lambdas (u/lambdas) - Readit News

lambdas commented on Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England news.sky.com/story/facial... · Posted by u/amarcheschi

orra · 14 days ago

> Must be a truly dangerous place...

I don't know if you're awaee, but the number of arrests for terrorism has skyrocketed in recent months, in the UK.

Sounds terrifying, until you realise people were arrested as terrorists for holding placards. (That fact is of course terrifying, but in a chilling way).

lambdas · 14 days ago

I hope I’m not adding 2 + 2 to get 5, but it’s incredibly convenient that a lot of people are being charged for supporting a proscribed group the same month as the online safety act is rolled out…

The cynic in me almost wonders if when it comes to re-election time, these increased numbers in terrorist charges will be trotted out and the context conveniently forgotten.

lambdas commented on RISC-V single-board computer for less than 40 euros heise.de/en/news/RISC-V-s... · Posted by u/doener

rwmj · 15 days ago

There's nothing that's compatible with RVA23 except qemu, and very few boards which are even partially compatible. Ubuntu's decision is a dumb one. This should run Fedora or Debian just fine.

lambdas · 15 days ago

I don’t think it’s dumb - hasty and premature perhaps. Manufacturers have been shipping boards with flaky RVV support, a years old kernel and undocumented blobs on in house baked OS and calling it a day.

Feels like a step towards strong arming them into shipping products that can be supported easier/not being left to rot in a drawer.

lambdas commented on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/phlummox

monooso · 15 days ago

Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it.

Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:

> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.

It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.

lambdas · 15 days ago

The only time a labour majority voted against this bill was when an amendment to make category 1 sites have optional controls for users (something that would have prevented this).

I’m going to guess that our MP’s are tech illiterate enough as it is, that when an opaque term like “what is a category 1” came up, someone hand waved over it and said “think Facebook or Twitter”

lambdas commented on Hyprland – An independent, dynamic tiling Wayland compositor hypr.land/... · Posted by u/AbuAssar

angelmm · 17 days ago

Hyprland is on my todo list because I think it will the reason why I move to Linux. The level of customization and performance is amazing. You can build the desktop you want.

lambdas · 17 days ago

I’ve been using it for a year and can’t say it does anything I couldn’t do with dwm, xmonad, i3wm over my past 18 years of tiling WM experience.

lambdas commented on Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole bytemash.net/posts/i-went... · Posted by u/jcusch

jhy · 19 days ago

Well, perhaps it's an AI writing about a tool...

> No API routes. No request/response cycles. No DTOs. Just… objects that magically sync. It kind of feels like cheating.

lambdas · 19 days ago

That and the paragraph above:

> What makes this powerful is that these aren’t just type definitions - they’re live, reactive objects that sync automatically.

Is what twigged my AI radar too. LLM’s seem to really love that summarisation pattern of `{X is/isn’t just Y. Pithy concluding remark}`

lambdas commented on A list is a monad alexyorke.github.io//2025... · Posted by u/polygot

billmcneale · 2 months ago

> That's why the pattern is so useful in the first place

How useful, really? Monads don't even universally compose, which is what most people sell the concept for.

lambdas · 2 months ago

Actions compose, types (generally) don’t. So Monad X and Monad Y may not make a valid Monad Z, but Kleisi composition very much exists for actions within a monad.

lambdas commented on Algebraic Effects: Another mistake carried through to perfection? kjosib.github.io/Counterp... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

lambdas · 4 months ago

To which implementation is the author referring, I wonder?

I can’t say I recognise any of these issues from freer, polysemy, nor bluefin.

lambdas commented on 'Nobody has done this before': Britain's beloved steam trains trial technology theguardian.com/uk-news/2... · Posted by u/beardyw

tialaramex · 4 months ago

Historically steam locomotives have a bad record with actual use of safety systems. IIRC accident investigators found that one locomotive retrofitted with the current minimum allowable safety equipment (TPWS) was routinely being operated in a "cut out" mode intended only for service use but in passenger service. In this mode no actual safety is achieved, the locomotive can (and does) for example pass danger signals without action - which is why accident investigators were looking at it, it had been involved in an accident which should have been impossible because it simply sailed through red lights like a distracted driver playing Candy Crush as their SUV rolls through a busy intersection.

On a typical "modern" (ie late 20th century) train like the mainline EMUs I would normally catch when I was a commuter decades ago, the equivalent "cut out" is a glass sealed MCB in the cab, a driver who wants to get rid of this safety feature has to destroy a tell-tale glass seal and company regulations will make them write up why it was necessary then replace it - and of course the automation records each occurrence because why wouldn't it. The paperwork is a faff, so is getting a new unique numbered seal, so drivers actually choose the non-risky option when it's available.

On the steam loco, that "cut out" is operated by cutting a cable tie. The cable ties aren't unique of course, and so investigators found countless broken ties littering the dirty cab of the steam locomotive, because you just cut the tie, do what you want and before signing off try to remember to fit a new cable tie. No actual safety delivered.

lambdas · 4 months ago

Yeah, the steam operators raised hell over having to follow the central locking for doors and sealing of windows passengers could stick their head out of.

Wasn’t even prospective, preventative action. There was pretty rash series of decapitations/fatalities in the past decade of people who think sticking their head out of a moving train is risk free that lead to this ruling being made mandatory.

They kicked off claiming it would ruin the ambience, but really it cost a very pretty penny.

They’d do anything to save a few quid; it’s amazing how they used to get cheap oil lube and coal from Russia, and since the war they’ve miraculously been managing to procure the same rates from new companies that have appeared overnight/moved production to sanction-less countries just over the border like Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan etc.

lambdas commented on 'Nobody has done this before': Britain's beloved steam trains trial technology theguardian.com/uk-news/2... · Posted by u/beardyw

mrweasel · 4 months ago

In some sense I'm more surprised that someone spend time and money on building a new steam locomotive, rather than the fact that you can fit ETCS on one.

Sure, fitting modern signaling equipment on a steam train isn't easy, but it also doesn't feel impossible. Building a brand new steam locomotive, again, sure you can probably do it, but it seems like a lot of expensive work, requiring skills that hasn't been employed in decades and it's probably not really worth doing, financially speaking.

Edit: Apparently it is not uncommon to build steam locomotives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotives_of_the_21st_...

lambdas · 4 months ago

I’m a dynamics/kinematics engineer who gets consulted by steam locomotive companies often, and they’re very much worth doing financially speaking.

They certainly wouldn’t be your only venture, more “you have a lot of money and love trains” but seats on these things can run for £2k a head and they run basically every day from Spring through to end of Summer.

lambdas commented on UK IT job searching broken · Posted by u/c7THEC2DDFVV2V

tetris11 · 5 months ago

I got lucky with a US startup.

At first I wasn't satisfied with working their hours, so I kept applying for UK firms.

(I've since adjusted with lazy mornings and no sociability in the evenings.)

But there's nothing. I mean nothing. Lots of companies putting out the exact same job listings, month after month, and I refuse to believe that they haven't found the right candidate after 6 months of continuous interviews.

They're either projecting growth but not actually hiring, or are waiting for someone to tell them that they'd happily work for almost nothing.

Then there's the horror stories of the major re-orgs happening at large companies, and the hire-and-dump schemes that seem to be prevalent. Who would have thought that small startups were the stable ones? It's a shitshow.

lambdas · 5 months ago

Glad I’m not alone in this; I’ve seen niche roles up for 16 months. Do these roles even exist? Are they waiting on the most golden of geese?