I used to be @ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml. I also have the backup account @ambitiousslab@reddthat.com.

  • 3 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 15 days ago
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Cake day: January 11th, 2026

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  • I worked at a bank at the time. We were moving to a new system and running recons against the old system to check the behaviour was the same. I had to run a manual recon of the old system vs the new 4 times per day. There was a lot of focus from management and users on the new system.

    The week leading up to Christmas, I was the one person not on holiday yet, and also the most junior person on the project. I found that week so stressful, as I had to run these recons and quickly decide whether each break was real or not before reporting to the users. Despite having worked on that system, I had very little confidence and didn’t have the same intuitive mental model of the system my colleagues had. I had to dig into each break case-by-case, but they seemed much more able to understand what was going on via a few simple queries.

    Anyway, I get through the week and left for the holidays on Thursday evening. I’m just grateful that I’ve gotten through it. Then, around 3pm on the Friday, I see a missed call from the tech lead. I log in, and everything’s on fire. I join the incident call, and it turns out that we hadn’t processed a single trade in the new system that whole week. I discover that it was thanks to a config change I’d made several weeks before, that had just made it to production. No-one (neither the users, nor I) had realised! But we missed several hundred million pounds worth of payments in that week as a result.

    It was so jarring, having been relieved that I made it to the holiday, then joining the incident call and struggling to work out what to do. I completely dissociated and my mind was blank. I remember being on the call and really passively and calmly walking around my room. I kept thinking “I need to do x, I need to do y” but my mind couldn’t focus and I was just staring at the screen. At some point I just lay in bed with my laptop while on the call.

    There had been a total failure of process: my change had been approved by two people, the nonprod environment was configured differently in a way that didn’t expose the bug, the recon failures looked very similar to the false positives, and there were so many false positives that it was impossible to dig into all of them. Meanwhile, we didn’t have basic queries monitoring that trades were flowing in, and the users weren’t paying much attention either, until they realised that it was broken.

    Still, I made a lot of mistakes. I should have just escalated that there were breaks instead of trying to figure it out myself. I shouldn’t have been afraid to call the tech lead and bring them out of their holiday. And I shouldn’t have been afraid of the confrontation with the users.

    Anyway, that experience really messed me up mentally for a long time. I lost so much confidence and became so much more scared of production (not in a healthy way). It really was not the right environment for me.




  • I though the final monologue was very funny, made all the better by him getting increasingly pixelated as the camera zoomed in :D

    I would have liked to see the queue curse, but I think it’s fair enough that he didn’t take it, especially since they’re on their way straight to him.

    He was probably right to play it safe, but I was shouting at the TV to choose the hand expansion + draw one card! I know Sam’s run got messed up for not having enough time bonuses, but it was so early in the round that the risk seemed worth it to me.

    The first section where Adam just pestered Sam to give him Edinburgh facts was awesome. Could tell he’d had enough of hearing that Sam spent 4 years there 😂








  • I get you. I can never think of anything that would be interesting to post or ask in the more discussion-oriented communities, let alone choose a specific one to post in. I definitely find comments easier, as well as posting to more niche communities. I feel the scope is usually better defined there.

    Would you say it’s about not knowing if your post would be accepted in the community, or just finding the best place for it? If it’s the latter, AskLemmy could be good for general questions, or failing that, any of the casual chat communities such as !chat@beehaw.org.

    As long as your post meets the rules of the community/instance, I feel it’s better to post somewhere than not at all - people can always crosspost it elsewhere if they like.




  • I independently thought of the same idea. While I’m daydreaming, I had some extra features that would be useful to me in a dream world:

    • It would be good to be able to apply this to posts (that are not mine) as well, or even to a link (i.e. all comments that would show up under the crosspost aggregation feature)
    • One problem I have with GitHub is that the subscription list perpetually grows and is never pruned.
      • It would be nice if I could make such subscriptions, for instance, automatically expire n days after the last interaction
      • Or, if there is a list of subscriptions somewhere, if I could manually “prune all whose last interaction is more than n days”
    • I’m not sure what the best UI would be, whether everything should go in notifications, or whether there should be a dedicated view for these subscriptions
      • And, should that view show the whole thread underneath the top-level post you subscribed to?
      • Or just the “new” comments?
      • My feeling is the former, but not sure.

  • Now, I’m not asking companies to open-source their entire codebase. That’s unrealistic when an app is tied to a larger platform. What I am asking for: publish a basic GitHub repo with the hardware specs and connection protocols. Let the community build their own apps on top of it.

    I agree with this. I think the most important thing is not necessarily the original company releasing their proprietary code (although that would be nice), but it being easy (and legal!) for hackers to reverse engineer and/or build on top of the platform.

    The irony is that, since most such products will have some GPL’d code in there somewhere, most products already basically have such a requirement, thanks to the section requiring complete corresponding source including installation instructions. Hopefully, the Vizio case will establish the precedent that users, as well as copyright holders, can take action against such companies.




  • I have mixed feelings about this. If this leads to more investment in local services, then that’s good.

    I don’t like that I haven’t seen a clear public debate. In some countries we’ve seen “there are too many AirBnBs” -> “we need to disincentivise tourism” -> “we need a tourist tax”. But that doesn’t seem to have happened here (or I’ve missed it).

    Have we decided as a city whether tourism is something we want to incentivise or disincentivise? Of course there are many pros and cons, but it feels to me that we haven’t had that debate, and really Westminster is just scrambling to find a new group of “non-working-people” that they can let cities slap a tax on, to avoid funding local government properly.

    If the tax was set up as a way to directly combat the effects of tourism, like building more housing, I would probably be more keen.


  • There were some breakthroughs in postmarketOS with the BlackBerry KEY2 recently. I really hope a phone with the Blackberry Classic form factor gets good mobile linux support in the next few years (bonus points if it’s a linux-first device!) A physical keyboard (in that form factor) is one of the few things that could convince me to ditch the Librem 5.

    I grew up on the tail end of Blackberry’s dominance. Most of the people in my school had a Blackberry, I’ve always envied those keyboards, and I feel really nostalgic about them.

    There’s something special about that form factor that appeals to me more than the N900 or clamshell designs. I think it’s that they’re happy to compromise the screen for a great keyboard, rather than the other way round.