mocko

Does it support original Winamp skins?

https://archive.org/details/winampskins_major_tom_v5_1 was a true work of art

After some digging - https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel/blob/main/LICENSE says MIT

I can see how this would work on a technical level but what's the intended use case?

Sad but true. Anyone wanting to learn more about how dysfunctional the UK's justice system is after years of underfunding should read Secret Barrister[1]. For comfortable technology folks who seldom brush with the law it's eye-opening stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Barrister

What's the significance of this? The most recent advisory listed is almost a year old.

Holy crap, thanks for sharing this. It's the first time a conversational AI has impressed me. I can just about find the edges (short memory, relentlessly positive) but in the space of an hour it's given reasonably good advice on social situations, answered questions about how it works and even recommended some great niche bands based on my existing tastes. Just as you said, its knowledge seems to be extremely broad.

There's a contrast between Pi and the kind of chatbot discussed in the article. When we talk to Pi we don't expect it to do anything for us - it just gives advice and makes suggestions that we can take or leave. The resulting stream of tokens matches our expectations enough to satisfy us.

A chatbot on a company's website however, probably we are talking to that because we want something to happen. "Please fix my account", "my last bill was wrong" etc. As the chatbot isn't integrated with the company's processes it can't actually change the state of the outside world and so talking to it will be a frustrating experience. I wonder if this will improve if/when chatbots get better integrated with systems? Will companies even dare to do this for real?

Slightly offtopic but anyone with a dark sense of humour would do well to check out Chris Morris's stuff - I get a feeling most younger Brits haven't heard of it. Day Today and Brass Eye, both still funny, are wonderful time capsules satirising Britain as it was thirty years ago.

But IMO his finest work was Blue Jam - the radio comedy not the TV incarnation, hour-long episodes of low-key music and surreal sketches. Absolutely brilliant even today. Archive.org has a copy at https://archive.org/details/chrismorris_bluejam.

Trigger warning: basically everything. The BBC would never get away with broadcasting it now.

Amazon has had a print-on-demand service [1] for a while so the real question is whether major publishers have been signing deals to use it. Maybe from their perspective it's worthwhile for older books, to avoid maintaining lots of slow-moving inventory?

[1] https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GHKDSCW2KQ3K4UU4

I wouldn't say so. The story needs this context to make sense and outside a war, where else would one need to rebuild large bridges under fire. As a technical achievement it certainly is something to be proud of.

Minidisc lover here - I bought my first MZ-R50 in 1998 and a quarter of a century later I still occasionally use it.

With secondhand players getting expensive now what are the odds of somebody bringing out a new one? I'd pay good money for something that's backwards compatible, has the same chunky metallic look and feel and comes with a few new features.

Sure, I'm not hating on Apple - it's a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do. But I'd question how much of global cobalt production was ever going into macbooks/iphones rather than electric cars, lawnmowers, hoovers and whatever else.

This sets a good precedent but we'd need other manufacturers (who I'd guess are more cost-conscious) to follow suit before it changes much.

Well, hmm - is it? I'd naively imagine cobalt content is proportional to battery size, and while Apple sells a lot of devices they aren't large energy-hungry ones.

Surely far more of the world's battery production (by watt-hours or kg, take your pick) goes into cars and grid storage than iPhones?

In the context of a long-lived build server it could permanently compromise the machine, allowing an attacker to modify any other package you publish from there and maintain that access even after Rust has been fixed.

That sounded so nuts I had to look it up. Turns out they really are! https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/03/13/s...

Given the amounts of energy involved and (terrible) thermal efficiency of steam traction it would be impractical. You could short the 25kV overhead wires on an electrified route straight to the boiler and I doubt even that would make sufficient steam to get an express up to speed.

A more practical option would be oil firing, which was tried in the days of steam and found to work, but didn't save enough money to be worth the effort in a country that still had an efficient supply chain for coal. It could be done again now and would doubtless work, but wouldn't smell or look quite the same. Better than nothing I suppose and if coal really does become unavailable, that's what heritage operations will have to do.

That's absolutely right, but boilers aren't the only thing to wear out. With so many moving metal parts, despite an automated lubrication system delivering oil to most of the surfaces even the best designs of steam loco will shake themselves to bits before long. The regular expansion/contraction cycles as it's warmed up for work and cools down after also put a lot of stress on the metal.

Sixty years ago refurbs would be much of the work going on at any large railway works - taking engines apart, stripping them down to the chassis and reassembling almost a new one in their place. The ingenuity today's preservationists demonstrate in doing this without any of the facilities of a plant is truly a thing to behold.

(Source: some of my family restore steam engines. I once tried to drive one and I was terrible.)

It's very atmospheric, an absolute joy. But the best part has to be turning up at Victoria in the middle of the evening rush in an 80 year old steam train. The looks on people's faces alone are worth the price :)

Britain has a huge rail preservation community and a lot of their restored trains, many steam, make it out onto the main line.

If you'd like to catch a glimpse of one or even book a seat on it, check out the calendar at http://www.railtourinfo.co.uk/tours.html.

It truly is. For an example look at these guys juggling AT commands to control 5G modems fresh off the production line - https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/3vx1k1r3-39.

SEEKING WORK - Remote (London based), happy to visit you anywhere in the UK.

DevOps/Python consultant with a 15+ years experience building, hosting and fixing applications.

I work with engineering teams to make their products as scalable and robust as possible. AWS, Kubernetes, load testing, lambdas, CI, deploy systems, monitoring, config management, security audits, dev projects of my own - you name it I've done it.

Recent projects include:

+ Re-hosting a large microservice node.js + RethinkDB web application on Google Cloud. The resulting stack (serving a busy news site) is deployed to GKE with a set of Helm charts and a minimal amount of custom tooling for CDN & image serving. GKE has turned out to be low-maintenance and rock solid; I'll be glad to work with it again.

+ Rewriting a Python big data stack for a bioscience client. Result was a robust, scalable system deployed with Terraform/Docker to spot instances managed by AWS Batch. Benefits included better resilience, higher resource utilisation and vastly reduced cost/processing time.

+ AWS/Kubernetes/Docker deployment to support a large distributed (15 microservices + persistence layer) application. Updated a sprawling Django/Postgres app to fit modern containerised hosting, resulting in a stack that makes great use of k8s' scaling & resiliency features. Templating via Helm for multiple, namespaced stack instances & continuous integration.

+ Another AWS/k8s/Docker stack, this time with a persistence layer comprising Cassandra & Kafka with service discovery through Zookeeper. Prometheus & Grafana for monitoring.

+ Large multithreaded Python 3 application for automated crypto trading. Didn't get rich, still posting on here.

[email protected] / https://uk.linkedin.com/pub/alex-hewson/b6/50a/8b4