5,730 karma · joined June 14, 2018
You're eliding the why :)
> to help their runner run at a target pace
To help their runner get from the start to the end of the race faster (or indeed at all). In short: to increase performance.
Pacing isn't a neutral thing.
Q: Do Anthropic actually specify a document format?
It's a strategy to achieve more, not less.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
"The school curriculum in England is the responsibility of the Westminster Government. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for setting their own curriculum policies."
Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?
I wish we could spend less (collective) time here on HN talking about/worrying about Elon Musk.
We're (allegedly) here for "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
What SpaceX and/or Tesla are doing could certainly satisfy that, worrying about Musk himself certainly isn't.
There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else.
In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words:
“Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,” he said. “That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: ‘Goodbye, see you next year!’”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...
from the original
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-d...
A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.
"Border controls aren’t supposed to exist between EU member states – that’s the promise of the 1985 Schengen treaty. Yet today, travelers routinely face checks when crossing borders within the [European] union"
https://euobserver.com/198454/law-professor-sues-germany-for...
I'm not convinced that academic institutions are actually self-policing, it may not even be correct to assume they each act as one coherent entity. There are a lot of incentives in play which may not be obvious from the outside.
<apologies for yet another anecdote from way back when>
Many decades ago during my PhD I was in working in a chemistry lab when a colleague had an accident which caused a minor explosion, big enough to blow both of the glass side panes completely out of his fume hood.
With hindsight he was extremely lucky to have only minor injuries, he was peppered with tiny cuts from the flying glass and temporarily deaf from the bang.
I called for an ambulance, which seemed like a reasonable response.
The first prof on the scene (not our prof though!) came in and immediately asked "who phoned for the emergency services?", so I said it was me. He then gave me a bit of a telling-off, ending with him saying "and now the press will find out!" before he stormed off.
I remember thinking "wtf?! my colleague has just blown up our lab, and your top concern is that it will be in the newspapers"...
You may not wish to hear this, but real life is very much a data exercise:
I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.
Counter-example: muscle memory.
My OH has - more than once - attempted to tell me her PIN code. On more than one occasion two of the digits have been transposed. Happily I know that it's the middle two digets that get transposed... :)
Fed: "give us your PIN or else"
me: "528491"
Fed: <types 528491, presses OK>
me: "no! 528419, I meant 528419!!"
Fed: <watches phone wipe...>
It's write and/or erase cycles that cause wear.
If we're going to argue that a platform is free to make decisions, aren't its [ex-]users also free to make decisions, too?
...to be told the truth? Quite a lot.
I've been inside companies that had to right-size their teams, it's not pretty, but my goodness honesty from management is better than pretending.
I don't mean to be combative about this but
1) do you have children and 2) if yes, how many times have you taken your child to hospital with a broken bone
I have (unfortunately) got a certain amount of experience with this, and I'm not sure it works the way the uninitiated may think it does.
I bought a beer yesterday and shared it with our 16 year-old, and I shared some wine with him this evening.
How does that not come under "parental responsibility"?
(Speaking as a parent of three) why can't we just leave all responsibility to the parents? In our experience in the offline world it seems this applies!
I speak as someone who's taken each of my three children - for two of them, multiple times - to the emergency room to be treated for broken bones incurred in the course of Real Life[tm].
Yes, they play contact sports.
Yes, we use Family Link with pretty restrictive settings.
Despite the series of broken bones, I'm still in favour of kids playing sports and still dubious about the effect of screen time on young minds...
Perhaps I'm underestimating the number of pelicans(?!)
Wholesale electricity costs make up 28.7% of the bill
Carbon taxes make up 6.4%
[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
From The Atlantic: "The [UK's] output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state - and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s"[1]
According to the IEA, the UK has the highest industrial electricity prices of the 25 IEA countries reporting data.[2]
Hinkley Point C is routinely described as the most expensive nuclear power station ever built, four times the average for South Korean plants. Guaranteed pricing originally £92.50/MWh (2012 prices), now equivalent to around £133/MWh (2025 prices), inflation-linked for 35 years...[3]
HS2 is consistently ranked as the most expensive high-speed rail on the planet.[4]
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mkw3
[1] How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi - A case study in self-sabotage https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/07/uk-productivity...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68da5e91dadf7...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
It's two votes, not one; the President and the rest of the Commission are confirmed separately. In this case there was a four month gap between the two votes!
VDL was confirmed by the Parliament on 16 July 2019, by 383 votes to 327 against, with 22 abstentions[0].
Her Commission was approved by the Parliament on 27 November 2019 by 461 votes to 157 against, with 89 abstentions[1].
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190711IP...
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20191121IP...
No public hearings, no public votes, not even any public parliamentary debates(!) about different candidates for the Commission. This is indeed "the EU way", trying to find compromise via party-family bargaining ... in private.
> All lead candidates had been tried before her, but all of them failed to obtain majority support in the negotiations.
The Parliament didn't actually get to vote on any of the other candidates, did they?
I'm not sure the EU needs to worry about political capital in the way that many national and regional governments do. Power moves through negotiations between institutions, party groups, lobbyists, activists, and heads of government rather than through anything voters can trace. If one is being unkind, it's basically backroom deals all the way down. Naturally, the EU has more respectable terms for this sort of thing, like "trilogue".
Look at how the President of the European Commission got her job in 2019 - there was an election campaign in which major parties presented lead candidates for the post and she wasn't one of them, then post-election - ta da - she's nominiated for the post and there's a confirmatory vote in the Parliament on which the ballot paper had precisely one name listed - hers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48853746
https://www.alamy.com/16-july-2019-france-france-straburg-a-...
"Banned" feels like a slightly clumsy word to use to describe restrictions such as these.
Isn't this basic curation and child protection, not censorship?
Why would you need to moderate private messages between users?