Ahh, so like the smartphone present in many countries where if the US doesn't like you then it's almost impossible to have a normal economic life?
8,928 karma · joined July 3, 2017
The -chester means something like "a city or walled town, originally one that had been a Roman station", or sometimes "prehistoric fort". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_(placename_element)
I thought it might be the sound, but I see Worcester (which is the spelling of the unpalatalised variant ) is translated to Workaster, so it's a consistent conversion based on the root.
But if it's etymology, I can't find (at least not with my poor knowledge of Dutch) a Dutch use of -kaster.
A-ha! I think I figured it out! The Dutch village of Kesteren is from the Latin "Castra", for "army camp", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesteren .
Well done!
According to the Guardian article, which it the source the NY Post used, if those trees were illegally logged, they cannot be sold to wood-processing plants.
Do you know if the law also prohibits the topsoil from being sold to farms?
This is part of a 2 year, €13 billion investment by Google, so €5 billion is nearly all of the yearly investment of a single project.
On the other hand, Finland is only a part of Google's world-wide projects, and these projects are expected to produce revenue for, what, decades?
A 10-year time frame changes your numbers to ~0.1% and ~0.2%.
For Google, a fine of ~EUR 5 billion is a rounding error in their cost of doing business.
I've visited libraries in a half dozen countries, where I'm not even a taxpayer. I just walked in.
Some services at the library might not be free, including book checkout or making photocopies.
But if you want to make that distinction, then walking around your neighborhood isn't free because in most place you need to wear clothes, and clothes aren't free.
FWIW, I've walked a lot of forest roads without a car or bike. And the biggest littering problem on our sidewalks, by weight, are the escooter riders who simply leave their machines parked in the middle of the sidewalk.
The problem isn't that the sidewalks are free to use, the problem is one of regulation and enforcement.
That's why libraries are both free and well-loved - they librarians regulate the free space.
"Teachers and pupils won’t be banned from wearing political symbols, like pro-Palestine badges, at schools (AFP/Getty)"
and
"The government-commissioned report did not call for an outright ban on teachers and pupils wearing political symbols or flags – like pro-Palestine badges – in schools and colleges."
"Sir David said he decided against a ban as he believed it was “unworkable” and “untested legally”."
The report is at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-revie... with Recommendation 16:
"School leaders should carefully consider the time, place, and manner of political expression (including in relation to staff dress codes and pupil uniform policies), ensuring that the wearing or displaying of political symbols, flags, or slogans, and the expression of political views, are compliant with their legal duties in relation to political impartiality, whist being mindful of promoting respectful dialogue, inclusion and engagement."
And according to the methodology, calling for someone's resignation at a university is not considered deplatforming, while calling for an art piece to be taken down ... is.
Which I think is a bizarre definition.
I'm a programmer. What you're asking for is far from my expertise. My observation is this FIRE study does not appear sufficient strong to support the conclusions you want to draw from it. I am not able to present evidence which might convince you that your conclusions are right or wrong.
And it is far easier for you to criticize any specific examples I come up with, than for me to do the research you want me to present, which seems rather unfair, given that your only supporting evidence is this FIRE report.
That, combined with the lack of error bars (with estimates for possible increased signal sensitivity in their collection method), and the fact they changed methodology while their reports imply an unchanged methodology, does not lead me to the same conclusion you've reached.
The issue isn't "if the students get violent on campus, the campus gets violent in response", it's that recent history shows that even if students stay non-violent, the campus still gets violent in response, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incident .
It is hard to stay non-violent when the power structure opposed to you becomes increasingly violent.
FWIW, I recall student protests during the 1990s to deplatform Henry Kissinger due to his war crimes and abuses against humanity. There were student anti-war protestors in the 1990s too - I seem to recall Stanford students were opposed to her becoming provost. I'm also sure that if I looked I could find students opposed to a visit by Kurt Waldheim, due to his association with the Nazi Party.
"If they commit to this series"? You know their data starts in 1998. How long until you think they are committed?
If there are no error estimates, how can you even tell if it's an important indicator upward or downwards?
> I seriously doubt that students in the 1990s, the era of the X-Files and Art Bell, were out protesting “pseudoscience”.
Interesting. On what do you base your doubt?
I drew my specific example from being a student in the 1990s, and remembering the protests against the racist psuedoscience of "The Bell Curve". For example, from
https://archive.org/details/bellcurvedebateh00jaco/page/170/...
"""Rushton describes student protests against him: "They have a large number of blacks parading the halls with bullhorns, shouting, banging on the walls. If four or five skinheads with swastika armbands showed up outside my class, there would be tanks on campus to get them off and into jail. If you've got, quote, disadvantaged groups, a band of blacks and left wingers, the university will cave in."""
Here's a bio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton
Now, that's in Canada, but similar things happened in US universities. Do I need to find specific examples or will you trust me on that?
> Why don’t the students seem to go after any datacenters
Ahh, you mean the "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" approach?
Quite simple - polls are warning signs, and data center owners, like pipeline owners, have a lot of money and security, and with the government backing them up.
The civil rights movement started decades before MLK Jr.
MLK Jr. remarked that "a riot is the language of the unheard", not to justify the violent actions against American white supremacy, but to describe the underlying motivations which encourage those riots,
Those who have no political power are more likely to use physical power to cause change. If non-violent protest does not work, then violent protest is more likely.
As a thought experiment, consider the possibility that in the 1990s the administration was more responsive to student protests, and more amicable to cancelling, for example, a scheduled talk by a proponent of pseudoscience.
While three decades later, the administration practices have changed[1], student views are increasingly ignored, and students found their school was increasingly used to give pseudoscience the veneer of respectability.
If non-violent responses don't work, do you sit there and bear it? Do you leave? Or do you get tempted by violence to "make things right" for the shared esprit de corp among the students?
Quoting MLK Jr more fully:
> A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
Fight against social justice, expect thoughts to bend towards violence.
[1] https://telescoper.blog/2026/10/18/dark-academia-how-univers...
> "Dark Academia – How Universities Die" is] an analysis of the decline of the neoliberal model of the university accompanied by the rise of commercialisation, managerialism and authoritarian models of governance. ...
> '''Impersonal and unforgiving management hierarchies have supplanted academic judgement, collegiality and professional common sense. in many institutions, senior executives have no PhDs and have been trained in business or the military instead. Mindless performance targets dominate teaching and research to the point of caricature, designed by functionaries who’ve never taught a class or written a research article in their lives. Unfortunately, these hierarchies have become notoriously bossy. Coercion rather than volition compels much academic labour today, even tasks that scholars would have otherwise done willingly because it’s central to their vocation. This surfeit of duress, most of which is unnecessary and counterproductive, is a defining feature of the corporate university.'''
> The book charts the rise of this fanatical managerialism, the consequent fall of academic institutions as places of education, scholarship and research, and their replacement by soulless teaching factories.
I read the methodology and wasn't convinced that the collection isn't biased by the marketing push for awareness of FIRE's mission, or by changing methods in data collection.
Their graphs, for example, don't even show error bars, which makes it impossible to determine if the trend they report is meaningful or random noise.
Regarding old campus newspapers, part of the "expensive and slow scholarly effort" means also reading the followup papers to see if there is information about a meeting being held or canceled, and if there isn't, include that in the statistics collection.
"This original database only recorded attempts to disinvite speakers from speaking at campus events. FIRE announced the expanded Campus Deplatforming database on February 8, 2024, and detailed how the expanded database now includes records of attempts to cancel performances (e.g., comedy shows, plays), art exhibits, or film screenings, in addition to speaker disinvitation attempts"
How much of the recent change is due to that expanded coverage?
I tried to download the data, but got a "Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: a.has is not a function" in Firefox. I can see though that the first few entries include a staged reading of a play, an artistic work on display, and Night of Drag fundraiser, so I know it's showing the expanded coverage.
I also can't figure out how to search the data. How many times is Kissinger in the database?
Does it include, for example, https://nyunews.com/2018/10/16/10-17-news-kissinger/ from 2018? ("Once it was made public that he would be a guest at the Stern speaker series, “In Conversation with Lord Mervyn King,” over a dozen student groups organized a protest against him titled “No War Criminals at NYU” and wrote a letter calling on the university to cancel the event.")
I have a really tough time with any "database" which offers downloading and search, but where both are broken (at least for me), making spot-checking very difficult.
Before social media, these sorts of things would be reported in the school and perhaps also local newspapers. We know this because we've read about the anti-war protests in the 1960s and 1970s. I know this, because I went to college ca. 1990 and these happened.
But gathering this data would require expensive and slow scholarly effort.
Are you sure it was Pew? https://nypost.com/2026/09/21/us-news/record-number-of-us-co... says it was a FIRE, and I gotta say I'm not impressed with them so far.
Going back to your suggestion that this may be an "early signal for what future politics may look like." I remind you that we used to have firebombings at colleges (examples, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hall_bombing , https://www.nytimes.com/1969/11/12/archives/firebomb-set-off... and https://las.illinois.edu/news/2021-07-13/fire-protest-braver...), as part of the protests against Vietnam. How well did those protests predict the future?
But the question wasn't so much about targeting critical infrastructure, but about dual-use data centers, that is, critical infrastructure used for both civil and military purposes.
> “Why have we gotten to the point where we have permitted militaries of various states to use civilian commercial data centers for their military purposes? By potentially using them and relying on them, they have opened them up to the possibility of becoming military targets.”
I am unable to find an online resource with more info, though I know from general reading and from visiting WW2-era museum ships that sailors were listening to radio shows while at sea. I assume it was all shortwave, back in the time when radio dials included city names.
"The tech" is so far beyond what we can do that we would have self-contained cities in the Gobi desert, on Antarctica, and likely underwater and underground too, long before we can think of terraforming Mars. Even a dinosaur killer wouldn't be enough, while a supernova explosion like the one proposed as the trigger for the Devonian and Ordovician extinction events would also affect Mars.
As others have long pointed out, the population on Mars would need to be in the hundreds of millions just to have enough people with enough specializations to build and maintain the the equipment, and train those people, and the medical staff who take care of them, and the caregivers who raise the babies, along with the farmers, and plumbers, and everyone else. See https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insuffi... .
Or we hand-wave and say the tech is so advanced that computers do everything, in which case, why Mars when the magic tech can let humans live anywhere?
While I am certainly ignorant of Rust, my overall issue is that this statement:
"In order to avoid unhelpful segfaults, the program should check for a null pointer and gracefully exit if one is found:"
The following example shows that "gracefully exit" means a perror() and exit() call, which is not appropriate for a C library.
I presumed this is because the author is someone with Rust experience, and who wants to replicate the expected Rust behavior in C. I think the better alternative is to explain that a well-written C library can have different expectations.
I'll add that the essay has a footnote saying "The corresponding Rust function is not idiomatic, and can only correctly handle ASCII text. If I were writing a production version of this function, it would be a single line of code: forward.chars().rev().collect::<String>()."
I see that production version doesn't handle allocation failures either.
My follow-on presumption is that most Rust libraries use this sort of idiomatic production code, where allocation failures simply panic.
I could well be wrong, but this essay certainly doesn't clearly show that I am wrong in my belief.
Or you use the savings from not having a car to have the pizza delivered.
Or, in less car-oriented places, you walk to the pizza place to pick up the order, just like Laverne and Shirley would walk over to the Pizza Bowl in a fictional portrayal of 1960 Milwaukee.
A large watermelon? Really? How many times has that happened to you? Do you leave the watermelon in your hot car while you work the rest of the day? You also can't easily carry a windsurfer on a bicycle, so might mention that too.
But in answer to your question, if you are going to be carrying things on your bicycle, put some baskets on, like https://waldbicyclebaskets.com/products/582-rear-basket-blac... or https://www.femmecyclist.com/how-to-carry-groceries-on-a-bik.... Then you can carry a pizza and a watermelon at the same time.
As an unattached male, are you going to eat that entire watermelon on your own?
As to becoming attached, you'll find there are women who don't want a car-centered life.
So does the "entire western civilization" include Europe? Or just the US? And are Asia or Africa somehow less centered around the personal (ICE/electric) vehicle than Europe? (Especially if you include mopeds and motorcycles.)
The culture of bike-riding has existed since the 1890s and the invention of the safety bike. It faded after WWII, especially in the US due to government subsidized white flight, but elsewhere as well. It started re-emerging in some places, like the Netherlands after the 1970s Stop de Kindermoord movement.
"Protestant ethic for hyper-individualization"? You'll find that Catholic countries are also car-centered, the Protestant Nordic countries didn't have the American sense of hyper-individualism, and Weber's ides of the protestant ethic was that dedication to hard work and sacrifice is noble in its own right. Perhaps you're thinking of the frigidity of rugged individualism, as Mamdani described it?
That's the unmentioned context behind:
> “There’s lots of examples in history of crops arriving in new places and being dominant,” explained Borrell. “So there’s absolutely no reason why it (enset) couldn’t be important somewhere else.”
One example is breadfruit, which the British brought from Polynesia to the Caribbean as a cheap food source for their slaves.
Since you didn't read, other factors are 'enset is currently “backbreaking” to harvest', ', 'Cultivation also involves an elaborate methodology', 'turning enset into food requires specialist knowledge', and 'The plant is also something of an acquired taste'.
Quoting its Wikipedia page: "The book, spun off from The Onion weekly-newspaper format of dryly satirizing current events, features mocked-up newspaper front pages from the entire 20th century, presented as though The Onion had been continuously in print since before 1900." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Dumb_Century
For one example, my library uses memory-mapped access, which is great for files which push the memory bounds. However, using memory-mapped files, especially over a networked file system, are slower than simply using RAM, so I have an option to read the entire contents into memory. I know the file size, I allocate space, and read in the data. If malloc fails, I report the failure, and let the caller figure out how to resolve things.
I don't think my software is all that special. A well-written library is not supposed to cause the entire program to panic. At the very least, the library doesn't know how to clean up all of the resources opened by the rest of the system. (Especially in a polyglot program where Python with a finally: cleanup calls C++ with a RAII object, then calls Rust.)
Concerning "I am not re-watching this video right now", I linked to the specific timestamp where he talked about it, so you wouldn't need to re-watch the entire video. I did that because the only text version I found was from 2020, at https://github.com/hyperium/hyper/issues/2265#issuecomment-6... , and I wanted something more recent than that.
> and so you can absolutely write your own code that allocates memory however you'd like
The linked-to essay uses new_uninit_slice in Rust, compares it to malloc in C, points out the issues should malloc fail, and how it needs something like an exit() to handle malloc failures.
My observation is that this would be an appropriate time to point out a philosophical difference between the Rust approach, where the default is for Rust to handle OOM errors, and the C approach where you are in charge of checking and handling malloc failures, and how some C library developers prefer different behavior than what new_uninit_slice provides.
Your suggestion that you can absolutely write your own Rust code this purpose also holds for the C code. You can write your own malloc wrapper function which does the check-and-exit() for you, if that fits your needs, then only call "malloc_or_die()".
I just grep'ed my code base and found one counter-example, which I did on Aug 29, 2011.
Where I assumed sizeof(char) was 1. :)
For context, steveklabnik suggested that malloc will virtually never fail on basically every Linux system, because of overcommit being the default.
I showed a trivial example of malloc failing, when trying to allocate more space than on my machine.
Another example is when using resource limits. I've modified my code to malloc only 500M bytes, the set a virtual limit of 500000KiB, which works, then 40000KiB, which doesn't
$ grep malloc tmp.c
char *s = malloc(500000000ULL);
$ cc tmp.c
$ ulimit -S -v 500000
$ ./a.out
Look at all that memory!
$ ulimit -S -v 400000
$ ./a.out
Boo, hoo!
I don't think those are designed to withstand an aircraft dropping in, nor would their destruction count as the use of nuclear weapons.