for an engineering degree before switching to CS. It also helped me get a B in Linear Algebra thanks to holding a cheat sheet document for the final exam. I had no trouble with the likes of Calculus 3 and differential equations but for some reason the later material in linear algebra didn't click with me.
Merad
·2 months ago·discuss
That's not quite accurate. They have 10 days to issue you a temporary credit if the investigation is going to take more than 10 days. They are willing to issue the credit immediately precisely because it's temporary. If the investigation resolves in your favor the credit becomes permanent and you never know the difference. If it takes more than 30 days - well, I worked with BofA about 15 years ago and saw more than a few customers who ended up with a giant mess because that temporary credit expired after 30 days resulting in a snowball effect of failed payments and NSF charges.
Merad
·2 months ago·discuss
I've been using it for a few months because Copilot was the only AI blessed by our corporate overlords. It's not bad, I would say it's about 80% as capable as Claude Code, which I've used extensively on personal projects. However CC was recently approved, and I'm betting that with these changes to Copilot pricing we'll end up dropping it like a hot potato.
Merad
·3 months ago·discuss
If you're suggesting that the US submarine should have rescued the survivors - with respect I think you don't understand how submarines work. They have no capability to perform rescue operations. They have no way to handle mass numbers of injuries, there's normally just one corpsman (basically a medic) on board. Even if they want to do a rescue operation they have no place to put them. Subs barely have room for their own crew; typically 2 or even 3 sailors share the same bed.
Merad
·4 months ago·discuss
The situation with the ambulance service is obviously disgusting and immoral in a civilized society. But the article fails to address the elephant in the room - her chief complaint was severe pain in her knees due to RA. If she had been taken to the ER she almost certainly would've been given some short term pain meds and sent home unless she was showing some very obvious signs of cardiac issues. The system had already failed her because she really needed skilled nursing or assisted living help, being immobile due to chronic disease. It happens all the time. Several years ago my elderly father fractured an ankle - no surgery required, just a boot - and was sent home even though he was unable to stand or walk on his own. Fortunately he had savings and I was able to talk him into paying out of pocket for a stay in rehab (to the tune of about $18,000).

It's also likely that she ended up in this position because she couldn't afford proper treatment of her RA, resulting in it destroying her knees. I also have RA, diagnosed 3 years ago and my treatment costs $15,000 per month. Losing my job and/or having insurance that won't cover it is a terror that knaws at the back of my mind because without the treatment I'll start suffering debilitating symptoms in 3-6 months.
Merad
·4 months ago·discuss
An awful lot of corporate workers are stuck with Copilot as their only approved chat option, so some of them are probably trying to learn how to get the best results they can from it.
Merad
·5 months ago·discuss
I've been working off and on on a vibe coded FP language and transpiler - mostly just to get more experience with Claude Code and see how it handles complex real world projects. I've settled on a very similar flow, though I use three documents: plan, context, task list. Multiple rounds of iteration when planning a feature. After completion, have a clean session do an audit to confirm that everything was implemented per the design. Then I have both Claude and CodeRabbit do code review passes before I finally do manual review. VERY heavy emphasis on tests, the project currently has 2x more test code than application code. So far it works surprisingly well. Example planning docs below -

https://github.com/mbcrawfo/vibefun/tree/main/.claude/archiv...
Merad
·5 months ago·discuss
The RAV4 Prime is extremely hard to get if you live outside of SoCal and maybe a few other areas. I'm in the southeast and a few years ago the local dealer told me that this entire region is only allocated a few Prime's each quarter. Even today I've never seen one in the wild.