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mdpye

564 karma · joined January 25, 2012

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mdpye··on U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels
There is not. And any ecommerce site providing usps labels on their own usps account is constantly dealing with a flow of fraudulently printed labels which "borrowed" their account indicator, leading to usps invoicing the account holder for labels they didn't issue.
mdpye··on Eurorack Knob Idea
There are loads of systems where every button and encoder has many functions, with modal or paged interfaces. But I'm trying to stick to a model of no hidden or ephemeral state with my modular, just for fun, I guess. Mostly analogue, so no non-volatile memory to store settings, the positions of the patches and knobs set everything, and the test is that if I power it down and back up it must come back doing what it was doing when the power went out (very long cycle lfos notwithstanding!)

When a laptop can simulate anything, the physicality of the interface is most of the attraction, so might as well go all the way...

mdpye··on Remember FastCGI? (2021)
I remember in the very early days as a hobbyist working with cgi perl scripts for forums or guest books where the script just edited the "static" content in place.

The script would write new html files for new posts and do "fun" (I mean, terrifying) string manipulation on the main index to insert links to posts etc. Sometimes they used comments with metadata to help "parse" pages which would see edits.

These both were, and definitely were not, "the days" :D

mdpye··on How fast the days are getting longer (2023)
It is a life goal, for sure! Not necessarily one I'll be able to reach, but we have to have stretch goals :D
mdpye··on How fast the days are getting longer (2023)
Catches me every time too. And it's so quick. You can go in to a shop to pick up a packet of crisps thinking it's daytime, but actually is quarter past 6, so you come back out and it's full dark!

I'm in the southern UK, and I'd take our late-May/early-August "it's light while I'm awake and dark while I (should be) asleep" all year round if I could get it.

mdpye··on Industrial Design Student Work: "How Long Should Objects Last?"
If you were a fashionable person, that's exactly what you'd be doing! ;)

The cycle is roughly 30 years, and teenagers are revisiting the 90s trends right now.

mdpye··on British Placename Mapper
-thorpe, from either old nose or Anglo saxon also shows another nice geographical line. Complements the defaults selected on the page nicely:

https://placenames.rtwilson.com/#W3sidGV4dCI6ImJ1cmdoIiwiY29...

mdpye··on The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws
Unfortunately there are lots of materials run through a table saw which can trigger a sawstop. A false positive destroys the blade. Decent blades cost several hundred dollars, and are intended to be resharpened and last for many years.

I belong to a community hobbyist workshop. There are a lot of rules, lockouts and a key in place around the table saw usage, but they won't install a sawstop because they can't afford to keep up with the wasted blades.

Personally, I think I'd rather have one, but I can absolutely see why people would disable them if they were mandatory.

mdpye··on AI is not your friend
Have you read Infinite Jest? Barely any of the book is really about it (the actual theme being a study of addiction is many forms), but the ostensive premise is that a video clip has been created that's so compelling that it's impossible to stop watching it.

Some of the asides are also hilariously/terrifyingly prescient. The passages on the evolution of video calling are some of my favourites.

mdpye··on YouTube and Spotify won't launch Apple Vision Pro apps, joining Netflix
I've been to enough boutique hotels in the Netherlands with clear glass doors from bedroom to bathroom to say that probably wasn't a "future" thing, just a Dutch thing...
mdpye··on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will enable frame pointers by default
Because then it would need more registers for the other purpose?

But actually the decision about which general purpose registers to use for what is made at compile time (hence we're discussion a compiler flag here, the frame pointer is not a hardware dictated feature), so the question is actually kind of moot. If the compiler is out of registers to allocate and instead uses the stack, the CPU isn't reasonably going to be able to undo that.

mdpye··on GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting
It's an ML story. The article specifies that the current (now previous?) state of the art models are numerical, crunching vast equations representing atmospheric physics.
mdpye··on Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
You can safely return that oyster card and get your deposit back now :D

I live in London and recently passed a convenience store whose signage advertised the usual stuff: "Fresh veg. Off licence. European specialty foods. Oyster". I was genuinely confused for a second that such a place would carry such short shelf life seafood...

Pre-pay card are gone here. The only people I know now who have an Oyster branded card are those who get discount or free travel.

mdpye··on How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?
Huh, last time I thought about it was the kickstarter in 2015,and I remember it being closer to £120.

£40 is very reasonable :D

mdpye··on How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?
Here you go (2015): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ridebeeline/beeline-sma...

I thought it looked fun, but no way to justify the price.

mdpye··on In Digital Ocean, S3-like space keys can access all your buckets
You still don't appear to get it though. The fact that there even exists an option (never mind a default) which does not scrub storage between use by different tenants is completely unacceptable in a multi-tenant environment.
mdpye··on Ford's Theatre Front-Row Tickets from April 14, 1865
I was also given to understand that while boxes give optional privacy, a big part of their function in older theatres was to be seen, rather than specifically to see the play. Presiding, if you will.

At least that's the oral tradition I've been given in the UK. Makes sense for the old aristocracy, the US may have wanted to make a deliberate break with the tradition?

mdpye··on Why Ugly Architecture Is Bad for Your Health
I'm not aware of an anime adaptation, but it does sound a bit like J G Ballard's High-rise.
mdpye··on The best place to drink is the emptiest bar in the city
Ireland is an independent country, not part of the UK.

Pubs in the UK are much less like this than in Ireland, which I also believe are quite special. There are pubs like this in the UK, but they're less and less common the larger the town you are in - which (my pet theory) correlates closely with the likelihood that there are people in the pub who don't already know each other anyway...

Edit for clarification: the more people are mixing in the pub, the more likely they all knew each other beforehand. Likely because it's a small town pub, although tight community pubs do still exist still in London - they're rare).

mdpye··on I booted Linux 293k times in 21 hours
My work laptop has a touchscreen. I've never used it, but other people use it by accident fairly often. Usually only once each though, the look of shock is sometimes even worth the fingerprint :D
mdpye··on Using Redundant Conditions to Unlock Indexes in MySQL
I haven't checked if this works in mysql, but in postgres I would certainly reach for an index on the computed values, which it supports.

Index the thing you're querying on...

mdpye··on Ancient lead pollution in a Roman harbor (2017)
Kind of the opposite of what you're asking for, but you might enjoy an earnest exploration of why it didn't happen: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
mdpye··on Banning words won’t make the world more just
It absolutely does not add clarity. Enough people do not even know what a cervix is, or whether they have one, that it's an obfuscation. One which harms women disproportionately, like most other things radfems get upset about.

Go measure the prevalence of "people with prostates" and compare. The word "man" is, strangely, not subject to this erasure.

mdpye··on Ask HN: Share your favorite YouTube channels focused on mastering a skill/craft
> when baking

Yeah, that's pretty important. Cooking is an art, bakery is a science.

Like, for real, it's significantly more chemistry than most cooking, so the proportions do matter.

mdpye··on Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder?
People wanted to believe they were incapable of considering or even conceiving of such a thing, so anti-thetical to the narrative they built sparring with some US law enforcement agencies...
mdpye··on Amazon loses bid to overturn historic union win on Staten Island warehouse
Right, I misunderstood which vote were were talking about, sorry. I thought we were talking about voting on union action (e.g. to strike, or to accept a specific deal in a negotiation)
mdpye··on Amazon loses bid to overturn historic union win on Staten Island warehouse
Those who have opted in choose to be bound by the vote in exchange for the increased bargaining power that a consistent position affords, right?

In the car analogy, you're missing the "free to not have any car at all even though you would like one" option.

mdpye··on Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in computer science?
Not the GP, but I have a composite / s-video to hdmi converter from ebay. You can get DIN to RCA or S-video (the C64 exposes seperate luma and chroma signals) cables for the C64 fairly easily as well. Picture quality is... fine.
mdpye··on Should traffic lights be abolished? (2021)
A mini-roundabout is a centre circle painted (not curbed), plus the priority rules (give way to your right - would be your left in the US).

They don't take up any extra space, but they do probably require drivers to intuitively understand the concept and priorities before they can be introduced.

Here's a satellite view of a random one near me: https://goo.gl/maps/NJ2KpYdMP1reQA1u5

Its an upgrade of the American 4-way-stop with better defined priorities for entry.

mdpye··on Dreamachine
I don't think it's that important, the rotating slots and constant light were appropriate ways to get the necessary switching speed with incandescents.

The experience that was in London recently used banks of led spotlights, not even dedicated strobes.

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