RobinL

7 ms·

61.
GB Renewables Map(renewables-map.robinhawkes.com)
146 points by RobinL 8mo ago|49 comments
62.
by RobinL 8mo ago
Agreed! The first piece of software I built was a simple inventory and sales management system, around 2000. I was 16 and it was just about my first experience programming. It was for school, and I recently found the write up and was surp
63.
by RobinL 8mo ago
My wife's old company, a fairly significant engineering consultancy, ran it's entire time/job management and invoicing system from a company wide, custom developed Microsoft Access app called 'Time'. It was develope
64.
Matchbox: A record matching and entity resolution orchestration tool(github.com)
1 points by RobinL 8mo ago|0 comments
65.
by RobinL 8mo ago
Agree. Much of the value of devs is understanding the thing they're working on so they know what to do when it breaks, and knows what new features it can easily support. Doesn't matter whether they wrote the code, a colleague wr
66.
Respectful use of AI in software development teams(robinlinacre.com)
2 points by RobinL 9mo ago|0 comments
67.
by RobinL 9mo ago
> saw absolutely zero value in it At the very least, it can quickly build throwaway productivity enhancing tools. Some examples from building a small education game: - I needed to record sound clips for a game. I vibe coded a webapp in
68.
by RobinL 9mo ago
Does anyone have direct experience with Claude making damaging mistakes in dangerously skip permissions mode? It'd be great to have a sense of what the real world risk is.
69.
by RobinL 9mo ago
I think that's totally fine for individual work, but in larger data engineering teams it's less good to switch between tools because other people may have to maintain your code. That said, polars is good, and if the team agree to
70.
by RobinL 9mo ago
Worse in some ways, better in others. DuckDB is often an excellent tool for this kind of task. Since it can run parallelized reads I imagine it's often faster than command line tool, and with easier to understand syntax
71.
by RobinL 9mo ago
Found myself nodding along. I think increasingly it's useful to think of PRs from unknown external people as more like an issue than a PR (kind of like the 'issue first' policy described in the article). There's actuall
72.
by RobinL 9mo ago
Exactly - these huge machines are surely eating a lot into the need for distributed systems like Spark. So much less of a headache to run as well
73.
by RobinL 9mo ago
Author here. I wouldn't argue SQL or duckdb is _more_ testable than polars. But I think historically people have criticised SQL as being hard to test. Duckdb changes that. I disagree that SQL has nothing to do with fast. One of the mo
74.
by RobinL 9mo ago
Author here. Re: 'SQL should be the first option considered', there are certainly advantages to other dataframe APIs like pandas or polars, and arguably any one is better in the moment than SQL. At the moment Polars is ascendent
75.
by RobinL 9mo ago
It is true that for json and csv you need a full scan but there are several mitigations. The first is simply that it's fast - for example, DuckDB has one of the best csv readers around, and it's parallelised. Next, engines like Du
76.
by RobinL 9mo ago
https://robinlinacre.com
77.
by RobinL 9mo ago
> In her November Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves scaled back business rate discounts that have been in force since the pandemic from 75% to 40% - and announced that there would be no discount at all from April. That, combined with big
78.
by RobinL 9mo ago
I was curious for a UK comparison so I looked it up. At the start of 2025, about 3% of adults in UK had used GLP-1 drugs in past year in the UK. And "most GLP-1 for weight loss in the UK is from private, rather than NHS provision"
79.
Respectful use of AI in software development teams(robinlinacre.com)
1 points by RobinL 9mo ago|0 comments
80.
by RobinL 9mo ago
Another interesting aspect is that the NHS app makes all your detailed health history (doctors notes, scan results etc.) available to you as the patient. Which in turn means you have the option of feeding it into ChatGPT. This feels poten
81.
by RobinL 9mo ago
I'm hoping increasing we'll see agents helping with this sort of issue. I would like an agent that would do things like pull the spark repo into the working area and consult the source code/cross reference against what you&#
82.
by RobinL 9mo ago
The art creation tool is great: https://tiled.art/en/create/
83.
Maths vs. Monsters(rupertlinacre.com)
2 points by RobinL 10mo ago|0 comments
84.
Isocity – Metropolis Builder (open-source/in browser)(iso-city.com)
2 points by RobinL 10mo ago|0 comments
85.
by RobinL 10mo ago
Yeah - agree, Anthropic much better for coding. I'm more thinking about the 'average chat user' (the larger potential userbase), most of whom are on chatgpt.
86.
by RobinL 10mo ago
Feels like Google is really pulling ahead of the pack here. A model that is cheap, fast and good, combined with Android and gsuite integration seems like such powerful combination. Presumably a big motivation for them is to be first to get
87.
by RobinL 10mo ago
I've found Opus 4.5 in copilot to be very impressive. Better than codex CLI in my experience. I agree Copilot definitely used to be absolutely awful.
88.
by RobinL 10mo ago
Price and scarcity go hand in hand, not value and scarcity. Diamonds are pretty worthless but expensive because they're scarce (putting aside industrial applications), water is extremely valuable but cheap. No doubt there are some good
89.
by RobinL 10mo ago
More coverage of the broader geothermal renaissance: Geothermal’s time has finally come https://www.economist.com/interactive/science-and-technology... And i found this interesting: https://www.complexsystem
90.
by RobinL 10mo ago
Out of the current options, I strongly agree - I even wrote a blog post! https://www.robinlinacre.com/recommend_sql/ But on the other hand, that's doesn't mean SQL is ideal - far from it. When using DuckDB w

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