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cbeach

1,004 karma · joined July 19, 2012

My projects:

    https://www.caption.me

    https://newsavista.com

    https://stackography.com
submissionscomments
cbeach··on EFF is leaving X
Their posts on X are getting multiple millions of views. Yes, that has declined, but I need to see whether their viewership on Facebook has declined similarly before I can pass judgement on X.

People don’t use social media in the same way they did ten years ago.

And in any case, they’re still getting massive viewership on X by most people’s standards, surely?

I’m not convinced “X is declining” is a good faith argument here.

cbeach··on Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
I’m sure I could rig up my own email server with replication and all sorts. I recall doing this many years ago, running SpamAssasin etc.

Turns out the quality of things like self hosted spam filtering is no match for the world’s most notorious data ingestion and analysis company

cbeach··on Tesla reportedly developing new smaller, cheaper EV after killing Model 2
Your comment has more than a whiff of “never driven a Tesla”
cbeach··on Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
I use Gmail with my own domain (you have to pay for the privilege but Google Workspace has been very reliable and flexible for my purposes)

I'd rather use Google's web storage than my own. I don't have the time nor the expertise to implement multi-region replication etc.

I understand that granting Google access to one's emails might be a dealbreaker for journalists, dissidents etc, though - so clearly Gmail is no good if you have legitimate need for PGP.

cbeach··on US carmakers say proposed EU rules could block large pickup trucks from Europe
If we cared about reducing road casualties, then objectively speaking, we should ban bikes. Roads are designed for cars (people in protective metal boxes with hundreds of sophisticated safety features).

Roads were never intended for people on flimsy two wheeled contraptions with nothing more than a polystyrene cap to protect them.

cbeach··on Say No to Palantir in Europe
I'm not defending civilian harm. I'm defending the sovereign rights of a country to defend its civilians from warmongering neighbours.

Gaza doesn't get a free pass to fire rockets at Israeli towns, invade it, and massacre thousands of its civilians on the basis that Gaza's population is allegedly 50% children.

In your world view, at what point would Israel be entitled to fight back against Gaza? How many Nova Festivals before Israel is allowed to defend itself?

And what is Israel allowed to do, bearing in mind Gaza's government urges its civilians to "bare their chests" to Israel (i.e. act as human shields), and Gaza bases military assets in schools and hospitals (well documented)?

I'm interested to know which of my arguments has been "debunked"?

cbeach··on Say No to Palantir in Europe
Gaza lost a war it started. The civilian casualties could have been avoided if it hadn't started the war.

Iran is losing a war it started (by attacking Israel with hundreds of missiles, attacking civilian shipping, sponsoring terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis who commit regular attrocities).

These wars are "total wars." Total war is the only option left to Israel and its allies, because as long as Hamas and the Ayatollah regime exists (with their written and well-documented aim to "annihilate" Israel and Jews), then Israeli civilians face an existential threat. The last remaining Jewish nation faces an existential threat. This is a direct consequence of the rabid anti-semitism that's inbuilt into Islamist regimes.

You are not happy for Israel to win its total wars.

Were you happy for the allies to win WW2? From my PoV, 70K UK civilians lost their lives, vs 2M German civilians. The civilian death toll was massively one-sided. But it was Germany that started a total war, and I hope you and I can agree that it was Germany (with its genocidal anti-semitism among other appalling characteristics) that deserved to lose the war.

cbeach··on Say No to Palantir in Europe
Thank you for being honest about where you get your news from (the links at the bottom of the post). This helps explain your worldview.

(non affiliated - not an advert) I would recommend trying Ground News, which helped me understand the biases within sources, and helped showed me the blindspots in news coverage that I'd missed.

I'd like you to cast your mind back to the acts that started these two horrendous wars - Gaza's genocidal invasion of Israeli towns where they massacred teenagers at a music festival, paraded raped women through the streets of Gaza to the cheers of onlookers, and forced young people to watch as their parents and siblings were blown up with hand grenades.

This isn't hyperbole. This isn't a politicised Western interpretation (a la "truthout.org") - this is an account of the videos shared by Hamas themselves, which were shown to Western journalists.

Hamas had to be stopped by force, and I support Israel's right to defend its own existence. If Hamas wishes to use human shields (as it has outright admitted it does), then the tragic collateral civilian deaths are the responsibility of Hamas.

And in Iran, the systematic rape and torture of young people and LGBT people. The massacre of 30,000+ peaceful protesters. And the outright genocidal intent of its leadership ("Death to America, Death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews").

The Ayatollahs had to be stopped before they built nuclear weapons. There will be tragic collateral civilian deaths, but fewer in the long term than if the IRGC are allowed to continue roaming the streets unchecked.

cbeach··on End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance
Like in any market, housing prices are set by the levels of both supply AND demand.

Supply has increased steadily, approx +200K dwellings per year.

Demand has increased -dramatically- primarily due to mass migration (net +944K people in year ending March 2023).

95% of additional households had a foreign-born Household Reference Person between the years 2010 and 2014. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/62910/html/

cbeach··on Say No to Palantir in Europe
> Optimal for society? Optimal for the Epstein class? Or do you mean optimal for the owner

No. Optimal for employees and customers, which is, in turn, optimal for society.

Making technology choices based on political ideology rather than merit is bad for the interests of both employees and customers.

The hyperbolic statements in your comment suggest your worldview comes from an online echo chamber. With respect, I think you'd benefit from consuming news from a variety of different sources. Think critically about the biases and agendas of the media.

I suspect none of your favourite media sources mentioned the illegal cluster munitions that Iran used to destroy an Israeli kindergarten (among other civilian buildings) on Saturday: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-us-israel-war-updates-...

War is an ugly business. Outcomes are rarely so pure that we can single out "good guys" and "bad guys". But hopefully once you've examined the facts objectively you'll see that the Israeli government is more ethical than Hamas, and you'll see that the American government (yes, even Orange Man Bad) is better than the Ayatollahs of Iran and their IRGC.

cbeach··on Say No to Palantir in Europe
I love seeing companies set meritocracy aside for partisan political posturing.

All people who run companies should relish their competition behaving sub-optimally.

cbeach··on Treason in the Futures Markets
I wander if the scale of this alleged insider trading will come close to the systematic insider trading that occurred under the Biden term and gave rise to the PELOSI Act?
cbeach··on End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance
Have you ever stopped to wonder why ~26% of the electorate might be angry though? Personally I don't like seeing 100,000+ undocumented young men of fighting age rock up in dinghys on the Kent coastline and get free hotels, food, phones and ultimately housing.

Housing is in short supply and the sight of it being reserved for unemployed economic migrants is making me pretty angry.

cbeach··on End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance
In 2016 the UK demonstrated that there is a way for the public to vote down the corpus of bad EU legislation.

Of course our national govts have been pretty woeful ever since, but in 2029 we will have the opportunity to vote for genuine, dramatic change, with strong options on both the left and right side of politics.

Regarding the creeping surveillance state, Reform UK have explicitly stated they will repeal the awful Online Safety Act.

This is how we wrestle control back from the establishment.

cbeach··on The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos
Not true. In the UK, the only party that would repeal the heinous “Online Safety Act” are Reform UK, which is headed by notorious Euroskeptic MP Nigel Farage.
cbeach··on The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos
They won’t need to enforce this rigorously. They’ll just need to show some scary examples of people being arrested or having computers seized for using illegal forms of encryption. The mainstream media will go along with the EU, demonising these dangerous individuals, who must have been up to something nefarious if they were using technologies sanctioned by the EU
cbeach··on Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars
My 2016 Model S LCD panel developed the well-known fault of delamination and leaking some kind of sticky fluid.

Turns out the early Model S vehicles used consumer grade LCD panels that weren’t designed for the prolonged high heat you get in a metal and glass box left outside in the sun all day.

Tesla since upgraded their vehicle screens to proper automotive-grade LCDs which are excellent.

My point is, automotive-grade hardware is higher spec than regular consumer computer hardware, hence the high prices.

As an aside, I upgraded my whole computer and screen from MCU1 to MCU2 and it was worth the upgrade.

Credit to Tesla for building a retrofit computer upgrade for old vehicles. Thats a non-trivial thing to engineer and I appreciate their effort. Other car manufacturers would prefer you were compelled to buy their latest vehicle instead.

cbeach··on Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
> No, you can do things that benefit you electorally, but are also just the right thing to do. Changing the voting system from FPTP would obviously benefit parties other than the major ones, but that doesn't mean it'd be wrong for those parties to do it if they got into power

You're reinforcing my point.

Minor parties (who might collectively be popular with the electorate) will never be able to change the voting methodology to their advantage because FPTP keeps the incumbents in place, and only the incumbents have the power to choose the voting system. So democracy suffers and the incumbents benefit.

Similarly, in this case, allowing children to vote helps the incumbents stay in place despite their party, and their leader being deeply unpopular with the electorate overall. So democracy suffers and the incumbents benefit.

cbeach··on I don't use LLMs for programming
This is a fair argument but it’s rapidly becoming a non-argument.

LLMs have come a long way since ChatGPT 4.

The idea that they’ll always value quick answers, and always be prone to hallucination seems short-sighted, given how much the technology has advanced.

I’ve seen Claude do iterative problem solving, spot bad architectural patterns in human written code, and solve very complex challenges across multiple services.

All of this capability emerging from a company (Anthropic) that’s just five years old. Imagine what Claude will be capable of in 2030.

cbeach··on I don't use LLMs for programming
If you use plan mode, parallel agents and voice dictation, LLM-powered development becomes much faster and more powerful.
cbeach··on I don't use LLMs for programming
Claude has helped me learn that the thing I enjoyed was actually delivering good software, as opposed to crafting syntax.
cbeach··on Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
> There is no reasonable definition of "the Left" that includes the British Labour party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)

> Labour, is one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Conservative Party. It sits on the centre-left of the left–right political spectrum

cbeach··on Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
> 16 year olds can leave home, marry, join the army, and so on. Why should they not vote?

That's a separate argument.

My point is Labour's change to the rules is very politically convenient for themselves. In the most recent polling, 32% of 16-17-year-olds would vote Labour, while only 17% of the overall electorate would vote Labour.

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

> They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.

They allowed individual incumbent councillors to choose whether elections were cancelled. This was politically convenient for the Labour and Tory parties because the Reform Party is new, and while it's polling well ahead of Labour, it doesn't have many incumbent council seats.

When a court challenge loomed, Labour quickly u-turned on the latest round of cancellations. Funny how something can seem sensible one day, and can then be u-turned at the slightest whiff of legal scrutiny.

> They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.

Can you name a single Conservative hereditary peer that will be given a lifetime peerage in Starmer's reform plan?

cbeach··on Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
Removal of hereditary privilege is a good thing in principle.

However, given the Labour party just gave children the vote, cancelled local elections in conservative-leaning areas, and now they're removing the (traditionally conservative-leaning) hereditary peers, it's starting to feel a lot like the Left are gerrymandering our democracy.

cbeach··on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
Even if all the solar panels in the world were recycled, you’ve barely scratched the surface of the points I made.
cbeach··on Global warming has accelerated significantly
> They're poor.

China is a nuclear-armed superpower with the largest Navy in the World.

> The developed world's past and current actions have done and continue to do harm. Work on that. If you want to push India and China to go faster, lobby your politicians to tariff high carbon emitters and subsidize developing countries' rollout of clean energy. To be clear it has to be both. That's all you can do about emissions outside your country.

That's all we can do, is it?

I don't think so!

It is through deliberate Western actions and inactions that we have allowed our own production capacity to be replaced by production capacity in China, a country that cares little for human rights, workers rights and environmental standards.

It is through decisive economic action, like America's tarrifs that we can quickly bring production capacity back to the West. This is already happening at pace, with huge inward investment in American factories, which will use cutting edge automation and will create many, many jobs.

Not only is this a vital geo political win (consider China's aggression towards Hong Kong, Taiwan and its neighbours in the South China Sea), but it is also a win for the working classes in the West, who have seen their opportunities torn up by globalist leaders in the West.

cbeach··on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
By all means, calculate an arbitrary uplift on the price based on your own definitions of externalities.

But don't expect me to take you seriously when you directly compare a raw price of renewable energy with an uplifted price of fossil fuels.

Especially when your quoted price for renewable energy ignores the cost of grid upgrades, storage infrastructure, and externalities associated with mining materials to manufactur solar panels and wind turbines etc (as happened recently in UK parliament when the energy minister did a very dubious comparison between energy prices)

cbeach··on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
For Ireland, it's not so much the sourcing of fossil fuels, but the imposition of political taxes on fossil fuels onto consumers.

About 50% of the retail price of petrol in Ireland is tax (excise + carbon + VAT).

Overall fuel taxation in Ireland is ~50%, compared to 15-20% in the US. Although to be fair, most of Europe is doing the same thing to its population (during a cost of living crisis).

cbeach··on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
Their comment is talking about a wider context than this single coal power station.

In the UK, Net Zero politics means we are killing our own North Sea fossil fuel extraction, only to purchase North Sea fossil fuel from Norway, at an increased environmental (and financial) cost.

That's the kind of political lunacy the OP is aluding to.

cbeach··on Global warming has accelerated significantly
If you understand the trends over the last decade, and the projections of the next decade, you'll understand why the actions of China and India will have significantly more impact than the actions of the West.

That's why for those of us that truly care about the environment (as opposed to politics), are focussing on what we can do about China and India, as opposed to pointlessly self-flagellating about the last 100 years.

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