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That’s because big developers drip feed the houses onto the market…

Agreed, Thats why the planning system needs to change.

If you dump 100 new houses onto a small town you will cause a crash.

My town has a population of 15000 people, ~250 houses are sold per year and there is a development with permission to build ~400 new homes.

They get away with drip feeding because there’s no competition, because it’s really hard to get permission.

A simpler planning system would allow smaller developers to operate and they would buy, build and sell as fast as they can.

The reason big developers drip feed is that they have 100 identical houses in the pipeline so they don’t want the price to drop at all, because it affects the price of the houses in the pipeline.

The small developer sells quickly so that the cash is available for their next project.

Coming up with good French grammar quizzes. GPT5.6 is noticeably better.

Older models usually pitch the difficulty too hard/easy and rely on me remembering the gender of words.

I’ve not noticed a big programming improvement with the newer models.

Agreed. All racism is wrong. Would you like to take back your “And rightfully so” comment, where you support explicitly racist laws?

There are lots of white South Africans. I believe musk is one. Starlink is majority owned by a South African.

The law isn’t about foreign/doneatic. It’s about black/white.

Increasingly this state authorised racism is now extending to black people. The violent ethnic cleansing against black Milawians by black South Africans is terrifying.

Good programmers write code that’s so simple and obvious it looks like anyone could have written it.

Bad programmers make the simplest things really complicated.

Installing AC feels like admitting defeat. 30 years ago we thought we could stop this thing. Our world leaders came together, listened to scientists and agreed targets.

Sadly we failed. Now I’m going to have to buy AC and make an even bigger contribution to global warming.

Most people should have learned at a young age that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I’m fairly sure that there are no lions in my house. Lions are quite large and I’m capable of detecting lion sized objects with my eyes.

To demonstrate that something is not present you first define the object, then come up with a test that will reliably detect the object. If the test comes back negative then the object is not there.

In a strict philosophical sense I cannot prove that there are no lions in my house, the external world might not exist! A hypothesis that no one has thought of might be correct and that hypothesis could show that there are invisible lions in my house!

However I intend to act with the certainty that there are no lions in my house. Because I have no evidence of lions in my house.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Guidance in the UK is that you always attempt CPR with children and continue it until you get to hospital. This is mostly for the family. They have the knowledge that you did everything you could, and when the child is pronounced dead in hospital the family have a lot of support available in the hospital setting.

I think there will be a 50%-80% reduction in social media use by teens. This is good enough.

There will always be people who get round the ban.

If you are unable to empathise with people who support the ban and dismiss them (and me) as idiots then your political action is unlikely to be successful.

Every dad I know who works in tech supports some kind of restriction on social media/smartphones for kids. The argument is how to do it, not whether we should.

You’re taking my argument to it’s extreme and giving it the least charitable interpretation.

I want it to not be normal to spend all day on TikTok. If something is illegal and underground then it’s much easier for me as a parent to ban it for my kids

Most parents will take that over letting HS Tikky Tokky have access to their 14 year old boy.

These laws exist because social media is extremely damaging to children, destroying their attention, exposing them to online bullying and extortion, and showing them horrific and traumatic content.

Can anyone suggest a better way of protecting kids, other than age verification?

People without teenagers often say that parents can restrict phone access and use parental controls. In reality most parents don’t do this because it’s very hard to get a teenager to accept something that is not “normal” in their friend group.

In a trade off between child protection and online freedom child protection will win.

CPAP machines require a prescription in the UK.

https://www.hope2sleep.co.uk/cpap-machines-sleep-apnoea.html

Amazon is breaking the law by shipping one to you. I suspect there is very little enforcement of this law, which is why Amazon is unknowingly breaking it.

My experience with this is that contract is usually better paid than perm, so when it comes time to convert to perm I am not willing to take the pay cut so I go contract somewhere else, or remain with them as a repeat contractor.

HR usually stops my clients from hiring me perm at 2X the rate they pay their full time employees, despite the strong demonstration of competence that I’ve shown over the last few months.

My clients are usually unable to make permanent employment with them more appealing than repeat contracting with them.

Because that would be a big pay cut for the friend. Contract day rates are higher than FTE day rates.

Solution for who? Everyone with power in this situation wants to keep the building valuations artificially inflated.

If local people want shops on their high street then the only real solution is incredibly agressive fines for vacant commercial spaces.

Loan to Value (LTV) is a percentage that tells you how safe a loan is. You divide the amount of the loan by the value of the building. So if I buy a building for 10 million with a 6 million loan and 4 million of my own money then I have an LTV of 60%.

This means if I go bankrupt then the bank can sell the building and get its money back.

If the value of the building halves because the rent halved then I have a 6 million loan on a 5 million building. My LTV is 120%. The bank cannot get its money back by selling the building.

No bank is going to give me a loan on a property with an LTV of 120% so I’m stuck with my current bank. My current bank then increases my interest rate because I am now a very high risk customer who can’t leave. This is very expensive for me.

One way out of this situation is to get my LTV back to 60% which means I need to reduce the loan to 3 million by finding 3 million to pay off part of the loan.

Another way out is to sell the building for 5 million then pay the bank one million, exiting the deal with a loss of 1 million.

None of these are good for me. I’ll do anything to keep the value of the building high by charging high rents even if no one can actually pay the rents and the building sits empty.

Long term I might be able to exit by getting permission to convert it to flats.

Cool idea, I tapped the vehicles / heavy equipment tabs expecting to be taken to listings. Nothing happened. Maybe these should all take you to a page that lets you sign up to see listings?

Genuine question, why is this a tell? It looks like good dramatic writing to me.

I like the Single responsibility part of SOLID. It makes the code much easier to reason about. The Liskov Substitution principle is also super important. Subclasses should fully replace the parent class.

The I and O of solid are fine and don’t cause too many problems.

But I agree that Dependency Inversion is a recipe for loads of pointless interfaces that are only ever used once. I strongly prefer the traditional pattern where high level modules depend on lower level modules, it’s much simpler.

I think it would be better as SOIL not SOLID.

Maybe they could have replaced the D with DRY…

Normally there are more than 2 actors, which changes the reward structure.

X spends resources to kill Y. This benefits X because X doesn’t have to compete with Y anymore.

However Z also gets the benefits because they don’t have to compete with Y either. In addition Z hasn’t spent any resources to eliminate Y so Z wins. The stable equilibrium is 100% strategy Z.

Most animals will use violence in self defence, or when fighting over a specific resource. They don’t kill to remove competition.

Chimps and humans are an exception to this. Likely it’s because the coalitional nature of human and chimp violence reduces the cost of inflicting the violence to near zero, and the costs are spread across the group, so it’s worth doing.

Cells are very complicated, bus so are numbers, and LLMs. There’s clearly more complexity in the brain, but I think we’ll get there.

I’m curious why you dismiss the sentience argument with its “just numbers.”

I think our brains are just a bunch of cells and one day we will have a full understanding of how our brains work. Understanding the mechanism won’t suddenly make us not sentient.

LLMs are the first technology that can make a case for its own sentience. I think that’s pretty remarkable.

Would you mind sharing the tariff name and company?

Making parents control devices is too much. People do what’s “normal” right now normal is to give unrestricted access to kids when they’re 10 or 11.

It takes incredible conviction and force of will to keep your kids off the phone till they’re 16. Fewer than 1% of parents manage it. The problem is that the teenager wants a thing that everyone else has and it’s hard to keep saying no.

I think internet connected smartphones should be illegal for kids under 16 to own or use. It’s a tough sell tho.

It’s the same order of magnitude, allowing people to mentally budget zero time for a charge.