Yeah, I’ve filled 256GB pretty easily by recording on an action camera all day, maybe for a couple of days. 4TB would be very convenient for a holiday.

Yeah and this still wouldn’t cover something like xz-utils because I would only be aware of end user projects and not the libraries behind them. I’d have to draw up entire dependency graphs.

Now run an emulator within an emulator for extra acceleration.

Ah, maybe one of my experiences isn’t common. Mine started after a benefit was added and somehow not reported, which probably was my employer’s fault but I didn’t get anywhere with them. Reporting it seemed to clear it up.

I have had it where a second employer totally messed up which just involved waiting until April. Then another where a previous employer failed to produce a P45 and I just had to push them for it. Those are probably more common and, you’re right, the hotline didn’t help.

I’ve been at a small company where I’ve overheard directors talk about how they purposely didn’t produce a P45 out of spite of someone leaving. It relies on good faith far too much and is confusing to navigate.

This would really suck if you were put onto emergency tax, which temporarily takes away your tax free allowance.

The government would temporarily take £209.50 a month extra while the useless chat bot would be unable to help. After 6 months you’d be short by £1,257 which, for some, would be devastating.

If you don’t already, use version control (git or otherwise) and try to write useful messages for yourself. 99% of the time, you won’t need them, but you’ll be thankful that 1% of the time. I’ve seen database engineers hack something together without version control and, honestly, they’d have looked far more professional if we could see recent changes when something goes wrong. It’s also great to be able to revert back to a known good state.

Also, consider writing unit tests to prove your code does what you think it does. This is sometimes more useful for code you’ll use over and over, but you might find it helpful in complicated sections where your understanding isn’t great. Does the function output what it should or not? Start from some trivial cases and go from there.

Lastly, what’s the nature of the code? As a developer, I have to live with my decisions for years (unless I switch jobs.) I need it to be maintainable and reusable. I also need to demonstrate this consideration to colleagues. That makes classes and modules extremely useful. If you’re frequently writing throwaway code for one-off analyses, those concepts might not be useful for you at all. I’d then focus more on correctness (tests) and efficiency. You might find your analyses can be performed far quicker if you have good knowledge about data structures and algorithms and apply them well. I’ve personally reworked code written by coworkers to be 10x more efficient with clever usage of data structures. It might be a better use of your time than learning abstractions we use for large, long-term applications.

I really liked how coupling is described as “knowing.” I find we talk about “does x need to know about y?” more than we do “is x overly coupled to y?” because the former is a relatable indicator of the latter.

I was going to say that Cloudflare uses nginx but I found that’s no longer true.

F5 is American, they just had a Moscow office.

However the creator of nginx, Igor Sysoev, is Russian.

I use a UK keyboard, | is pretty easy to access and $ is Shift+4.

I’m guessing you mean more exotic keyboards. I’ve used a Swedish keyboard while helping a friend and I had to ask where every key was. You probably just learn the combinations eventually.

I feel like this is overlooked far too often. I rarely see anyone use data structures outside of (array) list and hash table and any attempt to use something descriptive of the problem is often shot down because of “familiarity,” which is sort of self-fulfilling.

I get away with flagging lists which should be sets, though.

This isn’t acceptable. If it’s important to the government, then all the more reason to hold them to account. This whole scandal makes a mockery of software engineering as if there is no way to ensure quality.

I work on software arguably less critical than this, in that it’s never been used to prosecute anyone, yet any discrepancy in numbers is found by QA, understood and duly fixed. Why can’t we demand the same from software which the outputs of can and are used as evidence in court? Why is it acceptable for them to say “it was too costly?”

Dual Core - For Aaron

Yeah, it’s pretty understandable to associate telemetry with wrongdoing. There’s been so much of it that it’s easier to switch it off.

There’s a lot of useful, non-personal data they have legitimate reason to collect. Namely, app profiling data for profile-guided optimization which can improve the performance of the browser by analyzing how it runs on actual devices.

The biggest issue most people have with it is the dynamic DNS feature, which is automatically enabled and contacts their server to create the record. If you turn this off before connecting the router to the internet, you’re probably good.

The simplified DoH client also only allows either Cloudflare or NextDNS, which aren’t the most privacy-oriented options. Still, it’s possible to set up your own.

Otherwise I’ve never heard of anything major; the devices are cheap and reliable. I’ve had one running constantly for years and only had to reboot it manually once.

Where did you get 100 from? I’m just asking if it’s a real limit or a guess at “some manageable number” under one million.

It can be worth experimenting and tuning this value. You might even find that less than 100 works better.

I agree. I use Proton and I have exactly one service which supports GPG. It’s a cherry on top but it’s not all that useful.

The big thing is to use a trustworthy service that you pay for. It’s not bulletproof but at least the incentive is there to keep your email private and away from advertisers.

I’d be pulled up at my job for any PR exceeding a few hundred lines. I don’t even know what they’d do if I just dropped a 15000 line stinker.

Funny, that’s in line with the $1 a year WhatsApp was going to charge.

Sounds like just $5 will pay for me and 4 others, so that’s nice.

Nice to know, I was pretty sure my experience was purely anecdotal.