Anecdotal, but I tend to get by with medium thinking on Opus and I noticed that as of sometime last week it really did feel like it had become noticeably slower to think about things.

I wouldn't say I've especially noticed its effectiveness having been reduced, it's just slower.

Outlook.com is a rebranding of Hotmail.com which absolutely did exist in the 90’s.

Indeed, Hotmail was sold to MS in 1997, which I incorrectly remembered to have happened past 2000.

It’s an option on the Windows app (Microsoft’s own RDP client), connects at full retina resolution but while having the host being set to 200% UI scale, so that you get the crisp text and UI.

Yeap. That's it.

Over here in South Africa we have a single time zone and no DST.

This contributed to me in my very early years of dabbling in software development being oblivious to time zone considerations and would do really bad things like make sure the web server was setup with the correct time zone so that the ASP Classic output would show the correct time.

My 4 year old Siemens oven is like this, as is the one (can’t remember the brand) in the previous house we rented for a short bit.

I wonder if it’s a kind of child safety thing. It’s possible on my current oven to enable a child lock by holding the clock button for 5 seconds, preventing the turning of the knobs from having any effect.

After a power failure the oven similarly will not react to the knobs being turned until the clock button is pressed, but a mere second or so is good enough.

Over a decade ago this caused a quite bit of head scratching for me as to why in our C# application a certificate's thumbprint was not matching with that in our App.config file, even though the characters were seemingly identical.

Turns out Windows Certificate Manager had an "easter egg" that if you copied a certificate's thumbprint to your clipboard it included a zero width space with it.

Very, very subtle and actually very hard to spot without doing a debug or something.

There is a Stack Overflow of exactly this issue: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11115511/how-to-find-cer...

At some point (Windows 10?) Microsoft "fixed" the Certificate Manager to stop doing this.

This sounds like being completely performance oblivious, like an extreme opposite of premature optimisation.

My rule of thumb is that as long as it doesn’t really complicate or convolute the code, write with performance in mind.

My expertise is in C# and sometimes this is as simple as using a hash set or dictionary instead of a plain list.

Other times it’s having a decent understanding of how EF (an ORM) actually works (the static typing benefits of them in C# makes ORMs very valuable when used appropriately) and the cost of round trips to any network host (including a DB).

"Premature optimization" became a battle cry of the Don't Make Me Think crowd.

As I think back to the people who fought me, the same group didn't like when you refactored code either because now they didn't have the code memorized. But I've found in the intervening years that making code discoverable is much more useful than trying to keep it static because coworkers are always going to need to change shit anyway to implement new features even if that feature is neither Correctness nor Performance. What you don't want is for people to hide logic from you. So if you move logic to a function call, that's fine, because it's still in the same neighborhood. But if you hoist it all the way up into a much earlier part of the call tree, you need to announce that in meetings and maybe in the documentation so people know what's what.

a hashset was used... then ".Where(x=>x == key).Count() == 0"

The engineer is the former founder of a company acquired by Cisco, so there is reason to believe they are exceptional and possibly more experienced and mature than most others at the same age.

27 is still quite young though and very possibly over confident.

Here in South Africa I’m seeing more and more BYDs all the time, the high fuel prices due to the Iran war is making their entry level EV pay for itself for people with any kind of commute.

I’ve been super happy with my Sealion 5 (PHEV) I bought in May, tank is still over half full since last filling it up mid July and having done about 4,500km since.

I have had two minor software issues. One time the one parking sensor warning indicator kind of got stuck on the centre screen (no noise though). The other was my wireless CarPlay refusing to connect. In both cases they self corrected once the car had been turned off (and unplugged) for a little while. A bit annoying at the time, especially as there seems to be no manual way to force a reset, but super isolated.

You're well over the 90 day mark where E10 is well into its degradation and standard unleaded is starting to sour. A nice problem to have in many respects, but just to be aware!

I drive a Mitsubishi PHEV. And it enforces this by not letting you drive on battery until you fill at least 20L of new fuel. So you're forced to use a portion of the tank at least every 90 days.

I appreciate the warning, will certainly do some homework here.

Apparently petrol here is almost never mixed with ethanol so at least I don’t have that to worry about.

I’ve already topped out the tank with 95 (as it apparently has a better shelf life than 93) and will be driving in HEV mode until it’s nearly empty, thereafter I plan on generally only filling up with 10l at a time unless I’m going to be doing a long distance trip.

Chery brands have 24% market share car sales in S.A - it was ironic seeing the BMW dealership closing in my town and being replaced by a BYD one.

It will be interesting to see how VW responds next year with the locally manufactured small SUV Tengo targeting the Chery Tiggo 4 Pro 4 - why bother with an old Polo Vivo when you get something WAY better and modern.

It needs to retail at R269,000.00 or cheaper.

VWs are decent cars, but they've been somewhat "premiumly" priced since at least 2000, in my view the brand is irrationally overvalued by South Africans.

When I looked at a Polo around 2018, the finishes were a bit nicer, but compared to the Honda Jazz I went with (with CVT, cruise control, climate control) it was considerably more expensive.

BMWs and Mercedes are apparently having a really hard time here right now. Chinese cars are really comparable in terms of features and finish but for like half the price, the only other reason to buy a luxury German car is as a status symbol, but for the genuinely affluent here, a Mercedes or BMW isn't exclusive enough.

They're not dead yet as there are still quite a few South Africans who deem it essential to their social status to have the nicest possible car at the absolute limit of what they can afford. My theory on why they do this is because others can see the car they pitch up in, but don't see that each night it's parked outdoors of a rented apartment worth barely more (possibly less) than the car.

> the high fuel prices due to the Iran war is making their entry level EV pay for itself

Is this that 4D chess thing people keep talking about?

sounds like you shoulda just gone full EV then, if you basically never use the gas?

It only has 13kW/h of batteries and an advertised electric only range of 50km making it considerably cheaper than a full electric SUV, and I can still use the same vehicle for the occasional long-distance trips with zero stress or concerns about charging infrastructure, e.g. 600km drive to holiday destination which I've done once already and have already planned to do again soon.

I work from home and my wife is hybrid, special school for my daughter is 8km away which is 22km from where my wife works. In practice we manage to cover about 98% of our day-to-day driving using electricity.

A while back I had a job which was 40km from where I lived, if I still had a work commute like that, I would have purchased (from BYD) either a Dolphin Surf (I think ZAR 340K for 300km range) or their Sealion 6 (I have a 5) with advertised electric range of 100km.

People should purchase the vehicle which makes sense for their circumstances.

Price is a fair argument. After going full EV I personally couldn’t imagine going going back to the hassle of a PHEV

I'm South African so wouldn't really know culturally how African Americans would see it, but wondered at the time if the changing of the Git default branch name to "main" was an initiative by European Americans worried about offending rather than actual offense taken by African Americans.

It is interesting how different locations find different things offensive. Only when I was living in Europe for a while (doing Blizzard Customer Service) did I became aware of how big a deal the usage of N word was, as over here the K-word (look up "South Africa k-word" if you don't know it) is the word of choice for the, unevolved, die hard racists.

Was similarly unaware, (but not really surprised in hindsight) how World War II references were much better left avoided and Nazi references an enormous no-no. Over here references to Nazism are very rare and while South Africans did fight and die for the Allies in Europe, the impact of WW2 over here was no where near what it was like for most of the rest of the world.

Is the "k-word" the Arabic for infidel? If yes, were there a lot of Arabs/Arabic speakers in South Africa?

It has etymological roots in the Arabic word, but is spelt differently and it has no meaning or use except as a slur of which there is nothing more offensive to say to blacks (“blacks” is a completely acceptable term here).

We don’t have much of an Arabic community here.

No and no