AdmiralGinge

Yeah, my 4G is fairly consistent and reliable whereas I just don't bother with WiFi if I can possibly avoid it. It's a hugely frustrating technology I think.

Not if you want it to actually fit in the socket of a car or bike.

The two weeks of learning about it substantially reduces the risk of death, it sounds like a reasonable approach to me.

I wonder how much it'd cost for them to license a tiny part of the low-frequency radio spectrum? The one for BBC Radio 4 covers most of the country with a single transmitter for example, using this old-school technology you could report your battery's serial number as stolen (with the appropriate authentication) and the company would broadcast a signal to short it out. This would be much harder to defeat than an internet-based solution I think.

I had to set up a filter to automatically reject anything from any of their domains, they're an absolute plague that Moses would be proud of.

I don't really like email alerts for social media as a concept anyway, if I want to hear what LinkedIn has to say I'll look at LinkedIn itself, it has no business injecting itself into the rest of my life via out-of-band methods like email.

I'm using the common idiom, I don't think it's actually evil but in my opinion it's definitely a fundamentally negative practice that is unfortunately required to be used in the process of doing something otherwise positive. Servers and programmers aren't free, and if what you're doing is positive then you're still socially net positive despite the negative impact of advertising.

I'm not saying that all advertising is bad either, it's the specific case of B2C online advertising that compromises privacy and massively reduces the signal:noise ratio of the platform you're using. Sales and marketing aren't inherently bad in themselves, obviously.

True, but cellular infrastructure is definitively in someone's territory. If I stick a phone mast up I'm still subject to things like planning permission even if the signal crosses a border. As far as I'm aware, space is pretty similar to international waters in that nobody is sovereign there.

It could lead to a bit of a "wild west" situation with governments giving themselves extraterritorial powers. In the late 1980s the British government gave itself very draconian powers to conduct armed raids on radio ships in international waters for example, they take a really dim view of information outside of state control even if they're not the state controlling it.

There's a bit of a spectrum between intrusive adverts and just malware, at some point we're going to need a definitive way to draw the line I think.

It's going to be very interesting for me. I plan to live on a sailing yacht and travel the world permanently, StarLink will make my working options a lot more flexible. Presently people are forced to see out their contracts over potentially dodgy marina WiFi.

The regulatory situation might get quite complicated I think, for example if you're in international waters, connected to the internet by a global ISP whose infrastructure is also outside of territorial limits then whose regulations do you have to comply with (besides your clients)? What's stopping the likes of Google poaching the concept of Radio Caroline, planting a datacentre somewhere in the North Sea and raising a two-fingered salute to any sort of data protection laws?

I'm cautiously optimistic about this, even if it is self-interested. Ads are very much a necessary evil rather than something desirable in society I think, and providing developers with an alternative business model isn't a bad thing.

Fear and respect are two completely different things though. Under the Peelite model of policing, it's impossible to create genuine community police officers when there's a huge power differential (IE a tool that can easily end a life) between police and public.

This just sounds mad coming from a British person. Almost all of our police are unarmed and do a decent job, the only place police routinely carry guns are airports for obvious reasons and Northern Ireland which literally had a decades-long sectarian insurgency happen there. At least nominally, the British police operate under Peel's idea of "policing by consent" where police officers are merely citizens in uniform charged with keeping order rather than the more Continental (at the time) model of armed enforcers of royal/state power.

It's hard to genuinely respect someone when there's a gun-related power dynamic forcing you to. That's not respect, that's just the threat of force. It's probably too late for America to adopt Peel's principles of policing but it's not done us much harm.

This threw me straight back to secondary school, we had a teacher with a fearsome reputation who was berating a class of mine for not revising efficiently, he said "you can't just open your book and learn by osmosis" and some very brave kid piped up with "it's not osmosis sir, that's the movement of water across a membrane. We'd be learning by diffusion, not osmosis". At the very least, this proved we'd been paying attention in biology!

>It’s been a huge boon for everyone except I guess traditional publishers.

My heart bleeds for them!

Oh fair, I always thought a distaste for Oracle was confined to tech.

I'm a web developer using macOS on my home machine for personal projects. I use Linux at work so I'm familiar with both, I have no intention of dropping either in the near future. Both fill a particular niche for me while not requiring much cognitive overhead to switch between them. As long as they don't do anything spectacularly moronic like insisting on the mac App Store as the only source of software or preventing non-Apple OS's being run then I'm unlikely to get pissed off enough to leave the Apple ecosystem.

"To each their own" is the key principle we're missing I think, personally my encounters with Windows have been by far the most frustrating and unproductive interactions with an OS, but some people wouldn't ever step their toes out of Microsoft land. I'm not sure how much of my dislike for Windows is because I'm simply too set in my *nix ways and how much is genuine bugginess and UI obtuseness as well.

Yeah, this surprised me too. As sceptical as I am of TikTok and its "I can't believe it's not malware" approach to privacy I feel a bit sorry for the poor sods actually developing it. Oracle are going to beat the world record for deepest borehole with how hard they'll run the app into the ground.

Many of the water companies in the UK still use divining rods to locate pipes, there's a lot of bollocks used in places that really ought to know better.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/21/uk-water-fi...

Aren't they essentially just glorified galvanometers like the Scientology e-meter?

As much as we like to point fingers over the Atlantic, here in the UK our roads are mostly imperial except heights and widths which are in both feet and metres, because lorry drivers from the Continent kept crashing into bridges!

It's not in the UK, we have a serious political taboo against what's seen as a "papers please" kind of authoritarianism. Tony Blair tried to introduce mandatory ID cards and even with his massive majority it was politically impossible.

The ironic thing is that despite this widespread attitude, we have genuinely scary levels of mass surveillance.

I also fired up a 2006-era original MacBook fairly recently, running the first Intel version of macOS (I've always had a soft spot for Tiger, its version of Aqua is honestly one of Apple's prettiest interfaces in my mind), while it works with modern-ish WiFi all the certificates are long expired so few things actually connected. I'm not sure how bodge-able this problem is, I never had time to find a solution.

It's a shame, because I'd love to use Tiger as a distraction-free environment. I'd even try and build a controller app for Tidal or Spotify so I could still have modern music streaming facilities. I spend a lot of time SSH'd into servers anyway so the lack of modern compatibility doesn't matter as long as a terminal's available.

Huge shout out to DBeaver by the way, it's one of the most useful applications I use on a daily basis.

I set a custom uBlock filter to be rid of it.

In the minds of many people (especially British politicians!) the UK is actually "The City State of London with Four Inconvenient Countries Attached".

I'd consider volunteering to moderate a particular geographical area, when I was a student Facebook constantly took down the student confessions page I eventually ended up helping to run for the vaguest reasons, while letting actual hate posters run amok. I know I would say that, but we would genuinely get taken down for jokes that wouldn't even make sense out of the tiny university I attended. It was immensely frustrating having to build up the userbase again and again because the moderators of Facebook just weren't/aren't terribly good at their jobs. I'd happily have taken on actual moderation duties rather than had to constantly appeal and get a blank, inhuman "declined" message.

I think they tend to take an "if in doubt, remove it" approach which basically allows anyone who doesn't like a niche page for whatever reason to have it taken down through sheer attrition, if you report it enough it'll probably go down eventually even for stupid reasons. I actually ended up writing an app to cut Facebook out of our system altogether (it was kind of similar to Yik Yak with a much better moderation system and better anonymity protection - I really can't be arsed to deal with a GDPR lawsuit...) but we couldn't launch it in part because it took me ages to develop as I've since graduated and work as a full-time developer and because coronavirus meant our launch event got cancelled. I might take it live when students go back this year, but I'm concerned that with nothing much going on it'll fizzle and die because there's nothing interesting to post about. It'll all depend on how the Welsh government lift the coronavirus restrictions.

I'm one of them, the most frustrating thing with working with modern JavaScript is definitely the ecosystem rather than the language. React Native is particularly an issue, the recommended react-native-community geolocation library just flat-out fails on many Android vendor's phones, and the replacement someone made for it still isn't exactly reliable (although to be fair, it only broke on OnePlus devices which were later patched so it could well have been an phone-level issue).

I get it, I shouldn't complain about the quality of open-source and freely offered software and the onus is on me to audit the libraries I put in my code, but blimey some people take an awful lot of liberty with the truth when they claim something is "production ready". I reckon a lot of people just build some rushed, poorly-written JavaScript libraries so they can pad out their CVs as an "open-source contributor" but the only thing they're actually contributing is a massive headache for muppets like me who foolishly use said code in their own projects.

British here, I've definitely heard it used that way but it's not the first thing that comes to mind.

Twitter's actually worse I think, there's almost literally nothing nuanced you can write in 140 characters. The very nature of microblogging reduces discourse to "I'm right, you're wrong, shut up about it".

I don't think the world would be worse off if Twitter or even the concept of microblogging had never taken off.

The whole component simply known as "the comments" is terrible, my only theory is that someone is paying them to destructively test mice through needless clicks.