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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Anything to do with Warhammer 40k after being into it for decades, even playing competitively, going to the big info dump events, weekly gaming with friends, etc.

    I still have all my models, tens of thousands of points in multiple armies, just lost all desire to play with the newer rulesets as they became too simplified and even more focused on buffing the latest new shiny models stats. Plus latest models are often very limited poses, sure the overall detail is up but the scope for personalization is way down without major work.

    Then due to infighting the Horus Heresy line of rules and models got intentionally road blocked after Blighs death, which I had been relying on as a more crunchy outlet and to protect my investment in my models.

    Oh, and they started the long road to sunset normal Marine models, which when you have over 50k points of marines you collected and painted over the past 35 years stings more than a little.

    For the company its been an enormous success, sales are hugely up, so I don’t begrudge them too much after the mismanagement of Kirby post LotR.



  • For all freeways are all asphalt? Thats not correct Cali for a start has been moving to concrete.

    Concrete is used for the top layer for higher load areas were budget and the foundations can support it as its more inflexible. Asphalt is used as its cheaper (initially, it will need renewing more often) and it will support more movement for the foundations and worse weather.

    We (UK) had part of the M25 done in the same style, but it was shit as we cut the budget and its lots of small joined sections due to complexities of using larger slabs. The foundation has since moved about and the gaps get bigger.



  • Learning stuff from books post full time education. It used to be if you wanted to learn about stuff once you left education you would have to read a book, so picking up a new programming language would be either from courses (assuming work is paying), books (like the O’Reilly ones), and self study.

    It required more application from the learner than the internet has enabled as instead of having to read an entire book or at least the relevant chapter, you could just read a few stack overflow questions that were vaguely similar to what you needed to know, then copy and paste the bits that you thought would fit.

    AI has made that even quicker, and increased the chance of a wrong or misleading answer, and that assumes you are asking it to explain concepts rather than just getting it to write the code for you and hoping it works.

    Its reduced the barrier for entry, but is it actually maintaining output quality as understanding of the topic is almost always not the same.



  • Are you using assisted culling in Lightroom for culling? As yeah, thats just missing from Darktable and you would have to use another (opensource) tool to do that.

    However if you are still manual, I dont agree once you have learned the keyboard shortcuts, that’s as fast for me in both, or in my current tool of choice, photolab. Even just using 1 to 5 to do basic culling with auto advance is a game changer for manual review.

    Editing really depends on your workflow, if you have a lot of similar shots you can just copy and paste a working set across everything thats similar and then manually tweak. Even if the shots aren’t the same just applying the usual set of modules with some sensible defaults across photos is very helpful. I used to keep one back from my last set as a template.







  • Latest hobby is photography, I had a camera for Christmas after not having a camera with interchangeable lenses in decades. I like that it gets me out the house as like nature/landscape/train photography.

    Long standing hobbies are mechanical keyboards and coffee, espresso and pour over.

    Keyboards I have really slowed down my purchases to just two or three new keyboards each year.

    Coffee I have not purchased anything other than beans in a long time, but I still want to upgrade my espresso machine (marax) at some point.



  • Most amateurs have signifcantly more time they can cut by training better and harder than spending thousands or tens of thousands on better components.

    Its a very small list of amateurs who train to the same level as a pro who has a good chance of winning any of the big competitions.

    Stick that under 30s pro on a cheap bike geared the same as a midlife crisis amater 45 year old gear head on an ultra expensive bike and guess who wins?

    If you want to buy wins enter an amateur car racing event, those are mostly reflective of money spent given a base level of talent and training (which costs far more money per hour than training for cycling).



  • I did a large scale data rationalization and migration project for a company that is heavily regulated. They can be asked to prove they have this or that document from seven years ago, for no other reason than they should have it. Not having it means big fines and negative press.

    Hundreds of Tbs of data got appropriately labelled and migrated, even more got left behind on the old system till it could be decommissioned safely after a period of parallel running.

    As part of the decommissioning the data was backed up twice, and I wanted the backup properly tested with some random file restores. Not a full restore, just a few random restores just a proof of life test that the backups worked. I was told that wasn’t a reasonable request and it wasn’t needed as the architect in charge of backups trusted his backup team and he “designed pragmatic solutions”.

    I still mean to call in to the regulator in a year or two to trigger a restore request, lets see if a pragmatic solution design is actually the same as performing some basic testing.