Brakenshire

It’s really incredible the lack of technical detail there is in reporting of the EU and Brexit. As you say, it’s very difficult to pick out exactly what this means.

Some limitations which I do know of:

* British nationals can’t live and work freely on Europe, so an architect based in London can’t jump on a Eurostar and take a business meeting in Paris by default, they would have to get a visa specific to the country and activity. And their professional qualifications may not be recognised, so would have to operate through local professionals (not sure how that would work in practice).

* Products sold into the EU will have to be recertified for that market, no assumption of regulatory compliance or compatibility. So a lot more red tape and checks in moving products across borders, in particular that will impact food and products built as part of just in time supply chains.

* No ability for British firms to operate in other European countries with equivalent rights as a local company, will have to form subsidiaries instead in many cases.

Would be interested what else people can add.

I was assuming they’d announce the deal with a few months of extra time before it’s actually enforced, surely this is not actually coming into force in a week?

It’s one of the only things which prevents Apple and Google from being able to carve up the open web between them.

They abandoned the parallel layout engine which was arguably the most important bottleneck that Servo was attempting to tackle.

Looking at wikipedia KaiOS seems to be the second mobile OS in India now, ahead of the iPhone. I don’t think those rules apply to a system which relies of web technologies, because you have such an enormous base of developers and development infrastructure.

I agree, they’re currently locked in a negative spiral, the share needs to be higher to be stable, otherwise maintaining compatibility will not be a high enough priority for web developers. 8% on desktop means 3-4% on all platforms and less in selected markets.

To regain market share they need to be the unambiguously better browser. I thought there was a really solid path to do that with their parallelising efforts, in particular a fully parallel layout engine in combination with their other work would have meant drastically improved UI speeds, notably on Android, but elsewhere as well, it would have eliminated a lot of development difficulty and allowed a much more native-equivalent level of performance. That would have made a good basis for an embedded engine to compete with electron.

That path seems to have been closed off with the Servo team being fired. I’m not sure where Mozilla is going now, it’s not enough to tread water.

Has Mozilla fully open sourced Pocket? It seems like years since they promised to do that.

That’s based on low population densities, and inequality in terms of commanding labour (getting slaves to cut down trees and keep the heating system for a large house running) and in accessing natural resources (a house having enough acreage of land to grow enough wood to keep the heating system going).

It’s something which is a luxury in the absence of fossil fuels, or the rollout of new technologies they mention.

Out of interest, what’s the trend in that? Is it fading out or increasing?

It will be like any other country in the world. We should hardly feel sorry that they’ll no longer be ridiculously pampered and looked after by an underclass of mistreated immigrants. They have enormous opportunities, both in other available resources and in a capital overhang, to make their way.

Is there precedent for the Oxford vaccine? I didn’t realise that.

It’s curious that the country/federation that introduced the concept of self-determination doesn’t allow self-determination for its constituent states.

25% all cause reduction in mortality, I reckon chilli peppers could be better for you than modern medicine.

Yes, but it’s bizarre to complain about the deal while not knowing enough about it to even accurately remember which company was a signatory to it.

That already exists:

https://e.foundation

The taxes on fuel need to do a lot of heavy lifting, pricing in the cost of road building and maintenance, the effect of road congestion and air pollution in cities, and the effect of increased global warming. I’m sceptical they cover those factors.

Although, it probably would be better to move more of the tax burden to car use in cities, and away from fuel. Driving a car in the countryside is much less damaging than in a city centre.

There’s an impressive big data symptom analysis going on in the UK through the Covid Symptom Tracker app create by a company called Zoe. They’ve been doing trials comparing reported symptoms with PCR testing.

I’d like to do that, could you give some pointers?

Yes, it will be interesting whether this includes any meaningful action within his term of office. In the EU and UK there are requirements for average emissions for each manufacturer, which get tougher every year, and already are requiring about 5-10% of vehicles to be electric.

The EU probably will lose the same in absolute terms, but it will be spread over 400 million people not 60 million. So in terms of rational policy making the EU should want a deal as much as the UK, but of course in practice if the impact is less diffuse it’s just less politically important.

So of the 18 predictions none are from climatologists, none are in published research but rather in comments to magazines and speeches, and half are from 2 people, Paul Erlich (a biologist) and Kenneth Watt (an ecologist). And some of them are not even wrong, for instance concerns about population growth or rainforest loss at the rate it was occurring at the time. The headline here is “some random scientists were wrong about something 50 years ago”. The fact the comparison is even made between these comments and the published evidence base for climate change, indicates more about the person making the criticism than the target of the criticism. These are the same kind of people who think that political commentators on rolling news are making a meaningful contribution to scientific debate.

It’s that, and woodland management, and climate change.

You need devices which can objectively measure the strength of something like an ankle in multiple vectors of motion. And then algorithms which can combine the data into a meaningful index.

Corbyn actually got an easy ride in many ways, notably in the 2017 election where he inexplicably was able to stand as effectively the main Remain candidate without challenge, despite his record of Eurosceptism.

All of the accusations of antisemitism were dismissed by his supporters out of hand, but some were legitimate, likely not in any personal antisemitism but in a willingness to turn a blind eye to antisemitism in ideological allies.

David Graeber seems an impressive guy, but that doesn’t mean he’s right in everything.

Even white skinned people who spend long times outdoors may not get enough Vitamin D, especially if you live somewhere northern.

This was already happening, but I think the pandemic will drive it through. Commodity/cupboard shopping will happen online, and fresh meat, vegetables, fruit, seafood shopping happen locally. Supermarket sites are also hugely tempting for housing redevelopment, that will happen as soon as footfall consistently drops below a threshold.

The obvious target is apps, develop a simplified layout/styling model for properties which can be scoped within a component, and build a layout engine which can calculate the layout within those components independently, and then you could radically improve the performance of web UI.

I had a cheese marked “Gruyere” in the US which was a bleached white paste.

I just don’t think there are enough users who care about deep customisation through extensions compared to those who care about speed and stability, and Firefox traded one for the other in adopting a standardised Extensions API, and the changes that allowed in the browser architecture.

25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but in my experience a large percentage of users don’t even have a clear idea of what a browser is.

The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because:

i) Chrome is pushed by Google.com, which has a near monopoly on search

ii) Chrome was bundled and installed alongside other software

iii) Chrome is built into Android and Chromebook

iv) Chrome has a huge advertising budget

And all of these factors combine to make Chrome feel like the default portal to the web.

Also for a period of time Chrome was undeniably a better, more stable browser. It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable.

But Firefox Quantum only exists because of Servo, and vital parts of Servo (parallel layout in particular) have not been integrated into Firefox. It’s bizarre to see Mozilla sabotaging its long term chance at technical leadership not only by scrapping Servo but firing the engineers who built it.

I had an untechnical family member say unprompted last week they want to move away from Chrome but couldn’t use Firefox Mobile because it’s too slow. At the same moment Mozilla leadership was sacking its staff working on parallelising the browser engine.