Right to buy allowed social housing tenets in council owned houses to buy the house at a discount. It was a policy aimed at increasing the number of home owners but has proved divisive. It certainly worked well for those that took up the offer and were able to get their start on the housing ladder which would have otherwise been difficult. Some of the most gentrified areas of cities were once council house estates.

In my personal opinion it would have been great if the money from the sales went to the councils to reinvest in the social housing stock however that is not what happened. The result has been a decline in council properties and plenty of arguments about who is most deserving to be on the waiting list for the slowly dwindling supply.

We do have housing associations which are meant to fill the gap but their impact has been mixed.

There is a difference between reviewing code and the feedback when you have the job and during an interview when trying to get a job. I’m not saying you should never expect to be pulled up on mistakes just that an interview experience is very different to the work experience.

Maybe there are ways to ameliorate the stress during the interview to get a better view of how a candidate will perform once hired but I think it’s a tricky balance to strike.

I think there is a difference in setting. Pair coding is a useful exercise but demands a degree of trust that the two of you are working together on a solution rather than one of the pair judging the other.

If you’re expecting to be stressed all the time at work then that is a red flag. Some professions may involve a degree of stress, which should be mitigated, from time to time but software engineering shouldn’t.

Civ, Balatro.

In my first interview they put me in a room with a PC with Borland C and a copy of K&R and a sheet with a simple problem to solve and some extra enhancements if I had time. They said they would be back in half an hour and left me to it. That I passed fine.

Some twenty-ish years later I was asked to write a C function to reverse a string on a white board and I failed because I’d misformatted the for loop. I don’t think it was because I’ve become a worse C coder in the intervening years.

When I’m actually coding I’m sat with my editor configured Just So with completion, compilation and unit tests at my finger tips. My favourite coding music blasting my speakers and a handy browser window for looking up anything in unsure of. This is my most productive setting and expecting the same performance in a stressful interview setting is foolish in my opinion.

Working through problems on a white board can work well but you are looking for the problem solving approach, not an encyclopedic knowledge of regex syntax. Those same problems get immeasurably harder when explained over a phone call.

My personal preference when evaluating candidates ability to code is reading their actual production code, the break down of commits, the commit messages and the sort of unit tests they add with a feature. The interview is more focused on their soft skills, what about the work excites them and what they are looking to get out of the role.

You could if you want fork from when it was GPLv3: https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/commit/7f4e5d55dbdef5a50e0aa4994f667fb03d854928

From the linked comment it sounds like there was a license change in the projects history. I’m surprised the various distro packagers didn’t just collaborate on a renamed fork, unless there are more actively developed emulators still under a FLOSS licence?

Edit yep it was GPLv3 about 11 months ago: https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/commit/7f4e5d55dbdef5a50e0aa4994f667fb03d854928

I’ve moved to using Rama Lama mainly because it promises to do the probing to get the best acceleration possible for whatever model you launch.

Currently my kids can only watch YouTube on a shared account on the TV. They haven’t been exposed to any of the gift stuff as far as I can tell but we do regularly weed the history and subscriptions to keep it vaguely on track. While each of the kids have their own favourite creators we also have found a number of educational and comedy channels we’ll watch with them on the account.

The bigger challenge comes with homework as once in secondary school the teachers regularly link to YouTube videos as an intro to a particular homework topic. Although their accounts are registered as kids accounts under our indirect control I keep having to move their pc out of the restricted group on the router because for some reason Eero prevents some videos from playing which from my point of view are fine. I dread to think what parents who aren’t comfortable debugging network failures do, probably drop restrictions all together in frustration.

Directors have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders and that includes a legal liability if they don’t do their job. That said if the chairman has a controlling majority of the shares they can run the company into the ground if they want to as it’s their money to waste.

Generally if you want to bring investment into a company it will come with strings attached like nominated seats on the board of directors to prevent this sort of thing. Voting shares can be different normal shares or there can be several share types with different levels of voting rights. However the structure of the shares will be disclosed to the board and for a publicly traded company this will be public.

I’ve got an Ampere workstation (AVA) which from a firmware point works fine. They may even fix the PCIe bus on later versions.

I’m pretty sure it’s still private charging. I know there are some kerbside charging solutions that are a public/private mix so discounted for residents but I don’t think we need a lot of public charging infrastructure on normal streets. The only time I use public chargers is when doing long journeys and I stop off at motorway services which benefit from the 50kw+ CCS charging while I have a pee and grab a coffee.

I would hope in time that private charging gullys would become a standard part of street furniture when streets are renovated and redone. It’s going to take awhile before the majority of cars on the road have transitioned to electric.

Not sure what to do about the insurance premium issue. I would hope some of the ADAS improvements in new cars will eventually reduce the number of battery integrity threatening prangs.

Your council will probably have words with you if you have a permanent over the pavement solution. Have proper permanent gullys for charging cables goes someway to improving access to cheap charging for EV owners that don’t have driveways. That is by far the cheapest way to charge. My overnight charging is about 7p per kWh (~4-5 miles of range).

The road tax discounts are nice but not sustainable in the long term. EVs are still road users and need to contribute to the cost of upkeep. The fairest solution would be a usage based approach but their are privacy issues implementing such a solution.

I hadn’t noticed a massive difference in insurance. Is the premium you mention down to a government tax or just differences from the insurers?

Battery recycling is certainly worthwhile. Even if you don’t break then down a lot of EV batteries can have a good second life as domestic supply batteries.

Asahi is a powerful example of what a small well motivated team can achieve. However they are still face the sisyphean task of reverse engineering entirely undocumented hardware and getting that upstream.

If you love Apples hardware then great. Personally when I have Apple hardware I just tweak the keys to make it a little more like a Linux system and use brew for the tools I’m used to. If I need to I can always spin up a much more hackable VM.

Arm has been slowly pushing standardisation for the firmware which solves a lot of the problems. On the server side we are pretty much there. For workstations I’m still waiting for someone to ship hardware with non-broken PCIe. On laptops the remaining challenge is power usage parity with Windows and the insistance of some manufacturers to try and lock off EL2 which makes virtualization a pain.

They kinda left the biggest pitfall at the end of the article - the poor coordination between the two co-leaders. We shall see how they fare it their first electoral test.

My parents had one his albums on vinyl which we used to play all the time. They were funny even when i didn’t know the people he satirised in some of the more political songs.

Down 6.5% year on year. https://assets.simpleviewcms.com/simpleview/image/upload/v1/clients/lasvegas/ES_May2025_ed1142ef-9992-4a32-b44d-5404dba18b8e.pdf

You have to ignore the obsequious optimism bias LLM’s often have. It all comes down to their training set and if they have seen more than you have.

I don’t generally use them on projects I’m already familiar with unless it’s for fairly boring repetitive work that would be fiddly with search and replace, e.g. extract the common code out of these functions and refactor.

When working with unfamiliar code they can have an edge so if I needed a simple mobile app I’d probably give the LLM a go and then tidy up the code once it’s working.

At most I’ll give it 2 or 3 attempts to correct the original approach before I walk away and try something else. If it starts making up functions it APIs that don’t exist that is usually a sign out didn’t know so time to cut your losses and move on.

Their real strengths come in when it comes to digesting large amounts of text and sumerising. Great for saving you reading all the documentation on a project just to try a small thing. But if your going to work on the project going forward your going to want to invest that training data yourself.