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mprev

1,490 karma · joined May 1, 2014

Just this guy, y’know?
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mprev··on First tunnel element of the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel immersed
Isn't the issue the depth of the Irish Sea at the point where Scotland and Ireland are closest? It gets to around 1,000 ft deep there (roughly 5x where the Channel Tunnel goes) and has a bunch of unexploded WW2 bombs dumped there, too.

Then Dublin to Holyhead is, what, 70 miles? That's twice as long as the Seikan tunnel, which I think is the world's longest under sea tunnel.

mprev··on Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin speaks to Tatsuya Takahashi (2017)
To be fair, he was kinda forced to release it following a leak, wasn't he?
mprev··on Claude Code, but for SQL, Beekeeper Studio 5.3
I gave this a go and it's a really nice way of generating context-aware SQL without having to upload your entire dataset or even just your data model to an LLM.

Gives you a conversational interface for your SQL data, alongside a more traditional SQL GUI.

mprev··on Home washing machines fail to remove important pathogens from textiles
A note on liquid versus powder detergents. In the UK, at least, my understanding is that liquid detergents do not contain bleaching agents, whereas powders do. That is, unless you buy a colour-safe powder.

If you're pouring bleach into your machine, it can erode the rubber seals. I use Dettol instead (I think it's called Lysol in the States), which seems to do the job.

mprev··on Google’s two-year frenzy to catch up with OpenAI
Isn’t this more like Teams vs Slack or Zoom?

Consumer brand recognition isn’t the issue. Bundling with Workspace might be.

mprev··on Moving away from US cloud services
Important to note that the migration works well one way only. If you later want to migrate out it'll be more painful.
mprev··on Moving away from US cloud services
I'll give a different point of view.

I switched my personal email from Google Workspace to Proton. My use case wasn't privacy (especially when 99% of my email is sent to and received from people using Gmail, Office 365, etc.) I was interested in trying Proton more to support a plurality of service providers.

As such, I'm probably not Proton's target customer. That means the compromises Proton makes to enable E2E are not worth it to me.

Some examples:

* Search is like going back 20 years.

* The lack of automatic filtering (e.g. Gmail's automatically applied Promotions, Updates, etc labels) has made the signal to noise ratio in my personal inbox so low that I'm considering just taking the app off my phone or suppressing notifications, at least. I don't have the time to set up manual filters for everything that comes in.

* The lack of automatic filtering and decent search means that my personal email is now pretty much useless.

Similarly, it's pretty hard to migrate away from because you can't just use IMAP to shift your email history to another provider.

This isn't a negative review of Proton. This is just to say that choosing Proton Mail means living with the compromises necessary to enable their main feature (privacy) and I don't care enough about that one feature to make those compromises worthwhile (because my email is going through so many non-private services anyway).

mprev··on Event Destinations Initiative: A model for event producer/consumer interop
Great to see a push towards standardisation in this space.
mprev··on AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot understand them'
To be fair, most of the science fiction is about it being horribly broken or, at least, functioning in ways its human stewards did not intend.
mprev··on Britain is building one of the world’s most expensive railways
I heard someone say that they wished it had been called High Capacity 2, rather than High Speed 2.

What we need is more rail capacity, while people opposed to this project latched onto the idea that no one really wanted to get from London to Birmingham (a somewhat unlovely city that is the first major stop on the line) faster.

mprev··on Ask HN: I don't want higher salary, I need more freetime
You need a "product", not hourly billing. Defined outcome and a price per engagement, rather than charging for your time.
mprev··on Solar power from space? it might happen in a couple of years
Did we learn nothing from Sim City?
mprev··on Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying
I like how your typo makes it sound like a medieval sage.
mprev··on Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world
Around 30% is climate levy and similar taxes, plus there’s 5% VAT.
mprev··on Linux for UX Designers: What I learn after a year of doing design work on Linux
These types of interjections haven’t meaningfully changed anything for the better in the past 20 years of people making them.

Instead, people get interested in something new and interesting. Then, for a proportion of them, some stranger will come along and language-police them.

If you believe in free software or some variant, don’t put pointless barriers in the way of people adopting it.

mprev··on Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago
Specific translations, such as the NIV, are copyrighted.
mprev··on Lucid Boss Says Tesla Has Lost Its "Sense of Purpose"
In what way best?
mprev··on There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station
In between Rabbit and Three they launched Orange, too.
mprev··on Why 7M UK smart meters will stop working and what it will mean
It might be more due to the weird way that the government divided responsibility for the metering connectivity. Arqiva have the northern segment and O2 the southern, so they use the method that best suits their existing infrastructure.
mprev··on The closure of a Methodist chapel on Tyneside
Did you ever come across a minister named Holt in Gornal?
mprev··on Major outages across ChatGPT and API
Ha, no, but I did check that email account a couple of weeks later just in case.
mprev··on Major outages across ChatGPT and API
Bard promised me it would design a website for me. It said it’d get back to me in a couple of weeks. I can’t even remember the prompt but it was basically LARPing as a Wordpress theme designer.
mprev··on Average EV fast-charging costs soar above petrol
Is that an Octopus plan? If not, are you able to share the name of the provider and the tariff?
mprev··on Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm
Manga Steyr builds Jaguars, BMWs, Fiskers, and others under just this model.
mprev··on Is it time to retire the .gb top level domain?
Sorry to be picky, but the Isle of Man and Channels Islands aren't part of the UK either.

Politically, IoW is part of England and so GB, albeit geographically a separate island.

mprev··on One in four have accents mocked at work – survey
My point was that it's too simplistic to paint classism as a one-way street somehow used to keep the "hoi polloi" down.
mprev··on One in four have accents mocked at work – survey
We don't all have the same experience of life, so I preface this by saying that this is just my experience.

UK life can be somewhat tribal, like anywhere, but I don't recognise your framing of the UK as "deeply classist" nor do I think any classism is as one way as you paint. I grew up lower middle class/working class in very working class areas (council estates, ex-mining villages/towns, that sort of thing). Two of the worst things you could be in those areas was "posh" or from outside the area. So called inverse snobbery was a big thing. If anything, though, not being local was a bigger cause for feeling like an outsider.

mprev··on Unbundling Airbnb
I always disappointed there wasn't a site called GiteHub.
mprev··on I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)
In a rural area where the telco had to blow a dedicated fibre line specifically to your property?
mprev··on I took down my Starlink dish (but haven't cancelled)
Theranos couldn’t deliver reliable tests using other people’s equipment, let alone the magic box they pretended to have invented. Their claims were pretty much impossible to fulfil.

There are Teslas driving on the roads. Starlink is serving customers. SpaceX is delivering payloads.

Like him or loathe him, Musk has delivered multiple times.

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