Place I worked previously did this with Think pads - didn’t matter if you primarily used an email client or an IDE, you got the same 32GB RAM/i7/512GB NVMe. They were big enough to be ordering new laptops 50 at a time, and the overhead of having to manage different pools for swaps when things needed fixing or for upgrades wasn’t worth it. It only needed to save something like a billable hour a year over the book life of the laptop for it to be worth it
I mean, if he also wants to take on the costs of doing all the remediation work and ongoing maintenance and surveillance for the rest of time that’s probably a good deal for the city
Sweet, thanks!
Do you have a link? I’ve been using the square Aqara ones for years but they are way more expensive than that
howdoyouturnthison
I’m totally going to use that line next time I talk to our QA manager
Nah, that’s still engagement. Ignore it, and let it rot away
Take a look for yourself:
https://www.pbtech.co.nz/ https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/
He says, forgetting what community he is in.
Bring your existing gear, remembering that we use 240v here. Getting used server bits is pretty difficult and expensive because we don’t have anywhere near the density of data centers selling off old stuff. Enterprise switches in particular seem to be hard to get, I’ve previously had to buy on eBay and pay absurd shipping
Bit of a rambly story, but I swear it is relevant.
So previously I worked as a consultant for a company that manufactured a relatively small number of high value (tens of thousands of dollars each) Gizmos in a lightly regulated industry - the requirements weren’t too crazy, basically that everything has a serial number and they can prove that any given serial passed the full range of tests before it left the factory. Pretty much the sort of thing you’d want to have if you gave a crap about quality products anyway.
Initially they were using Excel to keep track of this - they manufactured 10 units a week, it worked well enough. Eventually, they got more successful and needed to scale up to 50 units a week, and it was decided that they needed A System to keep track of testing and manufacturing. Their head of manufacturing “looked around and couldn’t find anything off the shelf that was suitable” (ie, cost $0, and perfectly matched his aesthetic tastes; mistake #1), so they decided to build their own system.
They had a few in house developers, but they were focused on building new features (things that drive sales, unlike maintaining their reputation for delivering reliable products), so head of manufacturing decided to get one of the production line techs (who was “good with computers” by virtue of having built the Excel system, but was not a software developer mistake #2) to do it.
Eventually, they decided to use Microsoft PowerApps to build the new system - for those with the good fortune never to have seen PowerApps, it’s essentially a “no code required” drag and drop UI tool that you script using Excel formulas. Think Visual BASIC or Scratch, but Cloudy.
On the surface this made sense - the developer was proficient in Excel, so use what you know. Unfortunately, PowerApps is designed to rapidly build throwaway UIs over simple data models and lacks some of the things that actual software developers would have thought to ask about:
Eventually, these chickens came home to roost in the form of a defect that slipped through testing that they then couldn’t isolate to a particular batch because none of their testing data could be trusted. I was brought in to try and unpick this mess and advise on a replacement system, but between the cost to fix the issue and the lost sales from it they ended up in a pretty bad spot financially and ended up being acquired by an investment group.
Anyway, the takeaway from this is that you disregard experience and judgement at your own peril, up front savings generally don’t manifest in the long term and I expect there is going to be a thriving market of consultants brought in to point and laugh at companies that decided that a bunch of cheap, inexperienced developers and a magic talking parrot would build better software than cheap, inexperienced developers being guided and upskilled by an experienced senior developer
Are there people left who will lend him money after seeing what happened to twitter?
Everything is a wire if the voltage is high enough.
Every machine is a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough.
Yikes. I feel sorry for the 3rd party vendors who are going to be getting awkward questions from their clients about why they think that WordPress is going to be a viable platform in the future
Maybe I’m out of the loop, but isn’t this the primary corporate entity - the one that owns the trademark, sets the development direction, and ultimately owns the product - essentially announcing that they are abandoning their own product?
Now I’m imagining these scrawny ass war boys with calves the size of grapefruits from cycling on sand all day
What’s stopping you from learning to mod BF1 today? Why do you need some magic AI to make this happen?
shrug if you think you can run 100 ft faster than concrete can fall 30 during an earthquake so strong you can’t stand then more power to you I guess
Having lived through a major earthquake - if it’s a brick or concrete tilt-slab building, you are way better off inside the building. The risk isn’t so much some random piece of something falling off, it’s the entire facade of the building coming down on your head.
LLMs are a muse, not a fucking oracle you absolute strawberry plant
Internet in NZ used to work a bit like the US does now with one large ISP that is also the network operator and gave exactly zero shits about quality of connections or internationally competitive pricing, except they got greedy and charged their retail arm half what they charged their competitors. Anti-monopoly folks got very pissy about this and managed to get the largest fine permitted by law, forced them to split their wholesale arm off into a separate company, banned them from tendering on the government-funded fibre network (which cost them literally billions of dollars) and then changed the law so that if they did it again there wouldn’t be a cap on the penalty they could impose.
In 20 years we went from ~35th of the 38 OECD countries in internet speed and accessibility to 9th. Markets only work long-term if you actually regulate them
I’ve been looking at getting solar installed, and been talking to a few different companies for quotes. One place only supplies PowerWall batteries, and I said to the sales rep that I wasn’t really interested in buying anything from Tesla and his face made it pretty clear that that was the answer he’d been getting a lot recently