sherr

Also in the English speaking world, but getting rare: Elsie.

I just finished the book "The Aristocracy of Talent" by Adrian Wooldridge. It's a history of the idea of "meritocracy" and covers the criticism as well as the boosters, from Left and Right. I initially wanted to understand the reasons the British Grammar Schools came about, and why they disappeared (mostly) - suppressed for a supposedly better "comprehensive" educational system. The book is good and worth a read.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313113/the-aristocracy-of-ta...

There seem to be a few debates about the idea with the author on YouTube as well. I think we need meritocracy but it needs to be rebuilt again. It needs to help anyone with talents and not rely on wealth as much as it has started to.

You can pick "bad" artworks from any artist, maybe even objectively bad. And I dislike many of his paintings (sickly sweet, "fluffy" style) but he also did some lovely paintings. In my opinion of course.

The History Blog is a small gem because it is serious and not sensational. Always with a good level of detail for the average interested visitor, and from the original (or close by) sources. Plus pictures.

Picard was extremely useful to me when I decided to put all my audio on a streaming server in a local container (Navidrome). I used it extensively about five months ago. I find MP3 tags (and all the various formats and syntax) a nightmare usually but this was bearable. Picard was great.

Her half-sister's story wasn't so beautiful ...

Yes, that podcast series is excellent. Elizabeth was lucky in having an excellent team of people working for her. Their lives depended on keeping her alive of course. They were also lucky that she didn't inherit her father's habit of decapitating the most able ministers.

Sounds like a case of "Where Are the Customers' Yachts?" again. As brought up by an author called Fred Schwed regarding Wall Street investment.

This is what I do, to try out ZFS in a "safe" and easy way. An HP Microserver (my home server) with a USB3 disk attached formatted as ZFS. The server still runs Debian stable and uses DKMS ZFS. The recent pain points have only been the time taken to rebuild the kernel module for kernel updates and there have been a lot of them over the past few months (due to all the CVE's found and fixed). The ZFS side has been plain sailing so far but if I hit any ZFS issues I may have trouble (but, as I say, it's a test anyway).

That's wrong. All scholars know he was a Briton, or sometimes called "Romano-Briton". The "English" (Angles, Saxons etc.) were usually the antagonists of the Britons.

I only recently started to understand that the post-Roman "dark age" was not quite as dark as I thought it was. Scholars and other interested parties can tease out a fair amount of knowledge of these times. Even though it gets quite obscure.

I have a recent book by Caleb Howells about "King Arthur" and he goes into some interesting detail about some of this stuff. He also has a YouTube channel. There is real history to be discovered here still (but much can only ever remain speculative unfortunately).

I found Noah Smith's piece on this a good read. It's from November 2023 :

"People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone" [1]

"It’s important to clarify, by the way, that the phrase “Arsenal of Democracy” doesn’t refer to the size of our existing military, nor does it refer to our military spending. It refers to our military production potential — how much military equipment we could make in the event of a long conventional war against a major power like China."

[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-the-...

Yes, it's all very bad.

> 2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.

Yes, agreed, although (at least) Capita are probably much worse. They're currently in a deep hole having screwed over the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme. It's been causing deep pain for people for a long time now. Where's IBM when you need them, or Oracle? Just joking.

Publishers and "professional editors" have been releasing crap for years, even decades. No LLM needed. Humans are perfectly capable of writing so-called "slop" without a machine.

I see mentions of Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" in that thread but what this really seems to be mostly like is Vernor Vinge's "shred and scan" factory in his novel "Rainbows End".

There's a site in the UK [1] that shows images of the front page of various newspapers. I think they try to put them online the evening before. Sometimes worth a look and a European version would be useful too. Might need to be "crowdsourced" and I wouldn't expect translation to English (but maybe "AI" could do that).

https://www.tomorrowspapers.co.uk/

There's a good article on White and the book in the "Encyclopedia of Fantasy". It made me appreciate that this set of stories is more than just a book for children. I haven't actually read it but the entry for "White, T H" made me bump it up the list of books in my queue.

[1] https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/white_t_h

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48610055

Nothing has changed in that regard. Moscow still receives much more monetary attention than any other city in Russia.

Yes, that's what I ended up using. I was wanting to program something myself but it was too difficult. MusicBrainz Picard [1] is excellent.

[1] https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

My hell was trying too make sense or and organise audio/music ID3 tags. What a nightmare that is. EXIF seems much nicer to me.

It's a shame that the title doesn't say what the s/w is : keyd.

I actually use keyd on my laptops because it seems to do everything I need and is easy to get going without any fuss. So thank you Raheman Vaiya.

Thanks. I'm sure Sprang loved having Hockney as a user! I must say that I am less fond of the digital art he made and much prefer the traditional, physical, paint on canvas.

I wrote this on another submission here about his death :

Inevitable of course. He was getting on in years and starting to show his age. He's an artist I started to really appreciate about 10/15 years ago when visiting the one of his big Royal Academy shows in London. The works were very large, very colourful and monumental. But as well as the huge colourful paintings, his smaller, fine and fragile line drawings of the landscape were also inspiring. I think he got better as he aged and the past 20 years have been his best and most productive. Lovely guy as well. I'll miss him.

In addition to the above, he wasn't a grumpy technophobe. This was most apparent with his iPad usage but he was also someone who explored the way artists used technology in the past e.g. the Camera Lucida, an optical process of reflecting an image from in front of you onto a piece of paper. You trace it out. He wrote about this in a book called "Secret Knowledge" in 2001 [1]. He was always interesting in conversation.

[1] https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/secret-knowledge

Inevitable of course. He was getting on in years and starting to show his age. He's an artist I started to really appreciate about 10/15 years ago when visiting the one of his big Royal Academy shows in London. The works were very large, very colourful and monumental. But as well as the huge colourful paintings, his smaller, fine and fragile line drawings of the landscape were also inspiring. I think he got better as he aged and the past 20 years have been his best and most productive. Lovely guy as well. I'll miss him.

Yes, magpies are very intelligent birds. Also very annoying! I don't like hearing their "cackling", especially if you're in bed trying to sleep. Magpies at mine also figured out how to feed from the wire-cylinder hanging feeder, meant for small birds. They flap their wings like crazy to hover for a few moments at the feeder and knock out the food or get to it. Clever birds. The pigeons just stand around below and scavenge ...

Mine's been mostly fine. Second hand Pixel 10 (previous 2nd hand 8a) and I am extremely happy with an excellent phone. No problems like you've had.

Thanks for writing this. Perhaps a part of your therapy at the end. Also, a way to understand and recover. I hope all goes well for you!

Yes, I agree. It was magic to me really. I still love Perl.

Respect for programming this. I did some date/time calculations a few years ago using Perl and it was full of corner cases and trouble. Did I enjoy it? I enjoyed seeing it work. Hopefully with the right answers! This tool looks great.