IMHO Google Photos was also just brand/infra-churn because it replaced Picasa Web Albums.
1,273 karma · joined August 16, 2023
Forced? You clearly don't know the history.
It was a long campaign but the moral argument had won broad support in the population and parliament. It was literally the UK government trying to get this passed. Prime Minister William Pitt was an abolitionist as was his successor William Grenville that passed this bill. This specific bill was passed by a near unanimous majority.
Earlier bills under Pitt had passed the commons but fallen in the more conservative Lords claiming to protect "the national interest". I believe the strategies that helped tip the balance was salami-slicing to just abolish trade rather then total abolition while arguing that continued trade would lead to slave rebellions as had been seen in French colonies thus it needed to be stopped not just out of moral necessity but national interest too.
You seem intent on corrupting history to do what? Attack some straw-man concoction of British national identity? Stop it.
Do not pretend for a moment that USA was leading on anything here.
1. UK had already abolished importation of slaves. No-one could be a slave in the UK since 1778 (Scotland, Eng\Wales was earlier). If you "imported" a slave to the UK, they would become free.
2. The ~1807 US/UK laws were far from equivalent - the UK act was abolishing the trade completely. The US was only ending importation. Domestic / inter-state trade was unaffected.
3. The US law came into effect 6 months after the UK one.
The day Jefferson passed that 1807 act, his 100s of slaves got a little more valuable. Who needs imports when you can abuse 16 year old enslaved girls? As he signed this act, he was, yet again, impregnating Sally Hemings so that in 1808, his 7th bastard child born was into slavery. The birth was recorded in the Farm Book alongside other livestock.
Feels like a suss statistic. Counting the emails I have sent/received is as meaningful as counting network packets. Which dev working on services hasn't accidentally sent themselves 40k email alerts? Well, a few I imagine, but certainly not this one!
It's 30+ years since I owned one but I recall having to press the buttons with the corner of a nail and cursing if I thoughtlessly cut them!
My feedback is that a "front page photo" is a very high bar and most of the images fall well below what deserves the space. I would avoid:
- boilerplate page previews for e.g. github
- generic site logos e.g. arxiv, aide
- stock images and ai equivalents e.g. the models in suits stuff
- "decorative" images e.g. prime number
- author photos
- hate autoplaying gifs in this context. Very distracting. They might be great content better "play on demand" for me
To truly earn their place, an image has to add information above and beyond the text. Identifying when an article is actually about an image e.g. space photo, data visualisation etc. would add some real value to the presentation.
> very few people spoke more than one language
I have heard that ancient peoples might have been quite multi-lingual because there was less homogeneity and more linguistic diversity so that e.g. the villages in the next valley over would be speaking something quite different so you couldn't avoid be quite adept.
> never traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born
Along similar lines, I have heard that with smaller communities, there is more natural drive/incentive to move around to find unreleated partners. I am entertained by the idea that familial conflict is an evolved mechanism to promote the... uh... spread of seed.
People in antiquity really motored around way beyond our expectations. These folk would travel for years for education, trade, war, curiosity and pilgrimage.
> yet the earliest surviving documents on which the gospels were based were in other languages and originated in distant lands
And thus, this becomes more of an example case of historical humanity's multi-lingual peripatetic nature rather than an exception.
Sure, there will have been plenty of homebodies but be wary of underestimation. They currently think stone-age folk transported the Stonehenge altar 434 miles from Scotland and hell, I still find it mind-boggling that all sorts of animals from tiny birds to eels travel 1000s of miles each year just for the weather yet I barely leave the house :)
For inkscape, some of the more sophisticated generative things were "use and forget" for me but they have actually improved to be much more intuitive. The main thing I lose is some of the natural touch that makes it so fast to use. I do love when I use it regularly because it's so quick to pump about svgs at the speed of thought.
Getting really good at a vector tool is such a valuable life skill for explaining all manner of tricky things whether it's for UI mockups, software architecture or graphic design stuff like logos/t-shirt/marketing designs. I live for the "how on earth have you done this?" reaction when I can create a quality diagram while on a call with people. It can really enrich the quality of interactions and reduce cycle time to create designs in real time.
I also use it for all sorts of personal stuff like interior design, DIY, scaffolding etc. I've even submitted official architectural plans I made with it. It's as valuable as a spreadsheet.
MNCs are like local governments levying property taxes.
e.g. you need a phone much like you have to live somewhere. Your "Tech Government" is determined by a highly constrained choice like your local civil government is determined by your zip code. Maybe you can move at great disruption and cost but it's only to the jurisdiction of another government and some variation of autocratic laws and taxes.
However, you have no vote and there is no pretence at serving your interests. You are not a citizen but cattle to be farmed... just maximal exploitation to please the mighty Mammon.
e.g. does higher yield mean you get more product in higher bins? I imagine we need to judge a process by the distribution across bins not just a max efficiency or a total yield.
I have little faith in an optimistic view of human nature where we voluntarily turn more toward more intellectual or worthy pursuits.
On one hand, entertainment has often been the seed that drives us to make the imagined real, but the adjacent possible of rewarding adventure/discovery/invention only seems to get more unaffordable and out of reach. Intellectual revolutions are like gold rushes. They require discovery, that initial nugget in a stream, the novel idea that opens a door to new opportunities that draws in the prospectors. Without fresh opportunity, there is no enthusiasm and we stew in our juices.
I suspect the only thing that might save us from total solipsistic brain-in-vat immersion in entertainment... is something like glp-1 type antagonists. If they can help us resist a plate of Danish maybe they can protect us from barrages of Infinite Jest brain missiles from Netflix about incestuous cat wizards or whatever. Who knows what alternatives this new permanently medicated society, Pharma-Sapiens, might pursue instead though.
A lot of the "branded" goods were more like the first OP said - just a print or a label with some credibility like Levis, Diesel, Calvin Klein, Armani but on indifferent quality stuff you would never see in a high-end store from the same brand - likely from the same factories filling up super-market own brands but at 1/5 the price.
The sales were also a very big thing, especially the big dates like Boxing Day, New Years or Easter - it was a common habit to only buy clothes once a year. All those sales got gamed though, they would ship-in special tat to put on rails at 70% off for Dec 26th rather than actually discount their products and then they started before Christmas, and then from "Black Friday" and then from before "Black Friday"...
Yet I still miss them too. I hate fashion/shopping but clothes are sensual, they rest against the skin for years and the difference between good and bad is materials, craftsmanship and fit whereas an online jpg of a black t-shirt and a review of "my husband says it's ok" really tells me nothing at all. I find online browsing, deliveries and returns more time-consuming and stressful than a rare shopping trip.
I wonder if they could have created a "Super Plugin" interface instead of a Cursor specific fork and try to get it merged to VSCode or VSCodium or at least keep as a new shared platform for deep customisation instead of balkanisation by everyone interested in doing something similar.
Accessing something that might update it's internal cache needs to be mutable so i) this need for mutability is viral up the call chain ii) we can't share mutable references... so it's going to be a pain in the butt and need to sidestep compile guarantees somehow. Having an out of the box best solution for common scenarios like this would be nice to see at least.
I had hoped it might have come from reading rapidly in the days of uncut pages where you have to eagerly tear each new page to read it. But no, lol.
I believe "on a tear" was mostly used to communicate a sudden violent action rather than continuity e.g. "stock goes on a tear" not because of a steady continuous rise but because it undergoes a sudden violent change of state from flat-lining to vertical. You might be a "tearabout" or a "tearaway" if impetuous, reckless or hard to control.
I can imagine idioms like "tearing up the track" are pleasing in two meanings of the word e.g. that a horse might "tear down the track" in both haste but also in how torn up the track is from their hooves. Same with a speeding car in the days of dirt roads.
However, in modern use, especially about "productive" behaviours, I think it has lost some of the violence and gained more of the continuity sense supported by the pleasing visual imagery of e.g. scissors gliding through wrapping paper.
I have never met anyone meeting that description. Back in my day, nerdy pursuits were not very tribal. A franchise did not form someone's identity mostly because there wasn't enough content about it to devote oneself to. You watched a movie, read a book or whatever and liked it. A superfan would be someone who sought out a game or a graphic novel but it gives you only a few extra hours in the world at most. A fan club would be a yearly magazine or something. You had to find other things to entertain you.
My friends were pretty core Hitchhiker generation with very similar background/humour to DNA. It was a pretty common early book. We might have reread it, played the infernal video game, loved the radio show, and could recite the famous bits but there really wasn't anything you could fall into some solipsistic hole about. There isn't enough there. It would be something to obliquely reference as an in-joke but wasn't something that could even sustain a conversation other than complaining about that game.
Hitchhiker fans were also likely Python fans, Tolkien fans, Pratchett fans, Harry Harrison, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, graphic novels, Red Dwarf, Warhammer or like DNA, very much into the birth of the home computer which really was a bottomless pit of discovery and conversation.
In what ways?
As an industry, it seems pretty much a pariah. In terms of political power, the religious organisations that that pressure the finance system to break ties with pornography seem more powerful. Maybe it influences culture/perceptions about relationships and sex in more ways than I can see.
For example, could they significantly change voting preference? Why wouldn't they? Do we not respond to political messages with our "reward centre"? Will we find political charisma more or less entrancing? Will we find calls for vengeance and punishment more or less attractive? Does tinkering with desire and reward dull our emotional response? Will we find compassionate appeals to help less fortunate more or less attractive? Does "enhanced control" manifest as a political preference for rational altruism or as machiavellian selfishness?
It is now clear that all those Climate Research super computers HP has been involved in have yielded unexpected new capabilities... please subscribe to my newsletter to learn more.
You can change the UI font size in Settings / User Interface / Font (double click to edit).
My main objection was "smooth scrolling" which I could turn off as "scroll transition". Bit annoying you can't search settings though. Don't know why I am looking at it though because I value the higher level things new editors will always be missing e.g. refactoring, debugging, test integration, advanced panel management and a million extensions I forget I rely on everyday.
Back in the day they used Skyscape for IaaS. They used to have a rule against any IaaS contracts longer than a year. They would issue guidance about issues of platform lock-in with third party PaaS, recommend open standards to maximise portability and control costs and brag about migrating their VMs as proof of their independence. A government owned PaaS is in part a cost control strategy.
Today they migrated from their portable solution to Amazon specific lambda functions and database services. The hooks are in, Amazon is at the wheel and can now crank the costs confident that the whale is trapped. Let's check back in a few years and see how the spend has spiralled.
FWIW but if you want an example of the revolving door: Liam Maxwell was the government CTO then CIO then "UK National Technology Adviser"... currently Amazon "Head of Government Transformation". This is the transformation they wanted: tight coupling between Amazon services and the public purse.
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2022/07/12/why-weve-decided-to-decom...
> GOV.UK PaaS has not seen the rapid and continued growth that we’ve seen with some of our other platform products, and is now at a point where we either invest heavily in some significant technical architecture changes, or we make the difficult decision to sunset the product. We have decided to do the latter
Not terribly convincing. Not seeing "rapid and continued growth"? Feels like the junk words you say as a ceremony for people who sign-off any crime if justified by "growth".
I think I'd need to see transparency on Amazon lobbying and revolving doors with GDS, let's see... oh, look who "advised" them on this move:
https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/amazon...
> GDS retained Amazon UK boss Doug Gurr as an adviser.
Which gets worse...
> Gurr would have a hand in choosing the government chief digital officer
Seems beyond satire that the Head of Amazon UK has a role in picking in the civil servant that makes hosting choices.
It's so painful when there is a book I am really excited to listen to and find that I just can't. Maybe I just mentally drop out mid-sentence or the words float past without carrying any meaning and it can be difficult to pin down why.
One aspect is the performance. An accent or an intonation can cause a nails on blackboard type revulsion. A morose, monotone or bored voice, ugh? For example, I just can't do any Scott Brick performance (which is pretty annoying given how prolific he is) because he trails off every sentence in this weird pitch change that doesn't match how any normal person speaks. It causes me this distressing mental dissonance because it's so disconnected to the passage being read. I suspect it's a result of him just reading out words blind and not talking like a human trying to communicate specific meanings and feelings.
This is also the problem with robot voices - the difference between a joke, a question, an assertion, a doubt, sarcasm or self-delusion can all be in the intonation. With text you might pause and revoice a passage to catch a meaning but the conveyor belt of audio means the next words are upon you giving no chance for reflection. The place where I can handle a robot voice is when using it with the text in front of me. I quite like it as a pace setter. I still have my own internal voice giving flavour but gain some reading endurance when tired or the material is boring/dry and I keep mentally wandering off.
The other aspect is the style of writing - some writing is delightful to read but awful to listen to. The parameters includes everything from sentence structure to vocabulary. A simple example is lists: perfect for quickly imbibing visually but can be maddening to hear read out. Same with numbers, or parentheticals or footnotes or... so I generally can't listen to anything technical.
The most listenable things for me is anything in a conversational style. However, even dialogue dominated works can be torture when they use certain patterns of "he said"/"she said" directions that are effectively punctuation and silent when we read but overwhelming when voiced. A first-person diary style often fits with being spoken without changes. There is a probably an AI opportunity to rewrite books to more resemble radio plays that work better as voice performances.
IMHO voicing technical works needs some brand new ideas. Real life conference talks that just narrate their paper are torture to sit through. Successfully engaging speakers use personality, humour, anecdotes and structure talks playfully with setup/reveals, hypotheticals, pauses for thought and have all sorts of rhetorical tricks to bring drama to the driest content.
> Hardened foundation for your web apps
The honest description is : smaller faster electron for macos/win/linux/android/ios - written in rust using the OS provided web browser component for tiny binaries. The Tauri developer's focus on security in their marketing is genuine (they have paid for audits) but a little incongruous given what most of it's users want from it which is just a cross-platform UI and/or with a great rust experience.
I have really been enjoying v2 with Leptos with no problems. Ironically the only tricky bit has been setting up permissions for various types of system access (docs are not quite there) but it was simple and made sense once I saw how to do it. I expected a bad experience from the Linux OS web component but it's been excellent in terms of both performance and support on Ubuntu 22.04. The way Tauri can package your app as a .deb or .apk was crazy simple which I also did not expect.
That doesn't work too well in the UK. Fruit/Veg tends to be a whole zone with aisles/central islands and maybe some edge. Meat and dairy is often in an aisle. Speciality stuff is on the edges e.g. deli, butcher, bakery, cheese counters if you have them.
Going around the edge of my supermarket clockwise in order:
Near door: bulk snacks and cases of beer.
Left edge: in store baked goods: donuts/bread. Packaged baked goods: cake, bread. Freezer goods: three way split of veg, junk and deserts.
Back wall: Imported regional products - mix of basics and junk food for African/Chinese/Korean/Japanese residents. Breakfast cereals: mostly sugary rubbish but some oatmeal. Biscuits: mostly sugar but some rice cakes.
Right edge: kitchen/bathroom products. Not fattening but an acquired taste.
If they have a path to covertly compel action as a state secret under National Security / anti-terror laws we will only hear about it from whistleblowers. It won't be something the target can disclose let alone test in court.
FWIW I also don't believe in Apple's nobility as resisting on user's behalf. They happily bow to the state and remove apps for e.g. organising protests, monitoring deaths in US wars, csam scanning etc. IMHO their interest in encryption is to prevent jail-breaking and protect their app-store cash cow.
> interdicting shipments of laptops/phones and doing the work themselves
I don't think that proves anything about their powers. Given the option, I'm sure they would prefer to install things themselves without third-party knowledge or consent.
We have evidence of complicit action e.g. black rooms like Room 641A. I think the nature of "consent" and "obligation" gets pretty grey when it comes to the security agencies. They don't get results using court orders. I'm sure they have assets employed as staff in security sensitive positions.
As a kind of ex-VR enthusiast and strategy fan, I don't see much value there.
A single strategy game like Civ are 10s of hours of playtime or if a paradox game, 100s. The magical experience of VR presence fades pretty sharpish so it quickly comes down to comfort and practicality. This also applies to MMORPGs like Elite Dangerous - it's a breath taking experience docking your ship the first few times but as soon as you are into the grind, a headset just becomes sweaty nuisance.
These are games that benefit from the external world e.g.
- eat a sandwich, sip coffee, tickle the cat on your lap... as you ponder your next move
- have 30 browser tabs open - the wiki, a strategy guide, a tutorial, the patch notes, a thread about a bug, and that random history rabbit-hole because you are accidentally learning things about the Carolingians or whatever.
- ideal games to play along with some TV/netflix/youtube that only deserves partial attention. These are not games that benefit from 100% undivided focus. Kind of the opposite, a thoughtful game benefits from "gazing out the window" type defocussing.
- if playing something new/tricky, then I also have a todo list and spreadsheet for calculating some things going too
I think motion controllers have untapped potential but even then, they are are going against mouse/keyboard. When the task is wrangling complexity with both precise selections, data navigation/entry and bulk actions, filtering, searches etc. then it's difficult to see an advantage. You can enjoy some Minority Report navigation for a bit but after a few hundred hours... a keyboard shortcut is the real, truly valuable innovation you want.
Instantly jumping from location to location / screen to screen is better than whatever visual journey VR would typically insist on. I generally have zero issues with VR sickness but I actually get kind of nauseous micromanaging multiple wars on different sides of a map in 2D because of having to rapidly flip back and forth every other second. I can't imagine how bad that would be in VR!
Hmm. I've not experienced that. Something is leaking which can be identified/fixed. There are quick things you could do to narrow it down e.g. restart extension host or the language server or kill background node processes etc.
I generally have it running for weeks... although I do have to use "reload window" for my biggest/main workspace fairly often because rust-analyzer debugging gets screwed up and it's the quickest fix from a keyboard shortcut. I may be not seeing your issue for other reasons :)
FWIW I can recommend "reload window" because it only applies to the instance you have a problem with and restores more state than quit/restart e.g. your terminal windows and their content so it's not intrusive to your flow.
> but the fact that it takes an hour or two to repro makes that sort of too cumbersome to do
Yeah, I know what you mean. I now schedule time for "sharpening my tools" each day and making a deliberate effort to fix issues / create PRs for pain-points. I used to live with problems way too long because "I didn't have time". It's not a wall-clock productivity win.... but the intangibles about enjoying the tools more, less pain, feeling in control and learning from other projects are making me happy.