Dave H

🚨NEW EPISODE🚨 @gilesyb.bsky.social joins @nndroid.bsky.social & @jonnelledge.bsky.social to look at the real story of Britain’s finances; why Brexit is an even bigger drag anchor than the Treasury will admit & more. Listen now 👉 linktr.ee/ohgodwhatnow...

Good episode. The point about Labour avoiding what’s unpopular reminded me of John Lydgate

“You can please some of the people all of the time and you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time"

Labour’s trying far too hard at the last.

Exclusive: Ofcom is monitoring VPNs following Online Safety Act. Here's how Ignoring VPNs risks creating ineffective laws, but tracking them threatens people's privacy

Very disappointing that this TechRadar article, from a widely followed, supposedly technical site, entirely ignores that one of the main uses of VPNs is giving companies secure remote access for employees to internal systems. (234 chars)

www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-priv...

I think it's related to this, the BBC is still part of the state, the oligarchy don't like it precisely because of that and they've got their web of influence woven right to its core.

bsky.app/profile/urba...

The most frustrating thing about it is they almost certainly would still have won the election if they hadn't made that promise it was very much an anything but the Tories election.

That's Offaly mean.

Inside a Cello
Charles Brooks Photography

Never mind the bar charts

I think thats backwards, LLMs aren't inherently better at coding; SEs are just better at prompt engineering. Skills they've honed in logical decomposition, iterative debugging, and defining constraints extract higher-quality, production-ready output, making the tool look better at their job.

Ok so I've just spent a day using Gemini as a kind of pair for programming. And I'm calling it, LLM is a MASSIVE productivity boosting tool.
Like a machine gun if you didn't know which way to point it you could do a lot of damage, but it saved me at least half a day today, maybe more. Game changing.

Another addition to my ever-growing pile titled “Why are our politicians so bad at their jobs?” Either I don't understand what their job is or they don't. I had always assumed, perhaps naively, it was to run the country for the benefit of the people who live in it.

The problem with truth through clicks isn't that we've forgotten >who< decides what's true it's that we've forgotten >how< we decide what's true.

Peer review isn't "am I a very clever person who agrees with you", it's "are your methods sound".

Social media replaces rigor with ego.

a real racist?

They key word is >fast<, the voltage difference means kettles in the US take roughly twice as long to boil as those in 240v countries.

Never again? Memory entrepreneurship and the radical right’s assault on the postwar order

New post just out:

"Never again?"

On how the radical right are trying to change our collective memory about World War Two as part of their assault on the postwar order.

And why that memory remains a critical defence against nationalism.

(£/free trial)

open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/n...

Eastern Europe esp. Bulgaria, Poland and of course the UK.

🇺🇸 ~10% of U.S. coffee is instant, 🇪🇺 ~25‑30% in Europe

🇬🇧 Cheese on toast = open, grilled from above
🇺🇸 Grilled cheese = closed sandwich, fried from below

240 V vs 120 V. Europe got fast electric grills and kettles; America didn’t, voltage literally decided how we melt cheese and make coffee.

In 240 V regions, tea and instant coffee cultures encouraged widespread kettle use early on.

In 120 V countries, coffee machines and microwave ovens became the preferred options for hot drinks.

Depends on if you want to live longer or just make it seem like longer.

Odd really because I'm pretty sure that a clip of Farage getting riled-up and storming out would be an instant viral hit.

Oh I see you already made that point..

When does an audiobook just become a badly edited play?

If it came to a straight choice the Reform Vs Tory one is no longer that easy. In many ways the Tories are now more morally repugnant. Their actual policy on immigration will see 5% of UK residents deported including many who've lived here all their lives, paid their taxes, married & retired here.

Yep if he's done something illegal put him on trial, if not leave him alone. There's lots of morally repugnant people out there, he's nothing special in that regard.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

First system I worked on had three of these, 2mb main memory, supported a stock management and finance system for around 20 users and a network of 100 branch systems that did online orders and daily reporting.

And a lovely streak of shiny metal on the platter

ASCII art - Wikipedia

Oh yes ASCII art en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art

They were excellent for reading reports.
I remember we wrote a racing game that actually printed the track and the car as it fed through 🤣