mpettitt

Including developer tooling in a Docker image is missing one of the really useful things about Docker: not needing all that stuff. By using a multi-stage build, you can do all the slow dev stuff at image build time, then only include the output in the image, and that includes things like building a library which wants a different set of conditions to build than your application wants to run.

It also adds an additional level of risk - if your image is compromised, but all that is running in it is your app, oh well. If it's compromised, and it's able to call out to other parts of your stack (yes, some of this is down to the specific deployment process), that's much worse.

I recently bought a WD Red HDD drive for my NAS direct from WD, and it arrived in a crushed box. Now, things do get damaged in transit, but I don't want to install a drive, start using it, then get errors which were caused by damage which occurred before I even got it.

I sent the customer support team an email asking them to confirm that the level of box damage seen wouldn't affect the drive, or alternatively to provide a return label and replacement drive. Their response was "try it out, and if it fails, we'll replace it".

Having seen quite a few stories like this about WD and sub brands, I'm tempted to just return it for a refund and go elsewhere...

Some of these don't look like checkboxes at all, and wouldn't trigger any indication that they could be changed. For example, if I saw number 44 next to a line of text, I'd think "that must be something not available for some reason" rather than "I could click that to choose it". Same with 50 and 26 (that's a stop sign!) - they look like bullet points.

Some of the others are pretty nice though!

Ever read "The Machine Stops" by EM Forster? Over 100 years old, and it's got Facebook style interactions!

Well, according to "The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O" (Neal Stephenson and Nicole Garland), it was all about magic!

Was going to mention Interface! It's very much Cambridge Analytica vibes - you feel that there are teams as described doing pretty much the same things, just without the direct brain interface.

Personally, I think Anathem is the best of his works, although I enjoyed DODO - the sequel, which he wasn't directly involved with was less good though.

Kind of. I picture it as being a function of input to output, so if the input changes, the output does too, but the output change is based on what changes have been made by the player.

E.g. if you have a hospital which can handle X patients per day and has a reputation of 90 when doing so, increasing the number of patients to 2x would probably decrease the reputation. You don't need to model the full hospital to determine this though, just have a "max patients" value which, when exceeded, puts a fractional multiplier on the output.

Yes, I imagined that a component could provide some inputs (e.g. Grain) and outputs (e.g. Bread) with some default link between the two, and that would apply to all instances of that component within the world, unless a player took control of an instance and modified the behaviour. The nice thing there is that backing out of the instance allows for a different link between input and output to be created, without needing to simulate the full process.

Everything sim. You start with, say, Sim City. You find that your rail network isn't working properly, so you switch contexts to a kind of Transport Tycoon style game, where you can optimise the train schedules and destinations. You realise that the factory you're delivering stuff to is struggling, so you switch context to a Factorio style optimisation game. You realise that the inputs to the factory aren't pure enough, so you switch context to an Opus Magnum/SpaceChem style atomic manipulation game. You zoom back out, and find that your hospitals are struggling too. Context switch to a Theme Hospital/Two Point Hospital style sim. You need medicines, so switch to a Big Pharma drug production sim. You can optimise the machines here with the same interface as you used for the factory. Zoom out a bit, and you can see a football stadium, with the option to switch to a football management game, or to jump into a game and start playing directly. You zoom out again, and are now looking at a country where your city/region is just one part. You can context switch to a country management game. Keep going out, and you realise you're on a planet, so start working on a space program. Keep going out, and you can build a Dyson swarm and get some interplanetary government vibes going, all while being able to zoom back in on any part.

Pretty sure my original concept was for this not to be a single game so much as a common interface for basically every other game, where unoptimised parts work, but aren't great, passing a kind of middle-of-the-range set of values whenever queried. By linking multiple games together, you'd be able to control everything.

Nice - although the coverage locally is a bit spotty (I'm not talking missing shows, I'm talking missing theatres!).

I have a 5yo and play a wide range of games with her. She has various "learning games" from Orchard Toys. She has some junior versions of various mainstream games (e.g. Scrabble, Dobble) and junior versions of more gamer type games (e.g. Ticket to Ride: First Journey, Catan Junior, Concept Kids). She's got some (ok, a lot) of Pokémon cards, including the Battle Academy sets which give 3 roughly balanced decks for about £20, which give a decent introduction to the game. She can also play various other gamer type games - Zooloreto, full size Ticket to Ride, Thunderbirds co-op game, Kingdomino, etc.

Also have a 3yo who is awesome at Dragonimo and likes joining in with things like Uno.

I'm pretty sure the key thing is to teach kids that games are supposed to be fun and that there are a lot of options. There are games on my shelves which I don't plan to introduce them to for a while yet, but mostly because they are a bit too dry (hard to get kids interested in some themes) or require a bit too much in the way of reading without your opponent helping, but I'm sure they'll get introduced eventually!

This is such a good point. I've been pushing back for quite a while, and have generally had a positive response where the company revises the contract wording to a more acceptable level.

I feel that the principle of least privilege would be a good point for employment contracts to start, rather than the current approach of "try get control over everything employee might think of whilst employed, even if it's during their own time and unrelated to the business"

If you link to a page, whatever text you put in as the body of the link will remain. The link itself won't go anywhere, but the content you have added to it will remain. In this case, it's as if the link text also vanished when the target page vanishes.

That would be an interesting solution to link rot, admittedly - lots of older pages which are just empty lists formerly containing links to now defunct websites!

I was looking at this a couple of weeks ago, and compared to some alternatives (e.g. opencti) it seemed a lot less polished. It was still easier to get running than Cortex though, at least for a basic look.

The keyboard only shows the top four boards though!

I've recently switched from using a 15 or 17 inch laptop along with a 27 inch curved screen to a 13 inch laptop with a pair of 28 inch 4k flat screens, and am really liking it. I run Linux, and have various gnome extensions to allow for quick placement - main browser, second browser window for Comms stuff, slack, terminal, ide, etc. Combined with a dual monitor stand allowing me to grab a screen and move it closer for particular tasks, or further away for calls, and USB webcam and microphone for calls so people aren't looking at the side of my head while I'm watching them on a bigger screen, and it's a really productive setup.

No, they like @gmail.com, but don't want people getting gmail for their own domains without paying.

Historically, they've not been able to migrate purchases from g suite to Gmail - I've been asking on roughly an annual basis for the last 5 years. I really hope they are going to change that, although I don't buy much anymore thanks to a phone with very little app storage space.

Another alternative look at the Frozen story is in Disney's Twisted Tales version ( https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Conceal,_Don%27t_Feel_(A_Twis... ) which shows an alternative way that the parents could have dealt with the situation. Still not ideal, but better that the canon version in terms of the mental impacts on various characters!

From looking at the news, the US seems far poorer in day-to-day terms. For example, searching "living in cars" then "uk" or "usa" gives some results for each. The UK ones mostly talk about "hundreds forced to live in cars", while the USA ones often mention "thousands living in cars in California". The GDP of the UK and of California are pretty similar (around $2.8 trillion in 2019).

I would like to see simulation games which work together. For example, combining a transport simulator, a city simulator, a production simulator and a theme park simulator. You build a quarry which digs up clay, and another which produces coal, create bricks, use the bricks to build houses in a village, expand the village, find you need a glassworks, connect your villages together and handle trading between them with a transport system...

An idea I've had bouncing around for 20+ years was a variation on Transport Tycoon where you could "zoom in" on towns/farms and play them as if you were in Sim City/Sim Farm, or "zoom out" to connect to other regions run by other players, with trading or even combat. A universal format for "simulation stuff" would mean you could have it extensible, so you could have a dedicated farming simulator if you wanted, else it would be treated as a box with an average output, with the same logic applying to sub-elements, so if someone wants to micro-optimise a plowing algorithm, they can have a "plow management" simulator which plugs into the farming simulator, which plugs into the transport simulator. At the other extreme, someone who was only interested in country level trading could have the country outputs boxed based on an average level of output.

Might be too complex for any one player to handle everything, but even so!

You mean https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Prog... ?

Matt Haig's "The Humans" talks about humanity finding the answer to the Riemann Hypothesis being feared universally - it's simultaneously very important to the plot, and a convenient MacGuffin.

It's definitely on the label of my daily medication (in the UK), but it was interesting to see how the interaction seems to be fairly specific to grapefruit. Do either of the ancestor species have a similar effect?

I do wonder if there are other dietary/medication interactions that we simply haven't spotted, but which could allow for lower doses of medication (potentially with fewer side effects, if the effect was on one active component) or simply avoid some side effects altogether.

I suspect it may relate to the way it accesses other executable file directories - it scans for the RCT2 data files, which are in another executables folder structure, so rather than just sticking to the install folder and the shared documents area, it's looking at other files, which could reasonably trigger a virus scanner looking for "weird" behaviour.

It's important to note that while there are a lot of skills which can be useful, it's fairly rare to find a job which requires them all.

For example, if you have a mobile application specialist, they probably don't need to worry about, say, VLAN configuration on a regular basis. It's quite likely that even if they do know it, the lack of use will result in them not showing that knowledge well in an interview situation. If you give them a few hours and an internet connection, though, they may well be able to refamiliarise themselves easily. Alternatively, you just need to hire someone who specialises in network architecture and segregation - this does rely on the person doing the hiring to know vaguely what they need, though, which is not always the case.

I work in the industry, and there are people who are well known as experts in specific fields, but who I would never expect to be able to do some other aspects of my job, just as I would struggle to do things they can do without any difficulty.

I think the cyber security industry is at the stage where the web was 15-20 years ago, where a company would hire a "webmaster" who did all the web related stuff, rather than getting a combination of people in different roles each specialising in one area. It's slowly getting better, but it's still common for companies to look for a jack of all trades security person, rather than getting the specific knowledge they need.

It seems to be a very uniquely American game - being from the UK, I've never seen a copy in person.

From what I can tell, I'm not missing much - I think my kids would hate it, since they're happily playing Ticket to Ride and Splendor already.

It does make me wonder if there are equivalent "ubiquitous" games in other countries, that are essentially unknown outside of that country - can't think of one for the UK, although I suppose you could find regions where Merrills was universally known and played.

My 3yo daughter can handle Ticket to Ride First Journey, and even now knows some of the city names (we actually have a German edition, since I couldn't find an English one at a sensible price). It plays a bit quicker than the full version, so tends to hold her attention longer.

The Aurora Rising books by Alistair Reynolds are set in an environment where this is the case. Basically the only automatic right is that to have a vote.

As someone in the UK, it seems insane that cutting off domestic water is even allowed. It's considered a basic right, and even during droughts, the water companies have to supply a basic level to everyone. (https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/water/water-suppl...)

You can cut off water to commercial premises for non payment, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.