FrostViper8

> It appears that you have not yet learned the lesson that perfect is the enemy of good. Just because a system doesn't meet your high expectations, doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

That isn't what you are proposing. What you are proposing is something which has no value. I've told you why it is pointless. Saying it "has value" repeatedly doesn't change the fact that it is pointless.

> I'm also having trouble squaring your keen interest in the economic woes of inflation combined with your desire to have a stock market crash. Perhaps you are unaware of your bias given your portfolio, wishing to enact misery upon millions for your own personal gain. The last big crash was a major contributer the second world war, so be careful for the "meaningful change" you wish for.

I love it when people accuse me of wishing harm on others. I would prefer not to have to buy gold/silver and rather just put cash in my savings.

I told you why a big crash might be preferable (in the long term). Sometimes a bit of a reset and a big disaster will bring long term positive change as things will actually be fixed properly.

> you should learn the etiquette round here, cos that ain't it. Either treat fellow commenters and their perspectives with a modicum of respect or go back to facebook. BTW, that was a swing and a miss, I lived through that period.

You obviously didn't understand what you are talking about. It such a basic mistake. I pointed it out and then you pretended to understand how it worked. So it was obvious you looked up it up after my reply. Whether or not you lived through the period is irrelevant.

So complaining about my supposed lack of etiquette is simply a deflection. You could have just admitted you were wrong.

> Don't misunderstand when I don't reply or even read your next response. Its because I don't want to talk to you anymore, because you're not interesting.

So when you throw insults at people (calling me boring) it is okay, because you are doing it. Gotcha :D. I love double standards.

> the UK already forces ISPs to hold a database of the hosts you have visited in the last three years. By implementing the laws in the way they currently are doing undermines their own legislation by pushing UK users into having a tangible reason to hide their their browsing patterns from UK networks by funneling their traffic through VPNs or other proxies to avoid age gates.

People had tangible reasons before having to avoid age-gates. You should not have people spying on your online activity.

> Tin foil aside, my issue is that they're not even good at what they're trying to do. Their policy is inconsistent with their aims and lacks technical strategy.

Good, I don't want them to be good at what they are doing.

> You think they're worried about dissenters when in practice they're more worried about elections in 2029 and whatever pearl clutching users post on mumsnet.

They can be be worried about both. They are capable of being concerned about two different things at the same time.

I was actually directly addressing your comment about the your independent org for these identity tokens. There is no value because it cannot guarantee privacy. Therefore it has no value (at least not to me).

Secondly you seemed to not understand who set the interest rate but you are now confident in telling me about the perceived benefits of having a central bank set the interest rate. Which tells me that you just looked this all up about 10 minutes ago.

> It has value because governments cannot be trusted to directly control interest rates.

Neither can the central bank. As they are failing at their mandate of keeping inflation at 2%. The reported inflation rate is probably lower than the actual inflation rate due to CPI calculation wankery.

> The indirection has value, politicians are forced to spend political capital in order to wrest control.

To who does it have value? It doesn't benefit me (or most regular people) to have a 2% inflation rate and relatively low interest rates. It eats away the value of my savings. I now buy Gold (it hit a record high price today) and the value of my Gold and Silver has more than doubled in 3 years.

> Still better than black wednesday and Norman Lamont.

Saying it is better than a total crash isn't saying much.

Instead we have a gradual devaluing of the currency, many consumer goods are of far poorer quality (I repair my own vehicle and it is often better to get a reconditioned part than a new one), there is also "shrinkflation".

If we had a crash I actually think it would at least provide a wake up call and spur some real meaningful change.

The entire point of using a VPN is so that you don't have to provide photo card ID to a third party. So obviously there is a problem.

Most of these VPNs provide alternative payment options other than Credit/Debit card e.g. Monero/Cash etc. So it would undermine the entire point.

Firstly, I didn't even mention what the value might be. I simply pointed out that the "independent organisation" would not really be independent. Which means it won't protect anyone's privacy. Which undermines the entire point of having it. Therefore it has no value.

Secondly, it is the central bank that sets the interest rate. In the UK that is the Bank of England. Secondly the government sets their mandate. They have a mandate of keeping the inflation at 2%. One of the mechanisms they to control inflation is the interest rate.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation

Moreover the "Chair of the Court of Directors" (the Chairman) of the Bank of England is appointed by the Crown (the King) at the advice of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The government both sets the mandate and effectively selects the Chairman. So while they don't directly set the interest rate, they do set the mandate and who runs the Central Bank.

BTW the Bank of England is failing to keep the inflation rate at 2% (and for some time) as it is currently 3.4%. So we can see how well that is going.

What you are telling me in effect is that all the exchanges I have are ultimately disingenuous with the MP. It also tells me that the MP represents the party and not me (as they are acting as nothing more than a glorified public relations officer).

This undermines the entire point of the process and only further degrades public trust.

> You would need the non-governmental agency to share the urls with the government agency for the activity to be tied directly which would undermine the entire purpose of that architecture.

Which would absolutely would happen. The authorities will ask the non-gov agency for the details and they will be provided.

The "coordinated corporate fascists" (your words not mine) are providing a platform where I can challenge the the state and be seen by potentially millions of people.

If your ID is tied to your anonymous identity this creates a chilling effect.

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

The response is the same boilerplate responses I used to get when I used to write to my MP. This is why I just gave up emailing my MP. You are essentially pleading with someone to reverse their previous position when they have no incentive do to so.

Most content websites that are managed by a organisation such as a council/government or are usually driven by some CMS software. Updates are usually done by a content/social media team. These people are also posting the updates to twitter.

It isn't the late 90s/2000s anymore where people are uploading HTML files over FTP.

> Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file?

Yes. But I think most of the zero logs providers will remove the identifiable payments details after a certain about of time. e.g. Mullvad have a specific policy relating to what is stored and retention time (I am not affiliated with Mullvad, I just use their service).

https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy#payments

> Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK.

Or you can use Tor. I will just use a VPN that lets me pay with Monero or some other crypto currency. None of this will stop savvy people.

> Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting.

The privacy issue would still exist. They can tie your online activity directly to these tokens.

> If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know.

It is an utter waste of time. MPs already know about the concerns. They don't care. I wrote to my MP about many of these concerns in the past. You either get ignored, told you are enabling pedos, told there will be protections put in place (ignoring the whole point is that I don't trust the government), or you get a boilerplate reply.

Moreover The vast majority of people (unfortunately this includes people in my own family) have been propagandised to agree with all iffy censorship, monitoring and other spooky nonsense the UK state engages with.

> To stop it now we need a majority of MPs who are willing to take a political risk to reject it.

Which isn't going to happen.

I don't think it is really a fair test because I doubt the browser is going to use any of the video decoding hardware that maybe available. I suspect if you used something native then any video decoding hardware would be used correctly.

> same as I am atheist and know the Bible better than all but about 3 so-called christians I've met in 6 decades. Know your enemy.

I missed this the first time around. The fact that you see Christians as enemies (your words btw) is quite telling about this entire interaction/conversation we've had.

I honestly think that if you haven't learned why this attitude of your is a problem at almost 60 years old, I don't think you ever will.

I won't be responding to you again on any topic.

> Installing extensions is not customisability. It is code patching on the fly and it breaks when the desktop gets upgraded.

This is nonsense.

1) It changes how it works to how I prefer it, so that is customising it. 2) I've used the same extensions for ages. Nothing ever broken.

Basically want you and a lot of people want, is that there are hundred of options setting trivial things. Ok fine, then don't use Gnome, nobody is forcing you to use it.

As I said I install dash to dock and appindicator icons.

> Again you translate "does not do something well" into "it does not work".

It seems to be that you are getting hung up on the word "works fine" and wanting to get into some stupid semantic argument.

I found that it does do it well. You didn't read what I said. I used it for 2 years. It worked perfectly fine during duration.

So I know for a fact that what are you are saying incorrect.

> You didn't understand it, then. It is really about what settings to enable and what extensions you must install.

I was being flippant when I said "enable a checkbox". What was described in your blog post I've done this in virtualbox myself in the past.

It isn't difficult, pretending it is is asinine. I haven't used virtualbox in years, but I am quite familiar with the general purpose from when I did.

> I read it. I replied. I don't care.

Right. So why are you replying at all? So why should I care about your opinion if you aren't willing to consider mine?

You said you were 58 years old, I expect someone that is 58 years old (and is clearly articulate) to behave better tbh.

> A bunch of entitled kids who don't know how to use a computer with keyboard alone and who don't give a fsck about the needs of disabled and visually impaired people ripped out menu bars and a tonne more to make their toy desktop, but they threw in features to amuse audiophiles and people with fancy monitors, and you don't understand why I am pissed off.

I have HiDPI monitors for work. You keep on making assumptions about people and then come to the wrong conclusions.

Also I actually have a blind friend and he says that Gnome is actually works reasonably well (he installed it in a VM on his Mac).

He says it isn't as good as MacOS and thus he still uses his Mac. But he used Gnome and Unity and he says they are "ok".

As for pipewire/pulse. I had some issues with it like while ago, but it all seems to be fixed now.

So I am going to assume that you don't know what you are talking about.

> You ripped out my computer's UI and replaced it with a toy so you could have higher refresh rates and shinier games.

This is absolute nonsense. I did nothing of the sort. I just customised the default UI that happened to come with CentOS 7 at work and happened to like it and usually return to using it.

Gnome actually known for not working well with games. I am actually making YouTube video about it. You have to install GameScope to sandbox the compositor.

This is another case of you not knowing what you are on about quite frankly.

> I have been getting hatred and personal abuse from the GNOME team and GNOME fans, every time I ever criticise it, for over a decade now. It is the single most toxic community I know in Linux.

Says the person that just told me he didn't care about my needs and whether my hardware works and then blames for something never did. The toxicity isn't coming from me.

BTW, None of this was done by me. I use gnome. I am not part of the community. I done exactly one YouTube video for a friend to show him how to configure some stuff in Gnome as he was new to Linux. Oh I think I once may have logged a bug on their issue tracker.

It seems to me that you are arguing with the wrong person. You need to direct anger elsewhere. I did find the accusations of quite hilarious. So thanks for the giggles.

> By whose judgement is the css you speak of 'broken'? Just making random code changes without a corresponding ticket is a recipe for troubles down the line. I

Obvious display issues in a mobile app on the login which is the first thing you see. Like the login not being on the page, things being misaligned (by quite a lot). Fixed in like literally 2 minutes.

This is basically due to laziness.

> If you must do unprioritised work at the bare minimum create a issue tracker ticket to provide more information than can fit in a commit message.

I create tickets for each commit I do. So people know why I have done things. These people don't do anything of the sort.

> Something like selenium is good to automate acceptance testing (with screenshotting) cross browser as well.

I can't even get these guys to write basic unit tests for React components.

There are two different worlds. There is the world where things are done more or less properly and there is the rest of us. I've heard of some places that don't even use source control, CI builds or anything that may have been novel 25 years ago.

A lot of places just don't do this. Unless there is a threat of a written warning some devs will do the bare minimum. I currently work with a guy that sometimes doesn't even run the code he checks in, I doubt he really knows how to code and everything is basically AI, management won't do anything and it the only remote job I could get. Another guy I work with won't do basic CSS fixes to things that are broken, so I cleaned up the login page for the site he is responsible for.

I think Yes Minister has some good clips on YouTube but I can't watch it for a whole episode.

I look through commit messages and try to link it up to a Jira ticket and piece it together. Often the original developer has left, or if they are still present doesn't remember why.

Most of the time I don't know why something was done a particular way .

There is so much wrong here I don't really know where to start. There is a bunch of the usual flawed assumptions on things that haven't been relevant in decades. So I am going to pick the most egregious examples.

> But the big point is, it's there. I'd rather have confusing customisation (as Xfce can be) than no customisation like GNOME.

Those gnome plugins I install and extensions I must have imagined. I am sure there will be some reason why this isn't good enough, but I can customise my desktop absolute fine.

https://extensions.gnome.org/

> Some do, yes. But I avoid dedicated GPUs for my hardware, and most of the time, I run in VMs where GPU acceleration is flakey. So I'd rather tools that don't need hardware for performance to tools that require it.

I am not sure why you wouldn't want GPU acceleration that works properly.

Your examples of VM. Gnome works fine through in a VM (I used it yesterday), Remote Desktop and even Citrix. I used Gnome in a Linux VM over RDP and Citrix 2 years at work. It worked quite well in fact, even over WAN.

I don't care about what the situation 13 years ago (I dubious it was true then btw becase I was using a CentOS 7 VM).

EDIT: I just read the article. You are complaining about enabling a bloody checkbox.

> The best-selling single model range of computers since the Commodore 64 is the Raspberry Pi range, and the bulk of the tens of millions of them they've sold have 1GB RAM -- or less. There is no way to upgrade.

I guarantee you people aren't using these 1GB models as desktops. They are using this for things like a Pi Hole, Home Assistant, 3d printer, Kodi, Retro Gaming emulators or embedded applications.

People do run KDE, Gnome and Cinnamon on the 4GB/8GB/16GB models or buy a Pi400/500.

> I always hear this. I had to sit down with a colleague pumping this BS when I worked for SUSE and step by step, function by function, prove to him that Xfce could do every single function he could come up with in KDE and GNOME put together.

I was quite obviously talking about HiDPI support. You didn't read what I said.

This stuff works properly on Gnome and not on Xfce.

> Don't care. I am 58. I can't see the difference. So I do not own any HiDPI monitors. Features that only young people with excellent eyesight can even see is is ageist junk.

I do fucking care. I use a HiDPI monitor. Fonts are rendered better. My games look better than I run on my desktop. I like it.

I am 42. I can see the difference. While I am younger. I am not that young.

Why you are bringing ageism into what is essentially more pixels on a screen I have no idea. It is baffling that you are taking exception because I want the scaling to work properly on my monitors that I purchased. BTW my monitors are over a decade old now. HiDPI is not novel.

> It is not even similar.

It is exactly what you described. I literally read what you said and compared to what I could do on my Gnome Desktop. So I can only assume that you can't actually the describe the issue properly. That isn't my issue, that is yours.

> So you are happy with it. Good for you. Can you at least understand that others hate it and have strong valid reasons for hating it and that it cripples us?

No. You literally repeated all the usual drivel that isn't true (I know because I've actually use Gnome) and complaints that are boil down to "I don't like how it works" or "the developers said something I didn't like and now I hate them forever". It is tiresome and trite, I would expect such things from someone in their early 20s, yet you are almost 60.

TBH there is a few standout really good British shows and the rest is forgotten about. A lot of humour in some of shows was really tied to the time of making and a lot of audiences won't get the joke.

If you watch Today Today or Brass Eye, unless you grew up at the time, it isn't funny. Most people under 30 won't know who any of celebrities are in the show.

I actually didn't see that era as a Golden era and actually much prefer the sketch shows in the 80s and 90s such has the Fast Show.

I don't like any Mitchell and Webb stuff and don't particularly find either of them very funny.

David Mitchell's (at least on panel shows) brand of comedy is just doing a stupid face and making sardonic/cynical remark which is often some thinly veiled political jab, that the target audience often already agrees with. That isn't comedy. It is activism. Once you can see it, you can't un-see it and I find nauseating.

As a Brit, I generally prefer American Humour when it comes to comedy. My favourite films are Happy Gilmore and Tropic Thunder. A lot of British Humour is around that everything is crap, it gets tiresome after a while.

In One Punch man the gag is that while everyone is fighting for their lives, Saitama is usually distracted by other priorities that are often trivial (such as getting some bug spray, or saving some money down the local convenience shop as they have a sale on noodles), he also rarely gets the recognised for saving the day once he does bother so show up.

I personally never liked it. All the characters were deeply unlikable and a lot of the jokes are just disgusting shock humour. When I used to live in a shared house, I always skipped it if it was on the television.

While I believe Lunduke is a dishonest actor, he is tapping into something.

There are many people in and around tech that disagree with the direction. They want to pushing back against mega corporations, government surveillance etc. They see CoC, Woke as part of that corporate/government apparatus.

You can watch someone like Sam Bent's or Mental Outlaws YouTube channel and you will start to understand that attitude.

> It's always horrible when your niche get poisoned by this rhetoric.

Tech like a lot of areas of life has been hyper politicised. The best thing you can do is not to play the game at all.

I think they are probably buying the most expensive of everything in the shop. I can get everything for about £30-40 in Aldi.

> I mean we really didn't it was a period of great productivity and a massive boost in living standards almost universally.

A huge amount of wealth was also created under Thatcher but also a huge amount of wealth inequality. Blair didn't really change anything initially and continued their policies.

Remember that period ended with the Global Financial Crisis and an large increase of deficit spending.

There is also other problems with the Blair government. There was our involvement in the war in Afghanistan/Iraq, some of the iffy terrorism legislation amongst other things.

So like with a lot of things it was a mixed bag.