Digit-Al

I guess, if you really think about it, a lot of the safety checking is to make sure that the person trying to adopt is not a predator who will abuse the child. In this case, someone who was like that would not have called the police and handed the child in, they would have just taken the baby to abuse; so his handing in the child to the authorities automatically ticked the "not a child predator" box. Thanks for helping me to think about this in a different way :-)

A comparable example I suppose would be the question of what's the best strategy for seeking help if you're lost: basically, statistically, it's approach the first person you see and ask for help.

Ah yes, from the Paul Graham article on security. I bring that one up myself from time to time :-)

It can also be the article skipped on these difficulties for a better headline.

Thanks for the reply. That is certainly a possibility that I didn't think of. I guess they could possibly have thought that if he was caring enough to take time out of his day to call the police and look after the baby until they arrived that he might potentially make a good parent as well.

I find this story slightly odd. I'm not trying to suggest it's not true, I have trust in the Guardian not to print falsehoods; but do they really offer abandoned babies to just anyone in America?

Here in the UK, I used to work with a guy many years ago who was trying to adopt. He and his wife had to go through months and months of vetting and paperwork to be allowed to become adopted parents. You basically have to prove that you are fit to be a parent. And yet in this story a court basically says "hey, you wanna adopt this baby you found? Yeah? Here you go."

Sounds like this guy I knew should have moved to America. He and his wife could have just pulled up to an orphanage, said "I'll take that one", and been parents immediately - if this story is anything to go by.

Taking advice from Paul Graham on why you should not impose a wealth tax is like taking advice from the neighbours cat on why you should allow him to crap on your lawn.

His argument is incredibly disingenuous; the sort of people who will be affected by a wealth tax are the sort of people who find ways of avoiding paying income tax, or indeed any tax at all if possible.

It makes me very angry when these billionaires who build up enormous wealth, partaially by avoiding paying the taxes that fund the infrastructure that help them build their wealth, get upset at people who suggest that maybe they should pay something back to society.

Paul Graham should, maybe, stick to blogging about tech, because when he gets into politics he really shows his true colours... and it ain't pretty.

I know a lot of people like to dump on Firefox, but a number of paywalls, including the Guardian one, completely disappear when you use it. For those that don't, some of them disappear if you use reader mode.

Are you mabe thinking of Solid[1]? This is an interesting idea, and I have looked into it on several occasions recently, but despite it being around for a really long time it appears to be going exactly nowhere, unfortunately.

It seems a bit of a missed opportunity really. If they had more agressively pursued alliances, it could potentially have been a solid (pun only semi intended) foundation for Mastadon and Bluesky.

The name is unfortunate as well, it is really difficult to search for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...

I'm not sure this is quite what you are looking for, though I could be wrong. As far as I can tell they haven't added support for writing Markdown, the added support for importing to and exporting from Markdown.

It says all that in the article.

You are possibly misunderstanding me. Firstly, I am not saying anything against the Iranian people in general. As far as I understand things, the majority of Iranians are moderate and tolerant, and have a strong desire to have a more liberal approach to the world. The current Iranian government, however, is under the rule of insane fundamentalists (with the emphasis on mental) who think nothing of machine gunning down protesters in the street. Even the majority of Iranian people don't want to be ruled by them. This is fact, not "blessed homeland" mischaracterisation.

I'm British, and whilst I don't think my government is perfect (their stance on digital privacy is insane) they are not murdering people, and we can vote them out at the next election if we want to.

The problem is that you are not dealing with rational people here, you are dealing with extreme religous fanatics. They are either not afraid of dying and becoming martyrs, or they are afraid but dare not show it.

If you are on the mobile app, click on the burger menu and select "Feeds". You will then have a page that has tabs at the top. "All" will be selected by default, but if you select "Friends" you will see only posts from your friends. If you have completely caught up it will be empty and will say that you have caught up and seen everything your friends have posted. There are still ads, but you don't get all the reels, and crap posted by people you don't know.

The major problem is that no one trusts government not to abuse it and use it to track everything people do. There will be some proportion of people who trust the current government, but will be paranoid that a future government will abuse it, and there will be a proportion of people that don't trust the current government to not abuse it.

You might be able to get more trust by the government assigning a third party to audit the systems to make sure they are working as advertised, and not being abused, but you would still get people being paranoid that either the third party could be corrupted to pretend that things are okay, or that a future government would just fire them and have the system changed to track everyone anyway.

No matter what you do, you will never convince a subset of people that a system that can potentially be used to track everyone won't be abused in that way. Unfortunately, those people are most likely correct. This is why we can't have nice things :(

For the record, I thing it would be great to be able to have a trusted government issued digital ID for some purposes. I especially think it would be great to have an officially issued digital ID that could be used to sign electronic documents. My partner and I moved home recently, and it was not easy signing and exchanging legal documents electronically.

Next thing we need is for them to host their own Git infra, to avoid dependency on US Github.

On my Android phone, just the calculator app is 13MB. How in hell is it 13MB just for a calculator? It beggars belief.

This should be marked as being from 2023.

The Daily Mail is frequently referred to as either 'The Daily Fail' or 'The Daily Heil' (referring to the fact they supported Oswald Mosley and his fascist ideals, and remain very right wing). It is not a quality publication by any means.

Do you mean $300M for ByteDance? Because $300B dwarfs $1.5B and $3.4B.

That's because we are no longer in the EU. Before Brexit they were legally mandated to allow free roaming in the EU. Now they are back to charging whatever outrageous prices they wish.

Use Firefox or Zen browser with uBlock Origin. I never see ads on Youtube anymore.

"\v" is an ASCII control character, and means "vertical tab" (VT). In ASCII it is code 11, which is why they are inserting the number 11.

It would be interesting if someone could do a deep dive into what solar would cost if forced labour was taken out and all workers were paid a fair wage. Would it still be super competitive?

If someone could show that paying a fair wage to workers would still leave solar compellingly cheap then it might incentivise some parts of the supply chain to clean up their act. That's "if" of course.

Your documentation appears to be a bit broken. When I try to click on pipes I get a 404. Just to let you know.

"carrion luggage" lol

Did you get auto-incorrected?

You appear to have misunderstood what happened. It was her management team that thought it was in bad taste. They then got the lawyers to draft a letter. The lawyers weren't acting "supposedly on their clients behalf", they were doing exactly what their clients asked them to do - which is their job. In this case, it was the management team that was acting "supposedly on their clients behalf" and who needed to chill out.

Ever heard of a confusopoly[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly

That's a real shame to hear. Many years ago I took over the running of a website that was hosted on Rackspace, and their support really was great. We rarely had problems, but when things did go wrong they always resolved it really quickly.

Private equity asset stripping is a cancer.

Facebook mobile tip: if you click on the burger menu and select "Feeds" you will be taken to a page with a list of different feeds at the top. If you then select the "Friends" tab you will see only posts from your friends. Doesn't get rid of ads, unfortunately, but it does get rid of all the crap from recommended pages, etc...

What you're link refers to seems to be a different way to get to the feed that has been around for ages. The feed I described has been around for over a year (I can't remember when I first found out about it, but it was a long time ago).

[Edit] it looks like it was initially introduced three years ago: https://about.fb.com/news/2022/07/home-and-feeds-on-facebook...

Facebook could provide you options to only see friend's content. People have certainly asked for it. They absolutely refuse to.

What are you talking about? On the app, click on the burger menu and select feeds. You will then have a page with get feeds. Song the top you will see "Friends". Select that to see only stuff your friends have posted.

Facebook has loads of options to curate your feed. Lots of people are too lazy or stupid to find them.

What rock are you living under; our Queen died a while ago now. It will be by order of the King these days : - )