HN user
It's hard for an addict to stop being dependant upon a dealer - not least because the dealer wants to maintain that dependency. We've been suckered, and fallen for it hard, but now that Trump has made it clear that the US will never again be a reliable partner, the scales are falling from even our leaders eyes.
The headline has it right - there is no going back.
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Checklists" (https://rs.io/unreasonable-effectiveness-of-checklists/) comes to mind.
When I was younger I would have though the same. Now that I have more humility and less working memory, I think differently.
I've been using a VPN on and off for years when there was a privacy concern.
Now there is a privacy concern 24x7, and so I use a VPN 24x7. A bad law and risk-averse sites have made the web a complete PITA without one.
The number of e.g. news sites and other vanilla content that requires intrusive checks, photo-ID etc. is astonishing.
I wonder how many parents have had to ask their kids for help setting a VPN up? <sigh>
I just couldn't live without this thing. Well, I could but I would be less productive and more grumpy.
Back in the mists of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I developed DataEase applications under MS-DOS there was a thing called "Pathminder" [1] which was a very useful tool. Moving to Linux and finding Midnight Commander felt like coming home...
In my case being a generalist is less about knowing a lot about everything, and more about knowing how to work things out, and how to bridge the gap between specialised fields.
I do end up knowing a little bit about lots of things, but in terms of "knowing enough", I only need to go into a scenario with enough knowledge to get some traction on the issue I'm working on. Once I've established a bridgehead, the rest follows naturally.
Nope, the author's point is about what happens after fascists are elected, and he proposed no exceptions to that.
Finland was not cited as an exception. His point about Finland was that the fascists messed up - they tried to use violence before that point.
This is hilarious - I have yet to get to the article, because (on a fresh Ubuntu Mate LTS install with the stock Firefox) I am redirected to: -
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/cspace-generic-ua.html
...which complains about an "HTTP User-Agent header value that is too generic or otherwise excessively suspicious. Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that behave like this.", and I'm left thinking that the person behind this site does not care about client-side problems...
Username checks out!
I agree. As well as the technical merits, it seems to me to be a better match for natural human interaction. Your point about citizen-owned media is well made - in the US we seem to be seeing the near-total collapse of integrity in commercial media - on the one hand it is dismaying to watch, on the other it is as clear a call to arms as we could wish for.
It's been good to see Bluesky up its video game in response to the TikTok nonsense. I'd like to think that the Fediverse could evolve to meet the expectations of people fleeing Facebook, Twitter & co, but it's not there yet. Those of us who are highly motivated (and I am, after recent events!) will make do, but I think it needs to be easier in order to get the critical mass required.
We also outsourced our social media. That has to change - it's literally not safe.
There is a lot of witless verbiage about the "town square", but precious little acknowledgement of the obvious fact that every town has its OWN square, and that's the point.
For the last decade my feeds have been polluted by "content" about Brexit and Trump, almost all of which has been noise/distraction/propaganda. I'm sick to the back teeth of it, and it's time to make it stop.
No, they don't just work at these places, they run these places.
There may be some problems in UK society caused by upper class Harrow school boys (!), but the batch of those very same upper class Harrow school boys currently running the security services are obviously smart enough to recognise that getting the job done requires more diversity.
I don't think he _made_ anyone do anything, unless that's somehow a term of art?
Thanks for explaining where that apparently random ordering comes from - drives me nuts too!
Thanks for the link - will take some time for me to digest.
people with complex problems, chaotic lives and a high and ongoing risk of reoffending.
Surely that applies to almost all prisoners?
I don't think that you have addressed my point though, which is that the people who have been given these sentences are not those supposedly targeted by the law.
I couldn't disagree with any of the points that you make, but I think we're talking past each other. There is a threshold at which these sentences might make sense, and we risk conflating discussion about those cases with the much larger number of problematic cases where the logic is - at least quantitatively - different.
IPP sentences were created specifically to deal with prisoners who habitually reoffend on release.
The whole point about this situation is that the sentences were applied to people who do NOT fit that description (not my just view, also the view of the architect of this atrocity, David Blunkett), so in the majority of cases in question your reasoning does not apply.
Happy triple booter here - yup, it's a thing.
I have a stable/secure Linux and an experimental Linux on my trusty old T430, but I need a Windows instance for testing.
I'm glad this exists for those who want it, but for me the added noise / cognitive load of all those braces is painful.
Agreed. I have to schedule the "big" stuff, but for the rest the best I can do is work productively, following the connections between things.
I'll have a day doing the tasks using one sort of tech, and another doing something else - a python day, a sysadmin day, a writing day. I can't tell when a thing will get done, but by working this way as long as it's on a list I know I'll get to it. If I try to schedule it, my productivity plummets.
I use Joplin, and am with you on the half a zillion notes thing.
What is helping me is the "bidirectional links" plugin (so I'm linked to the the first version of the notes and don't forget it exists and keep starting again), and the "home note" plugin (so there is a hub for all those spokes).
It's a lot of work "curating" stuff, but I haven't found a better way for the way my mind works.
This completely fails to address the significance of the word "viable" in MVP - it's only meaningful if we define what it's viable _for_.
In a startup it may be "viable to test a hypothesis", in a running business it may be "viable to implement a new workflow". In either case the logic of the MVP approach holds - do the least you need to do to learn what to do next.
One could argue that "simple" in their SLC is analogous to "minimal", and "lovable" to "viable".
You have not stated a case.
Reading the cited article in Nature, specifically re. methane, it states that "Arctic wetlands are effective methane emitters, yet dry and moist arctic tundra soils in north east Greenland have been measured to draw down methane", suggesting that the issue is the balance between the two.
I googled that for you [1] and the answer is probably not what you assumed, so I'm not sure that your question makes the point that you imagine it does.
N.B. I've quoted the first hit, but multiple sources seem to concur.
[1] https://visitgreenland.com/articles/10-facts-nellie-huang/
It's in maintenance mode, and still has a role.
However, the focus has moved to py4web [1] which has many of web2py's strengths (including the DAL), but with a more orthodox architecture at the cost of a little more complexity and a slightly steeper learning curve.
Ubuntu Mate LTS editions, and ChromeOS if you count that - which I do.
Mate "just works" on my old Lenovo T430, I use Ubuntu on my servers, and both are solid.
Most of the time I'm on ChromeOS on a Pixelbook Go, with Thunderird, Terminator, VSCode and Joplin running on the Debian side, but there is the odd thing that is not happy on that setup.
I'm not aware of the Supreme Court having authority over the dictionary though.
Any news as to the process or reasoning for the hold?
My mistake - the links in the book are broken, but the site links take us to GitHub and all is well there.
Looks worth a look, but am getting "no such bucket" from the download links.
Is it ethical for the "public square" to have a robots.txt?
Musk is trying to have his cake and eat it...
(Clearly it's not a public square, but his position is incoherent).