gearhart

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
632
Submissions
129
Member since
May 16
I publish everything that happens in UK local council meetings on https://opencouncil.network

email me: [email protected]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 9 months ago
This is incredibly cool.

Licensing it as AGPL-v3 throws up an interesting question - given the thing this produces is your company as code, if you use this does your entire company count as a larger work that would need to be open sourced? Or is there an explicit distinction between the "firmware" (excuse me) and the work product?

Comment · 10 months ago
Really interesting, thank you! They do seem very rare in comparison to ANPR, although maybe I'm not looking for the right thing. Durham, Plymouth and Wokingham are talking about Red Speed and Acusensus but given basically all 300 odd councils have discussed ANPR at some point in the last year, that's a tiny percentage.
Comment · 10 months ago
Interesting. I just ran a similar search for « ANPR » which I think is the UK equivalent, in UK local government meetings and it’s mentioned about 80 times a month, which from a cursory glance looks like it’s more than are being shown here. I didn’t look through them yet to see how many were discussions about adding new installations vs referencing existing ones.

Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?

Comment · 10 months ago
Publishing everything local councils do in the UK at https://opencouncil.network - trying to help people feel like they know who and what they’re voting for next May.

It’s been incredibly rewarding to see people’s changing opinions of their local government

Comment · 1 year ago
We use openwhisper for transcription which accepts a list of "words to look out for" which we populate with a short list of the names of all the people and companies most likely to be mentioned in the text, and then we do a spell checking pass at the end using Gemini with a much longer list, telling it to look out for anything that might be a misspelling.

It's not perfect, but it's taken it from being an issue that made all our transcripts look terrible, to an issue I no longer think about.

I imagine just using the second spellchecking pass with Gemini would be almost as effective.

Comment · 1 year ago
The terrain isn’t difficult - straightforward hiking with no special gear required - but you can make it as easy or hard as you like by varying the number of days you do it over. Famously the UTMB is a race that does roughly the same route in one push over two days, which is definitely difficult!
Comment · 1 year ago
I will never forget watching a kookaburra swoop down as my grandmother went to take a bite out of a bacon sandwich, and stealing a piece of bacon out of it without touching her or the bread. It then sat on a branch whacking the bacon against it to "kill it" before eating it.
Comment · 1 year ago
Worth noting that in the UK if you say « this is obviously predatory and isn’t going to hold up in small claims court » this requirement almost always disappears and they tell you that just this one time they’ll be nice and cancel from today.
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 2 years ago
The BBC has a laudable goal of trying to be "balanced" which unfortunately is often poorly implemented as giving equal credence to both sides of an argument, even when doing so paints a wildly innaccurate picture.

If you look at the totality of the BBC's coverage, it's clear that the general consensus is that he did a good thing for humanity that hurt some powerful people, and he's been unjustly punished for it, but that there is a small cohort of people (including some very vocal, powerful ones who get headlines) who disagree with that opinion and think that he did something negative and was justly punished for it.

The trouble is that when you summarise that argument, you lose the "general consensus" and "small cohort" bits and you just get the two points, which together make a rather different story.

Comment · 2 years ago
I tried following this recipe - it was tasty but very heavy and greasy. Perhaps philosophy and cooking do not require the same talents.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
This is what Route2 is building.

It's not a pure-play software solution or an external policing force; it depends on large amounts of work done by analysts and cooperation from the companies themselves.

However, the motivation to drive internal actors in companies to care about tracking externalities has always been the hardest part of this problem, and that's starting to be solved for us by society and the market.

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO and we're hiring

Comment · 4 years ago
Looks like they could well have been CNC routed - if you turn them sideways they're a 2D design so it might be even easier than 3D printing them (and pretty!)
Comment · 4 years ago
Perhaps, or perhaps it's the traditions and rituals that allow the community to last so long.

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