Viewing profile — neilalexander

It is immensely frustrating that there is so little unlicensed spectrum available vs the massive amounts of spectrum available to militaries and very rich network operators. Worse …

I worked on Dendrite for a number of years, activity on it pretty much fell off a cliff after I left Element but there seems to be a fork called Zendrite that has carried on with d…

The CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE capability on Linux is far less of a blunt instrument that applies to a single process rather than system-wide.

Someone else commented about the law being “non-autistic”, this is a perfect example of that. The technicality of the encryption keys vs the files is irrelevant, the intent was to …

This is not true. There's a specced QR code and Bluetooth workflow for using a passkey on one device to sign into an account on another. It works cross-platform.

Ofcom's interpretation and enforcement of a law is not immune from judicial review, however. The courts can rule that Ofcom misinterpreted the law or acted outwith their remit or d…

I did read the article, yes, and it is clear to me that this is a bug, not a feature. Ofcom were suddenly able to find a "novel reading" when directed to do so by a court as a mean…

In other words, "stay where you are for now, we promise to extend the legislation to cover you in the future".

I don't expect that my current version of the software will be updated forever or remain indefinitely secure though. I expect that I'll get some small updates or security patches f…

TablePlus is a good example. I buy their product and in exchange I get a year of updates. After that, it keeps on working without new features or updates. If I want new features or…

> Upgrade pricing also doesn’t solve this. [...] versioned upgrades incentivize developers to chase shiny features that people might pay for rather than improving their app and bui…

This is a dumb take and a very weird attempt at gatekeeping. Of course programming is a profession. It can also be a hobby, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a profession. The wo…

Visa and Mastercard are both US companies and they issue both debit and credit cards. If you have a UK or EU bank account with a Visa or Mastercard, regardless of currency or wheth…

Bank-owned and supermarket cash machines don't generally charge for withdrawals in the UK but there are still many third-party machines that do.

No, because you could feasibly end up with neighbour entries for the same address via multiple interfaces and then you are no further forward.

AI contributions are only a part of the issue. Another part is where a contributor decides they want a specific feature and contributes it but then disappears off into the sunset w…

Having services be accessible on a link-local address and then advertising that service via mDNS is a completely legitimate use-case that works extremely well and is extremely comm…

I would add that there is no particularly good reason for an EV to have a push-to-start button. With Volvo, Polestar etc, you get in and shift straight into Drive or Reverse, and w…

It matters if it's relevant to the person asking the AI agent for help with what they're doing with the software that they already have.

Because there is a world of software out there that isn't CLI-based and much of it may never be updated to expose LLM-friendly APIs.

HaLow is just Wi-Fi on sub-1GHz frequencies and narrower channels. You get normal MTUs and TCP & UDP work just fine.

None of MeshCore, Meshtastic or Reticulum will scale well, especially not on top of a heavily constrained radio technology like LoRa. Flooding is inefficient for obvious reasons, A…

Incoming voltage monitoring is a requirement for EV chargers in the UK. The sudden huge demand would result in a voltage drop, the chargers would then detect the under-voltage cond…

If only I had a penny for every HN comment about naming conflicts.