BoxOfRain

When I was a student one of my mates was going on about the superiority of the metric system and how he wished the UK would adopt it fully rather than the heterogenous mix we actually have. The football was on in the background, and shortly after a goal was scored he exclaimed 'that must have been from thirty yards!' Personally I quite like the fact we use both, it underlines that our human systems of measurement are arbitrary rather than baked into the fabric of reality.

I'm too old to be a zoomer and too young to be a millennial, but I'm more or less bilingual with unit systems. Useful for a European who deals with the US often!

I'd be willing to bet that there's a lot more readable paper from thousands of years ago than there will be readable digital data from today in thousands of years. Digital information has to be actively preserved in every case, whereas paper can be passively preserved in some cases.

I strongly disagree with this take, a book might remain readable thousands of years from now but very few if not zero of our digital data formats likely will. We shouldn't be so quick to throw away diversity in the way information which may be useful for future generations is stored for the long term.

Surely no data is better than bad data? What's the point of a metric that doesn't measure anything tied to the objective reality of what it is that you're measuring?

All I see tools like this doing is getting people to manipulate the metrics, while at the same time producing enormous amounts of worker alienation. I'd even speculate the demoralising effects of workplace surveillance schemes undermine the alleged productivity benefits.

Another vote of confidence for CachyOS + KDE! This is my setup and literally the only issue I've had which presented a problem to me is that OpenRGB doesn't like my mobo at all, it's stuck in 'unicorn vomit' mode when I wanted tasteful accent lighting. Games work with minimal farting about, the desktop is great out of the box and customisable in plenty of ways, and it generally treats you like an adult.

Yeah people in the US who want protectionism for US models on grounds of IP rights are appalling hypocrites. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander!

One area that LLMs tend to do badly in still is sailing. I sail casually and I have friends who are instructors, basically all the LLMs we tried gave really unsafe advice for a particular manoeuvre. Claude was the notable exception getting it mostly right, but even so I wouldn't rely on it there.

I miss the night looking like night, the ultra-harsh white LEDs used in street lights are trying to mimic daylight which is the last thing you want to do at night in my opinion. The old sodium lights might have had unnatural colour rendering (or in the case of low-pressure entirely monochromatic amber) but this was a small price to pay for warm outdoor lighting. There's no reason SOX and SON bulbs can't be approximated more efficiently with LEDs, we could have the economic benefits of LEDs without the horrible side-effects of cheap and nasty ones.

I'm not sure where a previously sensible industry decided ultra-harsh daylight bulbs were warranted literally everywhere, in the past harsh white halide bulbs coexisted with sodium ones for decades and there was always guidance on when to use gentle sodium versus harsh halide lights. Apparently everything needs to be as harsh as possible these days, damn the institutional knowledge. I'm not anti-LED but I'm anti-'lots of blue spectral content at night' regardless of the source.

Yeah I think the grief OP was getting over that statement in some of the other comments is unwarranted, I understand completely what they mean about tools. You have people who buy expensive guitars and barely play them for fear of scuffing them for example, depriving themselves and the tool of the thing it's actually for. I'll never understand that mentality.

I don't like to be precious about my tools either, scratches and so on are evidence it's being used for what it's made for!

A fair point, I acknowledge my error without any admission of liability under intergalactic defamation law.

With all due respect, this is the kind of attitude which caused people to leave Stack Overflow en masse. We're discussing interestingly complex political procedures, this event has triggered several.

On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century.

For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-election triggered by Farage's resignation seeing the whole thing as a farce. As a result Farage will likely face only Count Binface, a space warrior from Sigma Six. He'd get my vote purely on the basis that he's promised to bring back Ceefax, and build at least one affordable house.

Yeah Winky the house elf definitely rubbed me up the wrong way for how pitiful she made the condition of freedom seem.

> Oh, and Kingsley Shacklebolt is quite an interesting name to give a fictional black person.

I'll be honest this one sailed over my head when I was a kid, I always assumed because he's a magical policeman the Shacklebolt referred to handcuffs. There's a lot of things named along those lines.

I have a 1950s mark 2 Shturmanskie as my main watch, the same model Yuri Gagarin wore into space. It's a 'frankenwatch' in that it's been assembled from parts of other watches, albeit in this case they're the right parts from the right period except the dial, which is a reproduction to avoid the considerable amount of radium the Soviets liked to put in their pilot watches.

Now that is an unreliable watch! It'll usually lose maybe a minute a day which is actually pretty decent for something from when Khrushchev was in power, but it likes to randomly stop or occasionally start running fast or slow according to its mood. I'm not sure how much of it is because it's a Soviet frankenwatch and how much is that it's hard to find people who'll work on Soviet watches in the UK.

To be fair it depends so much on the city. Oxford is a great example, driving there is a hellish experience because it's a historic place with notable buildings which too important to knock down, especially in order to replace them with roads and car parks. They try to cram cars in anyway and it's just miserable. In reality the whole city centre should be pedestrianised because that's what the city is actually supposed to be designed around. Remove the private cars and buses, taxis, and yes of course delivery drivers will have plenty of room.

This perfectly legitimate argument for Oxford would be silly to make about say Milton Keynes.

It's not the only example of extreme immorality that's presented pretty causally in the series.

I loved the books as much as anyone, but Azkaban struck me as utter barbarism even then. You're telling me that prisoners, regardless of what they were actually sentenced for, get psychologically tortured through the magical induction of deep despair until they develop a form of dementia? And this happens whether you're a murderous dark wizard or you do a bit of magical petty theft or fraud? The Ministry using Dementors for law enforcement would morally justify rebellion against it in my view, not only are they slavers they're also torturers on a scale that would make many dictatorships blush.

It's obvious that the Ministry a wicked institution, but it's also an incompetent one since the Dementors aren't even really loyal to them; they jump ship to the Death Eaters as soon as they get the chance to.

I have never heard the name Beeching spoken with more venom than in Wales, I used to live in Mid Wales and now I live in Cardiff. If I wanted to visit where I used to live by train, I'd have to do a multi-hour detour of a sightseeing trip around the West Midlands, deep into England. The Beeching Axe literally cut Wales in half and the consequences are felt to this day, even though there wasn't much outright salting the Earth to make sure the terrible decision couldn't be reversed as there was in some cases, the Welsh government doesn't have the money to reinstate the Aberystwyth-Carmarthen line which would deal with a lot of these north-south issues.

Also it's not just Wales where Beeching carried out intense vandalism of public infrastructure, the South West was severely affected too. Basically anywhere that wasn't London-centric suffered, which is the British government to a T regardless of the party in power. The general assumption was that private cars would replace the local trains, which as someone who currently doesn't drive for medical reasons really makes my blood boil. While perhaps not in intent, in effect the Beeching Axe was a profound kick in the teeth for the disabled.

Bit rich given where Anthropic sourced the data to train Claude with. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

I've not used Windows in a very long time so forgive my ignorance, but I always heard that it was a bad idea to connect an XP machine to the internet because of the amount of malware sloshing about. In practice is that much of a problem for modern-day XP enthusiasts?

There's something so uncanny about the mismatch between the regard in which Blair is generally held by British people and the regard in which he seems to hold himself.

If I were him I'd have retired from public life and kept a very low profile after Iraq, and everything else for that matter. He doesn't seem to realise that his modern interventions alienate everyone, even Alastair Campbell of all people seemed uncomfortable to the degree he seems to uncritically sing the praises of people like Larry Ellison recently.

A lot of the demand is from guitar amps, while you can just as well simulate the behaviour of a valve amp these days there's still plenty of demand for the real deal. As long as the likes of Fender, Marshall and so on want to supply valve amps to the mass market there'll probably be factories producing ECC83s, EL34s and the other common audio valves. In a lot of ways the combination of electric guitar + valve amp basically is the instrument in some styles.

There's also a niche HiFi market, my daily driver audio amp is a 1960s Leak EL84 amp. It's a cool bit of living history and it's very non-fatiguing to listen to for long periods.

I think you can in the limited sense it supports the idea privatisation doesn't remove politics, just relocates it and often into a less democratically accountable place to boot.

Whenever a person or group has power over another person or group, politics necessarily exists. I don't think this fact can be avoided, as much as advocates of privatisation often argue that it can be.

>Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors.

We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.

I really do think the class system holds us back as a society in Britain, George Orwell had a lot to say on this subject in England your England and I fear the decline he describes in the 1940s only accelerated through the 20th century and into the 21st. That essay is a good read for anyone interested in the topic, although of course much has happened since it was written.

I resented being constantly 'corrected' on the local accent I was picking up from school as a child, but now I appreciate that an RP or close to RP accent turns down the difficulty slider in certain British interactions.

> [UI] should have stopped changing almost 30 years ago

In some ways it did, modern CLIs haven't changed that much fundamentally from their older counterparts. You can do more things but someone using a CLI 30 years ago wouldn't be phased by modern ones; the interaction model has barely changed.

They're all emulating the video terminals of yore too, which themselves were descended from even older teletypewriters.

My converse hot take is that I actually really liked Aero, I've always had a thing for translucent UI elements and glowing things.

I love learning about pre-internet ways of transferring data on the back of other things. Another cool example is that the UK is only shutting down its longwave AM radio service this month (as opposed to decades ago) because the carrier is phase-modulated with data telling older electric meters to switch over. For years this was the only reason such an antiquated radio system stayed alive.

This Teletext emulator displays a few projects recreating various services: https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/viewer/.

I'm planning on building my own Teletext service at some point as part of a wider analogue TV project. It's a cool form for things like the news because you have to be very concise for it to work in such a constrained format; it's the opposite of today where long-form content that doesn't really say anything is dirt cheap to emit at scale. Some of the British services had rudimentary games too like Bamboozle, a quiz game which relied on hexadecimal pages the remote couldn't enter manually.

One thing I'd also like to reinstate is NICAM digital stereo which British analogue TV used to have, most modulators I've come across only generate a mono FM subcarrier in PAL mode so looks like I'm going to be building my own modulator.

> They built the RBMK reactors (like the one at Chernobyl) specifically because the dual-use design allowed them to generate civilian electricity while simultaneously harvesting plutonium for weapons, creating a fundamentally unstable system.

It was more that the RMBK was more designed around existing Soviet manufacturing capacity, they could and did build more conventional reactor designs as well but they required enormous pressure vessels the USSR only had one factory to produce. The RBMK on the other hand is not a monolithic pressure vessel, it's a collection of hundreds of individual pressurised tubes which were much easier for the Soviet manufacturing base to produce. It was actually a clever idea on the face of it, the problem was more it had inherently dangerous behaviour in certain regimes (the infamous positive void coefficient of reactivity) and the positive scram effect wasn't known until well into their deployment. The operators were also given contradictory operating instructions which failed to highlight the safety-critical nature of certain parameters.

There'd be other interesting implications as well, socialist systems were more open to the idea of cybernetics and with a proper computer industry the Soviets might have had more room to explore it.

Mind you I still think it would have likely been impossible for political reasons, there were many structural incentives to falsify economic data in the USSR due to the high degree of corruption and patronage among the nomenklatura. The whole point of cybernetics is to treat economic problems as systems problems and expose data transparently, and given the USSR was structurally dependent on falsifying this data suddenly having an accurate picture might have actually been destabilising kind of like how Glasnost turned out to be.

Another interesting 'Soviets had decent computers' counterfactual is that the Chernobyl disaster might have been prevented, since the Kurchartov Institute would have been better able to characterise the processes in the bottom of the fatally flawed RBMK in low power regimes before it was put into mass production. Again this might not have actually helped, the overconfidence the Soviet system had in its scientific and technical institutions was high and genuinely really interesting.