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> In the UK, 'self-harm' is used specifically to refer to what used to be called cutting [one's] wrists. It's not intended to mean any action that has negative consequences for oneself.

Definitions slip over time. Violence, abuse, sexual assault, etc, were previously all physical acts. Then they became mental acts, and now just the perception is devastating.

> Remember, these are politicians: they have no understanding of abstraction and generalisation, and think that generalisation is the act of creating stereotypes.

In the moment. But a future politician can reasonably interpret the same idea differently.

> [..] putting stricter legal requirements on tech companies to hunt down and remove material that encourages or assists serious self-harm, before it can destroy lives and tear families apart.

Does this include smoking, excessive eating, eating sweets, etc? What about listening to sad music?

> This government is determined to keep people safe online. Vile content that promotes self-harm continues to be pushed on social media and can mean potentially heart-wrenching consequences for families across the country.

"Vile" is very emotionally charged, who decides it? Will it be the next government that gets to decide it? Bare in mind, the (recently) ex-Deputy Prime Minister of the current government called her opposition "scum" [1], an extremely negative word.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59081482

Protected chats? The ship already sailed, text messages via the phone network are already MITM'd since a very long time.

Even in real life, the police in the UK now deploy active face recognition and makes tonnes of arrests based on it (sometimes wrongly). Shops are now looking to deploy active face recognition to detect shoplifters (although it's unclear legally what they will actually do about it).

The UK can compel any person commuting through the UK to give over their passwords and devices - you have no right to appeal. Refusing to hand over the password can get you arrested under the Terrorist Act, where they can hold you indefinitely. When arrested under any terrorism offence you also have not right to legal representation.

The days of privacy sailed unnoticed.

Very cool work, and the write-up is also great.

Personally I want to see something that isn't dependant on a depleting level of stock, ideally something open source. Otherwise the development investment just doesn't seem worth it.

This Tweet is not saying that they are working on a printer. I wish it said that somebody works on an open printer, but I don't think it should be Framework. Framework are doing a good job pushing the laptop/desktop computing products down the pipeline.

I think the idea is that it doesn’t matter if it takes billions of gates to achieve, the point is that it can do it very fast. If we thought a table sized FPGA could do it, a state actor would most definitely build one.

Reading the paper [1], I disagree, I think we are actually seeing an economic downturn due to the infinite spending during the COVID-19 pandemic. Borrowing was high, and now the interest on that borrowing is high.

> The patterns we observe in the data appear most acutely starting in late 2022, around the time of rapid proliferation of generative AI tools. They also hold for both occupations with a high share of college graduates and ones with a low college share, suggesting deteriorating education outcomes during COVID-19 do not drive our results.

The economic downturn was a delayed effect after high spending at low interest rates during COVID 19. In the UK [2], interest rates were as low as 0.1% (19 Mar 20). Whilst interest rates are low, it makes sense to invest heavily – and one of the largest investments most companies make is in employment. In late 2022 we saw interest rates raise above 1%, then 2%, and by mid-2023 they are above 5%. The largest cost to cut when borrowing is high is again, employment. For every employee, the overhead cost (at medium to large businesses) are 1.5x – 2x their wage. If you’re a big tech firm with 5 employees at $100k each, you could save $1mn a year cutting the right staff down. Apparently Microsoft have sacked some 15k employees this year [3], assuming an average of $100k a year wage, they may have just wiped up to $3bn off of their burn rate.

As the paper itself concedes:

> One possibility is that our results are explained by a general slowdown in technology hiring from 2022 to 2023 as firms recovered from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

AI is being trialled as an approach to maintaining growth despite significantly deep cuts. The Microsoft CEO is under the impression that up to 30% of their code is now written “by software” [4] (are we talking about automatically generated files at compilation, or LLMs?), apparently Google’s code is greater than 30%. I do not believe that AI has yet been linked with job losses convincingly.

[1] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...

[2] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/database/Bank-Rate.a...

[3] https://www.financialexpress.com/trending/microsoft-is-filte...

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/microsoft-ceo-says-up-to-3...

> One difference with renewables and traditional fuel sources is that once renewable infrastructure is built you don’t need to continually import from another country.

This is exactly what I'm arguing against. The UK only has two real sources of renewable energy, solar and wind. The articles I linked showed that there were periods where we could barely get the energy we needed - and that included the imports from the EU. There is no real answer currently to storing that energy.

The UK historically had a strategic decentralised reserve of gas which were decommissioned (although articles do not show it). A prior government foolishly turned us into a "on-demand economy" for energy, and we had zero buffer to global prices. Fuels such as gas, diesel, petrol, coal, etc, can be stored for long periods and are very energy dense.

> Maintenance is definitely an issue and on going expansion and upgrades as well. I do think long term renewables wouldn’t have the same issues as oil dependency on another country though.

Solar panels have a lifetime, the entire fleet will need to be rotated within 10-20 years, but they are currently being purchased directly with tax payer money. The UK has not yet demonstrated that it can incorporate all of these costs at a similar or lower rate. These panels are not manufactured locally, and we are reliant on external countries to produce them. Wind turbines are a similar story.

China has long faked all numbers they publish. They literally paint mountainsides green to fool satellites and get green subsidies [1] [2]. I can't find the article on it now, but they had fields of fake solar panels too. The only figure coming out of China that can be believed is externally measured emissions, and the number continues to go up at an incredible rate [3].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/14/china

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/chinese-mine-spray-painted-r...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

In the UK the push towards renewable energy has so far been disastrous for energy prices and stability. There have been days in the UK where the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, and we came extremely close to blackouts [0]. We were forced to buy energy for eye watering prices. After the initial shock from the Russia-Ukraine conflict gas prices moved slightly, but electricity prices are not really recovering well and are projected to rise [1] [2].

According to government figures, 11% of electricity costs goes toward green initiatives, and 5% to VAT, which is also earmarked for green initiatives. The government has promised that as we become greener, we should see the prices come down, but the opposite has been true [3]. The green energy sector is currently largely subsidised by fossil fuels, as we transition more and more to green energy, the true costs are realised. Our Energy Secretary (failed prime minister candidate) says:

> Responding to the 6% price cap rise, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said it was due to "our reliance on the fossil fuel markets" and added: "We're acting to bring down bills for everyone with our mission for clean, home-grown power that we control."

The irony is that we don't make our own wind turbines or solar panels, so our grid is still precariously dependant on foreign actors. We're breaking away from the likes of Russia to become dependant on China - great. Bare in mind, all of this effort for the UK which produces less than 1% of global emissions, but outsources its manufacturing to Countries such as China that have not even started to attempt to reduce their emissions (recent drops are due to economic collapse).

[0] https://watt-logic.com/2025/01/09/blackouts-near-miss-in-tig...

[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

[2] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro

As I said in the other comment [1], I can't extend the trust associated with my site to other sites not under my control.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44926470

Because the trust associated with my site and domain doesn't necessarily extend to another. The user should know that they are navigating away from the trust I have earned with them.

I think there is space for images, but they should be carefully considered. They should add to the overall text.

I provide additional features for users, one is TTS so that they can listen to the article. Another feature is a little icon that appears for links that are external to the website.

I have recently come around to the idea of adding a banner image, as a way of tone setting for the text to come.

> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

Let's ignore that most emails will be in semi-cold storage. Let's ignore that energy usage per email would be absolutely minimum. Did they not consider that thousands of people hitting the email servers requesting to view and then subsequently delete emails, wouldn't be an issue?

What I (tongue-in-cheek) suspect is that GCHQ and the like are having difficulty in searching so many emails. Maybe by reviewing the email it triggers a filter policy which aids in searching them. After all, the Online Safety Act mostly seems to be targetting data in transit.

> Don’t we care about output per capita?

Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down.

> Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual welfare but...

> our ability to service debt and social security obligations depends on total output.

Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1 million people, and add another million people (of the same distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt, but both delayed. It's not that complicated.

> We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.

It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond purchases, indicates this.

> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.

This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup making a loss, such as the UK's pension system.

> Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor countries harder.

Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less for their original country. What do we think that does to the original country on scale? What do we think that does to their growth?

> Affordable housing:

Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.

> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".

Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.

> In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its contributors, undermining their privacy and safety.

Some of the articles, which contain factual information, are damning for the UK government. It lists, for example, political scandals [1] [2]. Or information regarding hot topics such as immigration [3], information that the UK government want to strictly control (abstracting away from whether this is rightfully or wrongfully).

I can tell you what will (and has already) happened as a result:

1. People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them.

2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.

3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Labour_Party_(UK)_sca...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...

This is clearly a change that appears to coincide with the Online Safety Act [1]. The question for me is - why?

The UK agency Ofcom are in charge of deciding what to censor, and their approach has typically been to remain strategically vague, and cause those acting under it to be overly censorious as not to get fined.

The list of illegal content covered by the Online Safety Act includes:

    child sexual abuse  
    controlling or coercive behaviour  
    extreme sexual violence 
    extreme pornography 
    fraud
    racially or religiously aggravated public order offences  
    inciting violence  
    illegal immigration and people smuggling  
    promoting or facilitating suicide  
    intimate image abuse
    selling illegal drugs or weapons  
    sexual exploitation  
    terrorism 

Particularly egregious within the UK currently is "illegal immigration and people smuggling" as it has been used against multiples groups (including journalists) reporting on illegal crossings into the UK. Discussion of this political topic is being tightly controlled.

It is a VERY hot topic in the UK currently, and an important political discussion is being had by almost everybody about the future of the UK. So far the government's efforts to quash anti-immigration discussions has resulted in multiple grass-roots demonstrations (and counter demonstrations) outside of hotels housing illegal immigrants [2].

If you want a picture of how things are going, you need only need to consider the Meadow Well [3] riots of 1991, England riots of 1981 [4], the Notting Hill riots of 1958 and possibly more aptly, the race riots of 1919 after the war [5]. It's essentially all of the issues these riots focussed on and the government has no plan or ability to meet the demands of the rioters.

All of this to say - expect the Online Safety Act to be used more heavily in the coming months to try and bring the UK back under control.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/08/three-thousa...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadow_Well_riots

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_England_riots

[5] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/1919...

I think I have said the following till I go blue in the face:

1. Mobile phone numbers are not secure. SIM jacking is a thing, and a 6 digit code is not impossible to guess (it's only 1 in a million).

2. Sending codes/links via email is problematic as described by the article.

3. Inconsistent "best practices" confuse users, and frustrate them.

> * a truck is just a car that misses a roof over the back part of it

Respectfully, a truck is not just a car missing the back part of it. It often has a lot more power, is lifted, has off-road springs, larger wheels, low and high speed gear box, roll cage for the front cabin, raised air intake - the list goes on.

Most people, though, do just need a car with a removable back.

> However, Hill said, he thought about putting a butterfly keyboard on a netbook when they were a viable product category in the late aughts.

I really want to see sub-11" notebooks again. They were super cool travel laptops.

> The dual lights would have eliminated shadows and provided even better illumination, but unfortunately, this effort proved too costly to make it into the final product.

Ridiculous. Function must be allowed to win sometimes.

I tried the Lord of the Rings, where I foretold the future and decided to get drunk instead. I ordered Gandalf to find a new ring bearer which they did, and another hobbit went off on the adventure.

Did run into this interesting problem though:

> An error occurred while generating the story: Rate limit exceeded for shared resources. Please try again in 4 seconds, or provide your own API key in settings.. Please try again. If the problem persists, you may need to start a new game.

I would go further with this, essentially matching patterns of files in certain directories. Another use case for example is removing old log files from a directory.

In any case, I would have it as a user option to carry through the action, i.e. "the following is scheduled for deletion saving X disk space, do you wish to continue?".

> I did try the internal temperature sensor, but it didn't measure the ambient temperature. I have read that if you set the ATtiny85 to sleep mode for some time, it will converge to ambient temperature, but it would take too long to validate, and I didn't want to go down another rabbit hole.

It's kind of better than ambient, it would reach the temperature of the GPU if thermally coupled. The sleep-mode thing would just be a case of lots of micro sleeps to discount the temperature of the chip, could have even under-clocked too.

> USB Bootloader is interesting, but I already had a few ISP loaders. You can make an ISP loader with Arduino as well.

The benefit of USB is being able to get debug data from the fan controller as it runs, and be able to re-flash it whilst in the PC by attached to an internal USB bus.

This way you could also log out what the GPU reports, vs what you measure, vs what the ATtiny85 measures.

> The author has an I2C temp sensor next to a giant MOSFET.

Yeah... It's either overkill, or there is some decent power going through it and it will affect thermal measurements anyway. Not to mention what it might do to the reference voltage.

> [..] mentions I2C is bit banged [..]

They possibly bit banged it? But it wouldn't have been needed given the hardware support...

> [..] yet completely left out circuit schematics [..]

Yeah, which is far more important that anything else.

> [..] which incidentally includes freewheel diode for the fan.

This may have been sensible to be fair, especially if you happen to rapidly change the delta PWM signal, you could end up with a decently sized back-EMF. But I think even better would be to sink it into something, rather than back into the power supply of sensitive components...

> PCB getting in the way isn't going to matter in this instance.

Agreed.

Doesn't even need to be attached to the heat source, just thermally coupled. Could be achieved for example via a short, fat, insulated, shared ground plane or something.

The compensation might be needed, and the internal thermal sensor also needs tuning in any case if you read the specs, but it's close enough that you could use it out of the box and only be out by a few degrees. Chip temperature with regular sleeps isn't going to be a significant factor.

There is enough code space on the ATtiny85 that you could actually build a model that takes measured temperature T at time t (T_t), the goal temperature of G (G_t) and produce a predictive model for M(T_t, G_t) = T_{t+n}. You could then do something a little smarter than a PID controller that takes in some profile considerations, i.e. slow (low noise, low RPM, likely for normal usage), fast (high noise, high RPM in bursts, likely for gaming).

Could have been simpler still. You can read the internal temperature of the ATiny85 [1]. You can also get the ATiny85 to speak USB and even be flashed via USB via the micronucleus bootloader [2].

[1] https://andrey.mikhalchuk.com/2011/06/20/reading-attiny85452...

[2] https://github.com/micronucleus/micronucleus

> Rust was developed at Mozilla. Mozilla axed it. In 2020, it laid off the whole team.

> As I reported back in 2023, the Servo browser engine is doing well. Early this year, its own figures show strong continued upticks in interest since Igalia took over development. You guessed it – Mozilla also gave Servo the boot in 2020.

You don't need to develop a new programming language to develop a decent browser engine. Maybe it would be nice, and maybe it could be better, but do you really have the resources to go off on such a tangent? Clearly the answer was no.

> 2020 is the same year Cathay Capital invested $50 million into KaiOStech, saying it would help bring the next billion people online. As The Register reported in 2018, KaiOS is Boot2Gecko, Mozilla's FirefoxOS rebranded. Mozilla killed its own version in 2015.

Calling it "FirefoxOS" was a mistake, but the idea wasn't all too bad. The rendering in HTML/CSS was a good idea, Java after all have Java Swing/JavaFX and that worked well, but I wouldn't have forced all of the apps to also be JS. I think it will be the future equivalent of an OS where all apps must be Adobe Flash. The rendering should have all been done in HTML/CSS, with the backend being any language of choice running in a tiny container.

I think Mozilla need to make things that do one thing well, and they also need to get better at developing MVPs that test the waters before pouring in years and millions into it.

> The current submission can power up the GPU and probe the device on an RK3588 system-on-chip. This lets us read a few sections of ROM in the GPU, which in turn lets us provide this information to userspace by means of a DRM_IOCTL_PANTHOR_DEV_QUERY call.

I think ARM-based chips and embedded GPUs continue to be problematic. Powering up a GPU is not the issue, it's accessing the silicon that does specialised accelerated functionality without getting tied into some crazy legal stuff with the documentation required to do so. Reverse engineering your way to a working GPU driver is quite an effort.

I think I first came across this issue in the PineTab [1]. I was trying to do some kind of streaming from the device but it was ultra slow. After some search I found that Sunxi [2] was the only real serious effort at the time, and that it was sporting a Mali400 [3] [4]. ARM were not particularly friendly in open sourcing GPU code for the kernel and it was largely a reverse engineering effort that got anything working at all [5].

All this to say, I would rather support some kind of open-source GPU effort [6], especially if it could be boiled down to a small SoC or module. I saw this crazy 160 core RISC-V M.2 cluster performing ray tracing, and it really seems like we could get there [7].

[1] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTab

[2] https://linux-sunxi.org/Allwinner_SoC_Family

[3] https://linux-sunxi.org/A64

[4] https://linux-sunxi.org/Mali

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_...

[6] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/new-open-sou...

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRfbQJ6FdF0

I think it really depends on the context. In a news article it rarely makes the content better, but in a documentation wiki, the context can be everything. I think we are fooling ourselves to suggest that there is zero nuance and that there is a 100% correct approach always.

I still think that the missing context is an issue. Imagine the page is some 10k words, by the time you get to the bottom, you might not remember what "Amaya" is. So just saying "Amaya's download page" tells the user that it is a download, but nothing about what it is a download for.

I wonder how successful the screen reader experience is for using the web. Without checking URLs, how can they be sure for example they don't enter this credit card details on http://bank.xyz/scam_page , rather than https://bank.com ?

Or how do they know whether the download page automatically downloads the file whilst they are on it?

I can only imagine that using the web is extremely difficult.