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doublesocket

211 karma · joined February 1, 2021

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doublesocket··on Playa Phone
I always wanted to build a local mesh network of pay phones on the playa and call it Black Rock Telecom. Maybe 12 or more phones set on plazas. Geographically not being located in the US made this project tricky to realise.
doublesocket··on Auburn California Flock Surveillance Cameras Stolen and Dumped in a Canal
Shouldn't a sufficiently powerful laser be able to cook the sensor quickly and easily?
doublesocket··on VoIP brings back old-fashioned pay phones to rural Vermont (2025)
I had an idea years ago to hook up a bunch of old payphones on the playa at burning man. Solar powered and connected over VoIP on a mesh network. Sadly never got to make it happen but would have been a fun art project.
doublesocket··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
Maybe we can skip the compiler...
doublesocket··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
Why stop at getting AI to write Rust? If everything is vibe coded and code is no longer reviewed, get an LLM to devise its own ultra terse, super dense language intended solely for minimal token use and speed.

/s... sort of

doublesocket··on Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far
GDS was a national level effort and they certainly did a better, albeit not perfect, job than the myriad of private solutions councils use. There just doesn't appear to be the capability to properly specify and source IT at a council level.
doublesocket··on Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far
It's the most ridiculous situation with council technology that they all use different providers for what are fundamentally the same functions. It's the same for council tax and a host of other services as it is for planning. Consequently, at least from the various portals I've used, they all do it badly. This absolutely could and should be done by a single, well funded central team.
doublesocket··on Claude Design
Am I alone in not wanting banal homogeneity even on a work trip?
doublesocket··on We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
Which Claude literally uses.
doublesocket··on Identify a London Underground Line just by listening to it
Given their username I would raise you that they're on the victoria line :-)
doublesocket··on Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry
This was many moons ago, written in perl. From memory we used Regexp::Trie - https://metacpan.org/release/DANKOGAI/Regexp-Trie-0.02/view/...

We used it to tokenize search input and combined it with a solr backend. Worked really remarkably well.

doublesocket··on Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry
Supporting 10 different languages in regex is a drop in the ocean. The regex can be generated programmatically and you can compress regexes easily. We used to have a compressed regex that could match any placename or street name in the UK in a few MB of RAM. It was silly quick.
doublesocket··on Parse, Don't Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust
Agree with this. Mismatching types are generally an indicator of an underlying issue with the code, not the language itself. These are areas AI can be helpful flagging potential problems.
doublesocket··on Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'
Railway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.
doublesocket··on From stealth blackout to whitelisting: Inside the Iranian shutdown
I don't think OP was implying punishing voters.
doublesocket··on TeraWave Satellite Communications Network
That is ... an oddly specific reference?
doublesocket··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
Never understood why the yanks don't like vans? Pickups are much less popular here in the UK, many more people use vans. A crew cab van with removable seats is infinitely more flexible than a pickup, other than long stuff which you chuck on a roof rack.
doublesocket··on Firefox extension to redirect x.com to xcancel.com
I don't use it but I did still have an account which is now deleted. Thanks for the reminder.
doublesocket··on The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
My ADHD brain recoils at the thought of this, which probably means I would benefit even more from doing so.
doublesocket··on Mermaid Gantt diagrams for displaying distributed traces in Markdown (2023)
FWIW I gave up trying to render SVG for our project and switched to using fabric.js (and node-canvas for server side rendering). For us it was mostly because it had far better text support.
doublesocket··on Atkinson Dithering (2021)
We've very recently been testing multiple dithering techniques for graphics we send as bitmaps to a TIJ printer that's used as a dynamic labeller.
doublesocket··on Raspberry Pi Ltd is considering an IPO
It hasn't gone well for several UK companies listing through SPACs on US exchanges recently. Think that's given plenty of reason for a rethink.
doublesocket··on Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance
I currently use Mylio. The feature I like most is that I can store a compressed version of my entire catalog on my phone so it's very quick to find something and it works offline. I can then download the full res image if I want it.

My biggest complaint about Mylio is there is still no automatic synchronisation from Android. You have to leave the app open for it to sync.

Wondering if the Memories Android app can handle both of these points?

doublesocket··on Why are most sofas so bad?
There's a good choice in formaldehyde free boards these days. In the UK a popular one is Sterling Zero.
doublesocket··on Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)
There are various research projects looking at storing waste heat, often for the purpose of more efficient defrosting.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-022-00018-3

doublesocket··on UK Address Oddities (2018)
Yes, there was a noticeable drop in the count of number 13s too.
doublesocket··on UK Address Oddities (2018)
I did a bunch of analysis of UK addresses at a former job. My favourite was the clear inverse correlation between house number and value, with a noticeable dip for number 13s, which from memory were valued around 2.5% lower than where they should have been.
doublesocket··on We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms
Yes, they're so incompetent they haven't changed their parking page. See google search results:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=tarantope...

It's all on subdomains, e.g. https://wandsworth.tarantopermits.com

doublesocket··on We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms
Absolutely, there's massive duplication of functionality. I think it's partly incompetence and partly a control thing.
doublesocket··on We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms
The flip side of this is local government technology. Truly some of the worst crimes against web development have been committed by local councils, or rather their outsourcing partners.

The service that takes that crown in my experience is tarantopermits.com, a parking permit management system that fills me with rage just thinking about it.

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