IRL 1984 was fine. America was still good; the Soviet Union didn’t nuke us all

Musk is a shit, but lying doesn’t help

You can make a date from a datetime in cell A1 with

=Date(year(A1), month(A1), day(A1))

The old way of saying that is close to obsolete. One now must take it from context whether the “you” means you or one.

A human artist might have said “1/2 full” instead of “half full” but LLMs don’t understand jokes so there’s no hope they’ll be able to make the joke easier

Depending on how closed loops of time work

If you want the joke decoded:

-e return immediately for some failed commands

-u throw an error for unset variables

-s non functional

-a everything is marked for export

My favourite AI code test is code to point a heliostat mirror at (lattitude, longitude) at a target at (latitude, longitude, elevation)

After a few iterations to get the basics in place, “also create the function to select the mirror angle”

A basic fact that isn’t often described is that to reflect a ray you aim the mirror halfway between the source and the target. AI Congress up with the strangest non-working ways of aiming the mirror

Working with AI feels a lot like working with a newbie

I have experience from old internet services like IRC where ASCII art was popular, and sometimes you’d need to widen your IRC window to see a thing.

Landscape is analogous to that

Be Gay Do Crimes licence - seems to be good for gay people who live where being gay is a crime, unless one wishes not to out themselves by their choice of licence

Works fine on boost for me, in landscape

22% is awfully close to the 20% you can expect to answer a survey “wrong” to spite the person with the temerity to survey them

He seems to have reduced the popularity of the far right in the rest of the world

Internet users everywhere are paying more attention to where their stuff comes from as the propaganda leaks. I’m seeing more Made in Australia stickers on stuff than I have for decades

I asked gpt for code to aim a heliostat

It needed a module to get the sun’s position, it used sun::alt:: azimuth which doesn’t exist rather than Astro::Coord::ECI::Sun

It needed a module to calculate mirror angle between the Sun’s altitude and azimuth and the target altitude and azimuth. It left that commented out rather than selecting the altitude halfway between Sun and target and azimuth between Sun and azimuth

It turns out there’s precious little on the internet on how to aim a mirror, partly because it’s not popular, partly because it’s dead simple

I’m a systems analyst, or in agile terminology “a designer” as I’m responsible for “design artifacts”

Our designs are usually unambiguous

On the reasonable side of the balance sheet, Australia is moving so fast installing big batteries that CATL has named one of their products after the Australian company they’re supplying batteries to

Also we just had a study published and publicised for efficient pumped hydro locations near each population centre (though one state missed it and approved development of a pair of pumped hydro reservoirs in a location the study ranked poorly, leading to further advertising of the study and how its chosen site near the approved one would have been a tenth the cost)

Rooftop solar is so popular that grid demand in one of our two large cities was at an all time low recently

All in all it’s pretty promising here

Though just like America, a change in the party in charge can wreck a lot of the progress

They worked well for us, we were updating a big system or adding functionality to it and a lot of the features were similar enough that we could reliably break the work down to sub-single sprint chunks and assign consistent story points to them

Though I have only been in one team that lasted more than 3 sprints relatively intact, and it’s only that team that got good at story pointing work

I try really hard when I’m in a scrum master position (my position is pretty chaotic, 20k person organisation, scaled agile, “we need your x skills this program increment, please would you?”) to hide my team’s individual performance from management. Mostly because your can’t compare a system analysts numbers to a mainframe programmer to a mid-range programmer, but also if someone’s not pulling their weight I want to solve the problem within the team where we can approach it as equals before resorting to management “performance review” systems.

The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.

One team might deliver 30 points in a sprint while another delivers 25 and they deliver the same amount of work

Of course management want to be able to use story points for tracking, they want to compare teams using them, so you end up with formulas for how many points to assign

Of course if they score you on points, they get more points, not more work and story points become useless