BoxOfRain

To add to this, I definitely wouldn't say we've converged on a set of languages in general either! Most of my backends are written in Scala of all things, and LLMs have no issue with it. If anything, the expressive type system is helpful for them.

The RIAA is good? The outfit which opened legislation for outrageous sums against random teenagers over a couple of dozen songs? The outfit among others waging war on general-purpose computing? The outfit whose reason to exist is more or less to enclose and privatise the cultural commons that belongs to everyone?

I don't like the big AI firms either, but that doesn't mean I'm going to side with literal IP troll outfits.

While not metalwork, some are surprised to learn how old CNC machined guitars are. I have a Peavey T-60 and they were among the first CNC-machined production guitars in the late 1970s. It's going strong to this day as well, they're very well-built instruments.

Right but 'battleship'?

That's the same kind of silliness as calling the Russian Kirov class 'battlecruisers' in my opinion. It's not going to stand in the line of battle and exchange shells with other battleships is it?

On the off-chance you're not already aware, the US government considered exactly this during the Cold War! The mid 20th century is not beating the lead poisoning allegations in my view...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119

It's less sodium specifically, and more the general case of 'not using ultra-harsh high-K white light to badly mimic daylight'.

Yeah I'd be shocked if there wasn't a degree of 'will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?' going on here.

It's one of those things which seem to exist on a spectrum too; I have it severely enough that some days I outright can't read and my vision distorts quite badly, and it's accompanied by a permanent migraine-like headache. On the other hand, many people I've spoken too experience little impairment at all.

It's a badly named syndrome in my view, since most people younger than me have no idea what TV snow is, and some of the symptoms aren't visual.

Yeah I really don't like the proliferation of blue-pumped LEDs, they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.

In my view we should simply have improved on what already existed, instead of blue-pumped LEDs we should have used monochromatic amber ones like the SOX streetlights which were once ubiquitous in the UK. Night actually looked like night back then, rather than a cheap and nasty approximation of daytime.

I found the opposite effect from covid personally as a 'zillennial'. As soon as the lockdowns and 'rule of six' were over the first thing me and my friends did was rent a nice house in the middle of the Welsh countryside and have a massive multi-day party. We all felt that lockdowns had stolen what was left of our early 20s from us and wanted to make up for it!

I often wonder if there's a lot of national differences here, in the UK people for the most part wanted to reverse everything about the covid norms as quickly as possible after Partygate and all the political drama. People are still drinking less but it's because pints cost >£6 now in a lot of places, nothing to do with an outbreak of temperance.

I suspect he avoided making comparisons so daft they serve to obscure rather than illuminate.

Valve gear is particularly full of transatlantic differences, as well as valves vs tubes in many cases the same specific valves can have different names depending on the side of the Atlantic you're on such as EL84 vs 6BQ5. Your high voltage line is called HT in British but B+ in American, while what we'd call an anode in the UK is more commonly called a plate in the US. I'm not sure if it's as fixed but I've usually heard Americans calling what I'd call the heater the filament as well.

While 'valve' makes more sense from the point of view of what it does, 'tube' makes more sense from the point of view of what it is I think.

Even in English in some cases the term is still used, for example in condenser microphones, and in the context of old mechanical fuel systems.

If James Watt had gone to the government and public saying how dangerous the steam engine was, and how many people would perish in boiler explosions if he wasn't given exclusive control over all steam engines henceforth, he would have been rightly called a swindler and laughed out of the room. He would have been correct that they can be dangerous, but utterly wrong to suggest that warranted him having a personal monopoly or oligopoly.

Yeah I find the whole 'what if sufficiently advanced AI gets into the wrong hands' argument extremely tiresome when it's already in the worst possible hands as far as most of the human population is concerned.

With that kind of compressed work schedule, it's no surprise the software was pwned soon after it went live by a hacker of serpentine cunning.

If this is your genuine belief then try this exercise: put yourself in the shoes of the shopkeeper who owned his own means of production directly and sold his wares to his immediate community before Big Tech. Would you rather have his job, or would you prefer to be working in an Amazon warehouse where you're obliged to relieve yourself in a bottle for want of toilets while being surveilled in a manner a Soviet political officer might consider excessive?

Fishermen rejoice, for the price of bait will come down rapidly in the face of such a dramatic oversupply.

No surprise Teams is at the top of the leaderboard, if I could remove three software products from the universe I'd use all three goes on Teams just to make sure it's properly dead and can't come back.

I'm not sure that's the case, lots of supposed 4chan coinages came from elsewhere and 'slop' is much older. It's been known in the sense of 'liquid household refuse' from the 19th century.

I'm surprised it doesn't annoy the author. I use LLMs extensively for code but I cannot stand their natural language output a lot of the time, it always reminds me of that example from Orwell's Politics and the English Language:

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

> I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern [1946] English:

> Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

A 2026 version of this phenomenon would instead be:

> Here's the thing: success isn't just about talent — it's about timing. The fastest runner doesn't always win. The strongest army doesn't always prevail. Ultimately, life is a complex interplay of skill and chance, and recognizing that can be both humbling and empowering.

That's actually Claude and you can see precisely why the resulting vague language is bad; the LLM has changed the actual meaning of the passage from a sober reflection on the futility of expecting natural justice from the universe to one that emphasises skill and timing, exactly what the author is telling us is futile.

Admittedly the slop text LLMs produce in the 21st century isn't the same as the 20th century slop humans produced, but there's definitely a family resemblance in my view! Orwell was concerned with the idea language can be used to curtail thought, and he disliked what we'd now call slop because it merely gestures at a thought without actually instantiating it directly.

The whole essay is worth a read in my view, it remains highly relevant.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

When analysing a choice of technologies, it has a rather more optimistic view of risks presented by choosing a US option and a pessimistic view of risks presented by a Chinese option in my view. For example Claude warned me of the spyware risk presented by BigMe phones, but when I went digging by the chattiest software was Google's own. Mind you, the Chinese models are no panacea either, they too carry bias. In my view bias cannot be eliminated, only driven down using diverse models.

You might want to check out the Bigme HiBreak phones, they're basically low-mid Android phones with e-ink screens. They work perfectly well for the dull functional things expected of a phone, while rendering all the addictive and spammy patterns pretty ineffective. I've found my one very useful as an intermediate step between a dumbphone and a traditional smartphone.

While conspiracies would be pushing it, an illuminating exercise is to ask your favourite LLM leading political questions that cause it to assume your identity is something other than your own.

I also find Claude deeply Americentric in a lot of ways for what it's worth.

I wish it were possible to beat Opus 5 over the head with a copy of Orwell's Politics and the English Language sometimes.

Don't Ofcom still raid the odd shortwave pirate occasionally if they're broadcasting in one of the GMDSS bands? Fairly sure it happened to a station a few years ago but I could be misremembering.

Then again, as you say, they probably have much better things to do. Would be nice to hear more stations popping up on MW too as all the legit stations leave the band.

> The King of England isn't in charge of the UK though. The power largely rests in Andy Burnham.

Yes and no...

Firstly there's not been a King of England since 1707, he's king of the United Kingdom (and fourteen other places) and secondly it really depends who you ask. On paper sovereignty flows from the 'Crown in Parliament', many powers are actually the King's and are now vested in other parts of the state. Since the 19th century these powers tend to be used 'on the advice of the Prime Minister / Cabinet'. In theory the King could go against this advice, but Parliament ritually reminds [1] the King's representative what happened the last time a king got too uppity and the courts can still rule on the limits of these powers. There's one view which says the people are fundamentally sovereign (very relevant during Charles I's trial for treason), but while this might be true in practice the orthodox view is that sovereignty comes from the 'King-in-Parliament', a composite body of the King, House of Commons, and House of Lords acting in concert.

The point is that when Andy Burnham exercises his power in many cases he's in a sense doing 'su king' by virtue of his role as PM rather than acting in his own right. The PM role is weird as well, traditionally (and in my opinion correctly) the PM is merely the first among equals in a collectively responsible Cabinet, the term 'Prime Minister' actually started life as an insult. Of course since the late 20th century the role has become increasingly presidential, but this seems true in Westminster-style systems generally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Rod#State_Opening_of_Par...

Demonstrably false from this thread alone.

How can you meaningfully participate in a democracy when the world is so globalised without at least a basic understanding of international affairs?

To be fair TV detector vans actually did exist in the early days of TV, there were just barely any of them because they were expensive and they were just as effective as psychological tactic. The idea was that old televisions would radiate the local oscillator frequency used in the superheterodyne circuit strongly enough it was detectable from the street, where it could be direction-found from the van outside. Ringway Manchester has a decent video on the subject.

This wouldn't work nowadays for obvious reasons, but they still pretend the vans are a thing as far as I know.

> It seems as if one ambiguates the other.

Interestingly this mechanism contributed a lot to Brexit in my opinion, whenever there was legislation the politicians wanted to enact but knew would be unpopular with the voters they'd blame the EU and wring their hands saying there was nothing to be done, while in the background gold-plating the legislation far beyond what the EU was even asking for. This also made it easy for populists to point to many absurd examples of the EU being comically bureaucratic, when a lot of the more nonsensical ones were literally domestic additions. When the referendum happened, the consequences were obvious to everyone.

While no Brexiteer myself, I personally would want to see the European Parliament get a lot more powers and influence before I threw my wholehearted support behind rejoining. Half the problem with the EU is that it's seen as not particularly democratic as a place for legislation to originate, and giving the elected organ more power (including the power to propose legislation in its own right, and dismiss legislation proposed by the Commission with much more prejudice) would go a long way to addressing that I think. The Parliament needs to be more, well, parliamentary in how it functions.