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btbuilder

452 karma · joined February 3, 2012

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btbuilder··on MCP 2026-07-28 Specification: transport going stateless
Excellent improvement. The server-side complexity required to handle sessions has been a large burden both on infrastructure and on educating teams on its characteristics.
btbuilder··on In the UK, EVs are cheaper than petrol cars, thanks to Chinese competition
~1.5 billion train journeys a year is “functional”.
btbuilder··on The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
0C = Frozen!
btbuilder··on The future of Python web services looks GIL-free
It’s hard to answer without specifics but languages shouldn’t require you to determine whether it’s safe to use an api in an async context or whether it will hang your app. I imagine some of the sharp edges you might have run into are because go has real parallelism and you have to address data sharing.
btbuilder··on The future of Python web services looks GIL-free
This is fantastic progress for CPython. I had almost given up hope that CPython would overcome the GIL after first hitting its limitations over 10 years ago.

That being said I strongly believe that because of the sharp edges on async style code vs proper co-routine-based user threads like go-routines and Java virtual threads Python is still far behind optimal parallelism patterns.

btbuilder··on We found a bug in Go's ARM64 compiler
Right, in a 3rd-party library.
btbuilder··on We found a bug in Go's ARM64 compiler
Segfaults with no use of “Unsafe” equivalents in managed languages can give immediate indication it’s not a code problem.
btbuilder··on FP8 is ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cutlass" in it
I believe the driver silently swapped the textures to lower quality ones that looked worse but gave a performance boost.
btbuilder··on BS 1363 British Plugs and Sockets
That’s not my experience but it’d be interesting to from others on the matter.
btbuilder··on BS 1363 British Plugs and Sockets
TR in the US makes sockets harder to use, but I have never heard anyone complain about TR in the UK, as the earth/ground pin is always present, and is physically longer than the live and neutral, so mechanically it is reliable and unnoticeable.

“Just baby proof” means remembering to keep those little plastic covers in place in every outlet. That doesn’t seem like superior usability.

btbuilder··on BS 1363 British Plugs and Sockets
The shutter prevents someone (including children) shoving something metal into the live/hot. I have never heard of it failing. Newer US outlets (TR/tamper resistant) are way more finicky because of the optional ground pin. Sticking the little plastic covers over the outlet is a workaround.

The reason for a fuse is because of the high current capacity of ring circuits vs branch/radial. The fuse protects the power cable of appliances catching fire as they can’t handle the current available on the circuit .

Ring circuits are a thing due to minimizing copper usage when rebuilding after ww2.

btbuilder··on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units
The switching of command and service in the argument order from the init script days still catches me out.

foo restart vs restart foo

btbuilder··on M4 Macs can't virtualise older macOS
It at least has the virtualization framework now. There’s a product called Anka that plugs into Jenkins and lets you deploy macOS VM images as build agents on top of physical Apple hardware. While slower than containers, and limited to 2 VMs (?!?) you can have reproducible and sane build environments via VM images.
btbuilder··on We Built a Self-Healing System to Survive a Concurrency Bug at Netflix
I mean, it worked for Boeing[1] too.

1 - https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...

btbuilder··on We're excited about our new roundabout
There’s a link in the article but here it is with a time code for the start of the simulation.

https://youtu.be/07_m7HHiZRw?t=39

btbuilder··on Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC
Assembly of the phone or device using the processor.
btbuilder··on Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC
Do the chips get shipped to China for assembly?
btbuilder··on Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison

  input_string = "VMS"
  output_string = ''.join([chr(ord(char) + 1) for char in input_string])
  print(output_string)
btbuilder··on EV Motors Without Rare Earth Permanent Magnets
Pump filling times should be compared with DC-fast charging times as L2 is normally what you do at home when you don’t care too much about how long it takes. F150 will DC fast charge 15% -> 80% in “around 32 minutes”. Level 2 takes 10 hours as you point out.
btbuilder··on Java string interpolation feature has been cancelled
While it’s more how they are used, imo optional is abused to the point it adds complexity. You don’t avoid handling null, but now you have to deal with present or not. Therefore you’ve gone from 2 states to 3. Use of value or null is simpler to me and use of optional can be via Optional.of() rather than parameters and properties for the vast majority of cases.
btbuilder··on GDPR: Is It Worth It?
I always choose the “essential cookies only” option. This is normally harder than accepting all cookies, but it is getting easier over time. I rarely see a site that has essential-only.
btbuilder··on Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers
When looking for a reverse proxy that is performant on Windows and Linux around 5 or 6 years ago the options were very limited. Traefik is what we ended up using.

I haven’t checked recently but at the time nginx on Windows used select() and envoy was either beta or needed a recent version of the Windows kernel that not all customers were running.

We still use it today.

btbuilder··on Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
Press F12 and dust off your Dabs Press BASIC WIMP programming for the Acorn…

A machine that you could code up a full GUI application with the BASIC interpreter in ROM, enabling children everywhere to which a C compiler was Unobtainium.

btbuilder··on Why George Washington's Statue in London Doesn't Touch British Soil
Six Frigates is an excellent book about the origins of the U.S. Navy. It also gives a little insight into how quickly Britain and the U.S. aligned themselves, helped in part by the French Revolution.
btbuilder··on He spent his life building a $1M stereo
Meridian Audio have been making active digital speakers for over 25 years.

SPDIF input to every speaker with custom DSP to do digital crossover tuned to the cabinet and particular cones.

btbuilder··on Widespread FBI abuse of foreign spy law sets off "alarm bells," tech group says
I’ve been reading about negligence around controls of this process for over 15 years.

If folks don’t know already they should realize that section 702 was only passed after it became public that this surveillance was already happening with questionable legal authority.

btbuilder··on The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)
The kubernetes plug-in for Jenkins works well for us, and as the checkout/clone happens in the pod you don’t have the workspace bind mount problem. We are using docker-in-docker at the moment but looking at buildah. We do parallel windows container builds as well.

Jenkins is a bit like Perl IMO: there are ways to use it that avoid the majority of its sharp edges (eg putting logic in bash and just call bash, avoid groovy) if you know the perils that lurk.

btbuilder··on Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)
I bent a few pins in a VGA connector due to misalignment once. This was when the cable was hardwired into the monitor!
btbuilder··on Heat pumps can't take the cold? Nordics debunk the myth
Air sourced heat pump?
btbuilder··on The Future of Terraform Must Be Open
Copyright holder can always switch to any license they want. Difficulties only emerge if there are multiple copyright holders because contributors weren’t required to assign copyright. Workarounds include rewriting or removing the code owned by someone else.

Previously released versions cannot have their licenses rescinded unless there is clause allowing it.

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