m-i-l

11 ms·

1.
by m-i-l 14d ago
In times of crisis it can be physically moved, e.g. under threat of Nazi invasion in 1939-1940 the UK physically moved over 1,500 tonnes of gold from London to Canada ("the largest known movement of physical wealth in history"[0])
2.
by m-i-l 28d ago
In the UK a few decades ago, if you found a radiosonde from a weather balloon, it would have instructions on how to claim a recovery fee if you returned it for reuse. Sadly I never found one, but I knew this because my dad was a geophysicis
3.
Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?(bbc.co.uk)
69 points by m-i-l 1mo ago|73 comments
4.
by m-i-l 2mo ago
Yes, a community effort against the botnets would be great. The "good bots" which identify themselves and follow the rules are easy enough to block, so not a problem. It is the "bad bots" which pretend to be real users a
5.
by m-i-l 2mo ago
Looks like they were focusing on greenfield rather than brownfield, presumably because the margins are much higher and therefore more appealing to venture capitalists, but getting permission to turn fields and forests into streets and house
6.
by m-i-l 2mo ago
> "Is it actually the case that deaths and injuries in H & N are distinctly worse" Hiroshima and Nagasaki had radiation - many died in the following months from the "atomic bomb disease", now known to be acute rad
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by m-i-l 3mo ago
See also Hugh Piggott's detailed recipe books for building wind turbines, e.g. https://scoraigwind.co.uk/all-of-the-books-by-hugh-how-to-ge... . They were originally printed paper books because they pre-date the intern
8.
by m-i-l 3mo ago
I clicked on the link wondering if the twist might be that it was from state-backed troll farm, but not the country we normally associate with state-backed troll farms... However, from the article: "This may not always be classic forei
9.
by m-i-l 3mo ago
> "Amazon famously remained unprofitable due to reinvestment and waiting for them to become profitable before investing was a bad bet." Amazon wasn't profitable because it reinvested earnings into growth, while SpaceX is
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London Met Police Palantir Contract Blocked by City Hall(bbc.co.uk)
3 points by m-i-l 4mo ago|0 comments
11.
by m-i-l 4mo ago
I think the use of AI is really missing the point here. The point is that small in-house teams can deliver a lot more quickly and to a higher quality and at a lower cost than large outsourced teams from the big consultancy companies. I&#x27
12.
by m-i-l 4mo ago
Or smoking a cigar in an oxygen rich spacecraft cabin, as per the opening scene of the original Planet of the Apes (released in Feb 1968, after the Apollo 1 fire in Jan 1967).
13.
by m-i-l 5mo ago
Interesting. Android has a Nearby Connections API[0] which "uses a combination of Bluetooth, BLE, and Wi-Fi technologies" and appears to allow interoperability between Android and Apple devices, and Apple has a Nearby Interaction[
14.
by m-i-l 5mo ago
I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broad
15.
by m-i-l 7mo ago
> "The software used a special driver to get better than standard quality from the then most common 24 pin printers (laser printers where much expensive) by kind of double-printing, I forgot the details. It looked really good thoug
16.
by m-i-l 7mo ago
Yes. Just opened some files to check. There was one including a table which I thought at first was a little wonky, but then I realised the column that looked off had currency where I'd right aligned on the decimal point, so even that s
17.
by m-i-l 7mo ago
I used ST Writer which came bundled with my ST. I still have all my ST Writer files (last modified in 1993!), and quite impressively they open just fine in LibreOffice with formatting and everything preserved (unlike some later .doc files I
18.
by m-i-l 8mo ago
https://michael-lewis.com/ Also relevant here: https://searchmysite.net/ - a search engine for personal websites.
19.
by m-i-l 10mo ago
I think this is missing the point - it is a bit like saying "you only ever notice bad fraud, if the fraud is well done you never notice it" - the point is what it is, not whether you notice it or not. With AI in films at the momen
20.
by m-i-l 1y ago
Thanks for the great feedback:-) This is what searchmysite.net is attempting to do - help make "surfing the web" a fun leisure activity once more. It is good to see more people seem to get that point now. When it was on HN nearly
21.
by m-i-l 1y ago
At a big corporate, we had an Apache Solr based search which had some reasonably clever lemmatization and stats analysis and spell check config to suggest alternative searches if not many results were found for the original query, but one d
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by m-i-l 1y ago
That's right. Most search engines are funded by advertising, where there is the clear conflict of interest[0], not to mention incentive for spam etc. Alternative models include a subscription fee (which I don't think would work fo
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by m-i-l 1y ago
The LLM was for an experiment in retrieval augmented generation, i.e. "a chat with your website" style interface, using Apache Solr as the vector store. Results (on a small self-hosted LLM to keep costs manageable) weren't go
24.
by m-i-l 1y ago
Postgres is just used for the site admin, i.e. keeping track of submissions, review status, subscriptions etc. The actual search index is in Apache Solr. In theory you could use Solr to store all the admin data, but it is generally not reco
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by m-i-l 2y ago
A couple of references to the Nazis, but no reference to the Nazi book burnings, an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction, which I'd have thought would be very relevant in this context, i.e
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'I came to make new friends': the hangout event where phones are locked away(theguardian.com)
4 points by m-i-l 2y ago|0 comments
27.
by m-i-l 2y ago
My children were given a soft toy a few years back from a relative who had bought it from a Chinese street market while on holiday in China. When it was switched on it jumped about frantically and sang a very loud and shrill song. Not 100%
28.
by m-i-l 2y ago
Those are the good bots, which say who they are, probably respect robots.txt, and appear on various known bot lists. They are easy to deal with if you really want. But in my experience it is the bad bots you're more likely to want to d
29.
by m-i-l 2y ago
I used to work in an office which briefly had a commercially available 4KW microwave in the coffee area. I used to like it because it was fast. Unfortunately several other people failed to appreciate that you had to take the 800W timings an
30.
by m-i-l 2y ago
This matches my experience. I ran one of my side-projects on AWS for a couple of years before switching to Hetzner - AWS was around £35 a month while Hetzner was around £7 a month, so Hetzner was around 80% cheaper for an equivalent service

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