dtf

> European politicians have been attacking the AZ vaccine because it originates from the UK and they are ideologically blinded by hatred of Brexit.

There was a good piece in the Irish Times this weekend if you fancy a less UK-centric view on this. The view you've expressed above seems to be the only one I read among the British press/commentariat. Perhaps it is the UK that is blinded?

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/brexit-blinds-britain-to-...

"The Oxford/AstraZeneca team managed an extraordinary feat – producing a safe and effective vaccine against a novel coronavirus within a few months. Yet time and again, AstraZeneca has undermined its own efforts with communication blunders, a lack of transparency and a consistent record of overestimating its own capacity to deliver."

Well say goodbye to EU data adequacy. Although to be honest it probably wouldn’t have survived the first court case given the UK state’s addiction to snooping.

Yet, it seemed that the guidance the PM mentioned wasn't online at the moment that he mentioned it.

Like many, I was hitting F5 repeatedly on this page waiting for a document that didn't seem to be there, eager to know restrictions on various aspects of life. But the /coronavirus page just contained stale advice from December.

Eventually at 8:15pm, somebody found a link to a PDF of the new guidance and posted it on Twitter:

"This has all been done with such crashing urgency that they haven’t even been able to transpose the PDF version of the guidance into the website yet, it is here:"

https://twitter.com/AdamWagner1/status/1346188409300258816

[this is how it played out for me at least, did anyone else see this differently?]

There's a record & tuple proposal that would address this use case (currently served by tools such as Immer):

  const foo = #{};
  foo = 42; //not allowed
  foo.bar = 'baz'; //not allowed

https://2ality.com/2020/05/records-tuples-first-look.html

Consider the word "berk" - a fairly mild sounding insult that's a bit like "jerk" - but which actually implies something rather stronger.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/berk

I can't get it to work, packages upgrades show this error. Any ideas?

  error: failed retrieving file 'XXX' from cloudflaremirrors.com : HTTP server doesn't seem to support byte ranges. Cannot resume.

Is “GROUP BY 2” a shorthand for “GROUP BY itemId”, the second column in the FROM SELECT? Not sure I’ve seen that syntax before.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, this regulatory phenomenon is known as the "Brussels Effect" [1,2] (after a similar phenomenon in the US called the California Effect).

Some have suggested that it could make the UK's desire to set its own regulatory standards after leaving the EU rather an uphill struggle. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-the-bruss...

[3] https://www.ft.com/content/7059dbf8-a82a-11e7-ab66-21cc87a2e...

It’s completely free for the casual user who just wants to mess around, as long as they don’t use it for commercial work. Almost all features supported, except external renderers and certain geometry exports.

There are some great free tutorials here: https://entagma.com/

They added fact-checks to two of Lijian Zhao’s tweets yesterday. Not sure if that counts as a crackdown, but it’s a high level account.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52833063

For instance, you might want to update a large subset of rows via WHERE id IN (?,?,?,...) instead of WHERE id IN (SELECT ...)

While reading the documentation for iff(), I noticed the command line function edit(), which is pretty cool.

  UPDATE docs SET body=edit(body) WHERE name='report-15';
  UPDATE pics SET img=edit(img,'gimp') WHERE id='pic-1542';

Looks like an array of lines, which is a completely reasonable structure to use.

There's a good post on the Visual Studio Code blog about why and when they moved on from an array of lines to a new structure based on a piece table.

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...

Interesting... could that mean the focus of the NHSX app is the central authorities "assessing the network" to develop epidemiological models, rather than providing a notification service to users that doesn't give out false positives?

There's fear of people trolling this service by maliciously marking themselves positive, potentially forcing others to self-isolate repeatedly, perhaps without pay.

I'd heard another interesting angle to this - that the Google/Apple notification scheme is decentralized, but users can only test C-19 positive via a central authority. Meanwhile the NHSX notification scheme is centralized, but users can self-identify as C-19 positive.

Can anyone confirm this?

The FT reported yesterday [1], that NHSX had contracted Zuhlke Engineering to develop a “two week timeboxed technical spike” (deadline mid-May) to “investigate the complexity, performance and feasibility of implementing native Apple and Google contact tracing APIs within the existing proximity mobile application and platform”.

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/d44beb06-5e3e-434f-a3a0-f806ce065...

The Mapzen elevation tilesets are on S3:

https://www.mapzen.com/blog/terrain-tile-service/

https://registry.opendata.aws/terrain-tiles/

As far as I know it was a genuinely grassroots initiative, started by Dutch Londoner, after a similar phenomenon in the Netherlands (which I think followed from Italy).

https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/i-feel-like-a-proper-londoner-n...

Interesting they’re talking about colocating it in EEA countries. I see the rationale for Iceland and Norway, but why specify them as EEA? Is there a post-Brexit strategic angle to this? (considering the large sum of public money involved)

Fair point. Looks like I read the wrong newspapers!

Anyway... BREAKING: this particular ex-model's just had her laptop stolen while she was in the UK... containing 6 years of emails, documents, photos and personal who-knows-what from the time when she was reportedly giving technology lessons to our now Prime Minister.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7522877/Jennifer-Ar...

This is just silly. The last thing anyone would know about Arcuri is that she was very briefly a model. It would be like searching for info about (UK supreme court president) Lady Hale by Googling “barmaid”.

Try instead searching for “Boris Johnson technology lessons”, or indeed “Boris Johnson thigh”. Has his team SEO’d that yet?

Welcome to #FBPE Twitter.

The article is an excerpt from a book on Sydney Gottlieb, which is linked at the bottom. It’s one chapter, not a summary.

The quote is from a serving member of police staff. Should be easy to verify.

https://twitter.com/redshaw27

There are further cases mentioned in the article from other police forces.

- South Yorkshire Police used it to find a 65-year-old man who became trapped after falling down a railway embankment in Sheffield.

- North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service found a woman who had crashed her car but was unsure where she was.

- Humberside Police were able to quickly resolve a hostage situation after the victim was able to tell officers exactly where she was being held.

If these are all completely made up, and have made it past the BBC, then I'm rather surprised.

EDIT: I think this must be the incident: https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-new...

(The report mentions a substantial search, and in particular commends the actions of good doggo PD Logan: https://twitter.com/HPDogSection/status/1103713458334416896)

I agree with these points, and yet:

"Humberside Police also used the system to find a group of foreign nationals, including a pregnant woman in labour, who were trapped inside a shipping container at a port.

The port had over 20,000 containers and we knew that we needed to get to them quickly," said the force's control room supervisor Paul Redshaw.

The group were told to download the app and they were soon found.

There is no doubt in my mind that these incidents could have had very different outcomes had we not been able to use what3words," Mr Redshaw said."

The emergency services see something very useful here. Is there a better way to do it? Lat/Lon numbers just don't cut it.

Do you run Windows without Pagefile/Swapfile?

Sorry you’re getting downvoted! It’s amazing how far behind the tools in your industry are, despite Python being the standard tooling language. Proprietary tools are the worst offenders (compared with Blender has been Python 3 only since version 2.5)

For anyone interested, this is the VFX industry reference platform, which is finally hoping to move to Python 3 next year: https://vfxplatform.com/

  - poke faces (Alt-p) doesn't exist

It's in the Face menu, so either select the 'Face' menu dropdown from the viewport header menus, or press Ctrl-F, or press W (context menu) while you have some faces selected.

You can also just right click on the "Poke Faces" menu item, click "Assign Shortcut" and press Alt-P.

  - the selection behaviour (A doesn't seem to deselect any more)

Alt-A clears the selection.

  - shift-G doesn't work

Shift-G does grouped selections, I think this is the same as in 2.79.

  - W doesn't open a menu any more.

The specials menu has gone, replaced by a context-sensitive menu (what a right click might pop up in most apps) So "Poke Faces" is here when faces are selected.

  - Shift-tab doesn't change vertex/face/line selection mode any more.

Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, Ctrl-3.

"The tool panel lost its words, it's now just icons. Functionality has to be discovered by hovering. This is the worst UX habit from mobile, I wish it would stay out of my desktop tooling."

One more thing on this - hit Shift-Space to show the available tool icons with labels as a context menu.

If you prefer this (I do), you can then hide the icons on the left via View > Toolbar (or equivalently, toggle via the T key).

Some ways to merge vertices by distance (aka "remove doubles"), in edit mode:

1) Mesh > Clean Up > Merge by Distance

2) F3 operator search. Start typing "mer..." and hit Enter.

3) Ctrl-V to show vertex menu, then Merge Vertices > By Distance

4) The quickest: Alt-M + B (show vertex merge menu, B to select "By Distance")

I scratched my head a bit first too, but frankly "merge vertices by distance" is far more descriptive than "remove doubles".

The UI that pops up is just the operator parameters that used to appear when you hit F6 (eg try adding a Circle, see the parameters that pop up) It's better this is visible to users, rather than hidden behind some secret hotkey. As with previous Blender versions, operators are "applied" by default - you can change the parameters via the UI until you like the result. Once you switch operator, move on, or change mode, the UI will disappear and the operation becomes undoable.

To make objects visible/selectable/renderable etc... open the filter menu on the Outliner (top right, looks like a funnel). This lets you add more toggles to the items.

To move the view/selection/snap settings to the bottom just right click, Header > Flip to Bottom/Top.

Collections replace layers and groups (eg you can instance a Collection), though I haven't completely got my head round them yet. But they look quite powerful.