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

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

The estimate is not a promise, it’s a guess. I prefer to estimate in sprints because that’s about the resolution we can have confidence in, but management want hours so my process is to estimate the number of hours in a sprint (73.5 for us) plus one sprint

200% overruns are common, especially when requirements change significantly

10C* charging isn’t all that exceptional

But also charging a Tesla on a road trip takes ~15 minutes each couple of hundred kilometres, that’s often not enough time to get a coffee and use a toilet; it’s never long enough to get a meal.

On a thousand kilometre trip recently for a lunch break my partner would find a place to get lunch and order for themself and me while I waited in the car for it to become charged enough. I would generally get to the lunch place before food was served

Faster isn’t much use until it’s fast like filling a petrol tank

*10 times capacity – Charging rate 10 times faster in kilowatts than the battery capacity in kilowatt-hours

holding the bag

And not doing shit that tanks the stock price and sales.

Ok, so list the ones I can buy today

“it’s a bit limited for an operating system”

Instead they’re probably paying Canonical

They make smaller chairs. Blame your employer for not buying sufficient variety. Also a proper ergonomic chair should be able to bring the back forward or the seat back

Or get a cushion to put behind you

That’s every 10 minutes for looking at something far away

It was genuine, in my workplace the only optimisation is for run time

Isn’t that what you’re optimising? Trying to reduce runtime by increasing CPU load

It’s a fake teapot, you can’t brew tea in it

Some people use the RGB to indicate system loads by colour, so they can have a visual indicator for when a long process finishes

Waterfall is much more expensive than any of the agile methods, even with good requirement gathering and management

I know several who preferred waterfall, but the system I work on is a giant government one and when we were doing waterfall we were in specialist teams working on a small part of the system

At the same time we went agile management also said “everyone can do everything” so we’ve had to work across the entire system

For the rocket analogy: we started building a rocket under waterfall, but when we went agile we also decided that the rocket motor specialists could also work on fuel tanks and heat shields

We recently saw waterfall versus agile in actual rockets

Blue Origin spent years meticulously designing their rocket. They tested it on the ground. On the first flight it got to orbit, but the first stage exploded while re-entering

SpaceX started building their rocket out of carbon fibre. Changed to stainless steel. Started flying subscale demos, flew high altitude full scale examples to find if their aerodynamics was right, and haven’t actually tried for orbit yet

Blue Origin is trying for a last generation rocket (where the first stage is recovered) but bigger, SpaceX is trying to create the next generation where both stages are recovered