seabass-labrax

This isn't even close to true. The people who are serious about privacy and the open Web, and in the technologies posited to bring that about (such as self-sovereign identity and federation), tend to spend much more money.

They buy servers to self-host services, extra hardware to store data locally and domain names to let others find them. Those who cannot afford it sometimes join niche communities like the Tildeverse as an outlet for the interest.

In my experience it's largely the 'just not interested' camp who always go for the free webmail and whatever free messaging service comes with their phone.

Make sure you absolutely have fresh entropy for all ten of your encryption layers. Re-using secrets and randomness between different encryption algorithms can leak a lot of data!

I think even 111 years is being too cautious. One only needs to look as far as the numerous vagrancy laws in England to see how a citizen might be prevented from living "where he liked and as he liked". Persecution of minorities including 'witches', Gypsies and Jews has been a continual theme. England has had banned books, even banned translations of the Holy Bible.

The Edwardian era was a very unusual period of liberality, I'll agree. But at least in that quote, Taylor is making some strange omissions that I hardly think are accidental: for a start, where is the mention of women's suffrage, introduced for the first time ever after the Great War?

> ...powers of the government to require more identification for different things is orthogonal to the idea of digital ID > That's not to say there aren't risks of course, but other European countries seem to have managed to implement these systems without becoming totalitarian police states :)

Yet also: a country's requirement for identification is orthogonal to it becoming a totalitarian police state.

In British politics, there is a strong current of opposition to international institutions and treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights[1][2] and the International Criminal Court[3]. The UK's commitment to human rights is enough in doubt that one encounters situations such as German courts being unable to extradite a suspected criminal because of the poor treatment of prisoners in Britain[4].

Countries like Germany and Belgium are able to have mandatory ID cards without too much issue because of characteristics including their written (and actively litigated) constitutions, judicial independence and proportionally representative election systems. ID cards might be make them lean more or less totalitarian - but it doesn't matter as much, as the rules about identification make up only a small part of a huge and robust framework of law and human rights.

With few constitutional protections for UK citizens, and what independent institutions there are under constant attack from various political parties, I don't think those who object to digital ID can be blamed for being suspicious of the government's motivations.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/25/tory-candid...

[2]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/21/labour-mp-eu...

[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/3/threats-and-intimida...

[4]: https://eucrim.eu/news/german-court-denies-extradition-to-uk...

Alongside the environmental disasters that the USA and the rest of the world face, there is some good news to celebrate now and then. Like this HN story, but also things like the new 'wildlife bridge'[1] over Route 101.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/worlds-largest-wildlife-bridge...

It's been a long time coming, but wild bison are being reintroduced to Britain right now:

https://www.kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/projects/wilder-blean

https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/why-rewild/reintroductio...

This is mirrored by reintroduction schemes of red kites and beavers in the UK, as well as similar projects with bison, wolves and other species on the European mainland.

That's not to mention deer, which are both wild and doing really well - partly because of the lack of wolves, ironically!

Dear esafak,

It is not entirely true that the usage has changed; I usually start my emails with this salutation, both to recipients close to me and those whom I do not know well. I address mailing lists with a simple "Dear all".

Nonetheless, this is the first time I have done so in a Hacker News post, and it shall probably be the last too.

Best wishes,

seabass

Is this actually to scale? If so, do the near-vertical moving dashed lines depict inclined lifts or escalators? Because they look very steep when you compare them to other metro escalators, such as those in the Brussels Metro's Porte de Hal / Hallepoort station[1], which seem closer to 50° from horizontal.

[1]: http://estacions.albertguillaumes.cat/img/brusselles/porte_d...

> Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.

Was this not due to the expensive clean-up effort in each case respectively? Nuclear reactors may be a lot cleaner than fossil fuels operationally, and reducing their regulation to allow them to replace fossil fuels may well be cleaner on average. But if the once-in-a-blue-moon incident requires huge amounts of money in clean-up costs, then maybe those health and safety regulations would prove themselves cheaper in the long term.

Perhaps the real question is why we do not demand such stringent health and safety standards on fossil fuels, which are operationally dirty and prone to disaster.

Unfortunately for your proposal, the crawlers for training LLMs don't have the same censorship as the AI chatbots do when communicating with the end user. The censorship of chatbots is either done by means of fine-tuning (a technique which is part of the broader category of 'alignment' processes), or having a separate model (which may or may not be an LLM) filter its output. Both of these are done only at runtime, after the LLM has already been trained - and most of the crawling comes during training.

All that's to say that you can stop some of your website contents being quoted by the chatbots verbatim, but you can't prevent the crawlers using up all your bandwidth in the way you describe. You also can't stop your website contents being rehashed in a conceptual way by the chatbot later. So if I just write something copyrighted or taboo here in this comment, that won't stop an LLM being trained on the comment as a whole, but it might stop the chatbot based on that LLM from quoting it directly.

Everything is moving so quickly with AI that my comment is probably out of date the moment I type it... take it with a grain of salt :)

Gregg chose not to undergo surgery:

> This is major life-changing surgery with a long and difficult "recovery". I have elected not to do this, due to existing co-morbidities from my sorted past and the expectation that the recovery would exceed my lifespan, which I'd rather keep as normal as possible.

I wish I'd known about that post before he died; I'd have sent him my best regards personally rather than just saying nice things about him online now :(

Full disclosure: I haven't read the book myself. Logically, however, expressing regrets does not say anything about whether a specific course of action is better. By definition, one can only regret living one's life in a certain way if one actually did - so perhaps a high incidence of people regretting "working too hard" is simply indicative of working a lot being the most common experience, rather than any special reason why a life spent working should be regrettable.

And back to Gregg - he's personally been an inspiration to me. Who would I be to question his life choices, but I for one am grateful for the path he did choose to take.

The primacy of European Union law applies to member states of the European Union. That is part of what the countries agreed to in order to become a member state. Some countries negotiated opt-outs for specific laws that they felt shouldn't apply to them before joining - and disgruntled member states could attempt the same by threatening to leave.

The only way that the European Union can 'force' compliance of a member state is for the EU Commission (or, exceptionally, the Parliament and Council) to withhold EU funds from that member state. Those funds were never the property of the member state in the first place though - again, no infringement on national sovereignty.

That is factually untrue. While governments of member states of the EU no longer have a direct veto against proposed EU legislation in many cases, the EU does not claim any sovereignty over member states.

If a member state fails to block a proposal, all that simply means is that the qualified majority[1] of representatives of other member states believes the legislation to be so important that the union would not work without it. Dissenting member states can seek to reverse or temper the legislation later, or simply leave the union - see Brexit. No sovereignty is violated at any point.

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

> I think narcotics destroy the fabric of society. But the only realistic way to combat it is Singapore-style death penalties for possession exceeding certain amounts. HN's libertarian crowd may dislike this, but it's how Singapore has become one of the world's wealthiest countries by gdppc without a pronounced drug problem.

(not OP) I'm no libertarian, but there's another way... monitored legalization! Admittedly, the locations of legalization success stories haven't generally had to contend with fentanyl. But I'm also not convinced by the argument that we should hang anyone with drugs on them. The fact that Singapore continues to execute prisoners shows that the fabric of Singaporean society is still being destroyed by drugs, or alternatively that the fabric of society is damaged enough by other causes that people are being driven to deal in drugs.

As someone living in a country where executions are illegal, I do not wish to see the impact of substance abuse exploited to justify the reintroduction of a practice that many of my fellow citizens consider barbaric.

Some of the points you make are still true, but I think you're a little out of date.

Migration is not solved, but it also doesn't suck - unless you're doing it every week nothing will break, and several people I follow have already done it and it's been just fine.

Stability is also fine - if your server is down for a couple of hours, your timeline will catch up when it comes back online, and likewise your sent posts will stay in a local outbox until they can be sent. That's absolutely no different from email or Jabber or anything else.

"Fedi" is compatible enough that I run my own GoToSocial server, which is technically still beta software, and I haven't experienced any issues following and interacting with anyone on Mastodon, Pixelfed, Pleroma and quite a few other platforms.

Would I recommend it to a non-technical user, someone who wasn't really interested in 'servers' and 'clients' and 'protocols'? Yes, although I'd suggest they just go for The Big One, as you put it. What I would say though is that this is no longer just a technology for Web nerds any longer; it's a very viable alternative to centralized platforms.

I wouldn't personally trust the Economist with this kind of thing, at least not compared to publications by technically-minded experts that have been shared elsewhere on this thread, such as the Register. The phone-snatching is real, but the effectiveness of this theft in creating usable spare parts, or of the efficacy Apple's software in reducing said theft, is much harder to determine.

They had to take the cumulative risk of getting caught though - one well-targeted burglary to take a designer handbag or diamond necklace would earn that thief as much as the indiscriminate 'stealing nwallin's gym clothes' thief would make in a year, as long as they had the network to sell the contraband on without incriminating themselves.

That's would certainly be an awesome game, but did you know that your "Solar Mayhem" concept already exists? Children of a Dead Earth - it's probably a bit more austere by virtue of limiting itself to only somewhat-plausibly realistic weapons, mind you.

https://childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/

Good point! Wasn't the Sony PlayStation significant for being the first console to ship with a C API from the manufacturer, or am I misremembering? I always thought that Net Yaroze sounded fantastic but never ended up getting one.

Oh, and another question on that topic: did you ever write self-modifying code for games, or had that already gone out by 2000?

The article you link to is about radio navigation based on ground stations. The USA would have required at least an island near the Japanese mainland on which to establish such a ground station, or perhaps a ship if it could maintain an accurate position based on traditional methods.

Even then, I don't think it would be correct to say that the Americans had no other capabilities for targeted attacks. With air superiority you can do strafing at relatively low risk, which is very accurate. And the USA had also developed rockets by this point, which could drastically improve accuracy when compared to unpropelled bombs. They even used these operationally against Japan before the atomic bomb attacks.

Maybe the Americans were still remembering the first World War, in which the Germans already had low morale by the time the USA joined the conflict. The USA joined in the thick of WWII when the Germans/Axis were doing considerably better. A prevailing (but ahistorical) view among Germans after WWI was that they had surrendered prematurely in 1918, so that might have also led to a cultural disdain towards surrender.

Wow, I didn't know that. I always assumed that there was only one Transit van. It looks like both the American models and the European models were sold in the UK, with the European models being significantly smaller; is that right?

I'm not sure - I certainly see a lot of Vauxhall/Opel cars about, and Ford Transit vans are pretty universal. Caterpillar vehicles are hard not to see on construction sites in Europe. The only sector where American brands seem to have absolutely no market penetration at all is that of heavy trucks, to the extent that I have never seen one except at vehicle shows.

That story is not representative of the American aerospace industry as a whole, though. Lockheed were producing among the highest-quality airframes in the world at that point.

The British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) were desperate for new aircraft after the war. They would have bought Lockheed Constellations if they hadn't been pressured into rescuing the British aircraft manufacturing companies from financial obliteration, which had of course narrowly avoided direct obliteration from German bombing. Instead of buying new American aircraft, they converted British bombers like the Avro Lancaster into sub-par airliners and eventually brought the Bristol Britannia into service, which was a fine aircraft, just ten years too late.

The de Havilland Comet eventually made BOAC and British engineering competitive internationally again, but I think it would be improper to not give credit to American workers and designers for being the first to create such advanced aircraft as the Constellation which really did keep the Allied war effort going behind the scenes.

As for the Germans, they had rockets and all kinds of incredible experimental aircraft, but nothing quite like the USA when it came to high-altitude air freight.

The hardware graphics acceleration stack is heavily shader-based now, so there's less and less graphics code being written in systems languages like C. In a way, people are still writing their own graphics engines, it's just for such a different platform from the unusual Turing-computer CPUs that all the old techniques go out of the window.

Nothing stopping you from writing it the old fashioned way though - you can just keep generating a single screen texture in the CPU and let the GPU idle!

I'd really highly recommend the Uncle Albert series of novels by Russell Stannard:

https://booksforkeeps.co.uk/article/visiting-uncle-albert/

The intuition you can develop about special and general relativity from these books is pretty amazing!

Unfortunately, I suspect that any starship that could bring with it all of those services would also bring with it the economic and political strife of Earth. The are lots of examples of democratic states turning into oligarchies or worse in recent history so that can't work in it's current form at least.

The closest analogue in the real world to the ideal that you describe is, I think, Cuba. It does guarantee food and housing, and it does have a remarkably advanced healthcare system plus what is reportedly a united community. Perhaps most interesting of all, it's politically isolated like a starship would have to be by its nature. Even then, one would have to be either pretty brave or desperate to go along on the journey, as modern Cuba has only been around for half a century and that's at the absolute minimum of an intergalactic starship's practical mission duration.

I'm no sociologist, but a pet theory of mine is that lots of people have realized that one doesn't necessarily need to listen to others in order to achieve one's goals. For instance, in the past you could write a letter of complaint to a company and have a reasonable chance of getting a personal response, but it can be difficult to even find any contact information now, and any response is likely to come from a script. Companies know they can ignore complaints and pretty much carry on as before. I don't suppose one always liked the personal response but it surely feels better to be listened to.

People who want to discuss things in good faith (which presumably includes you and I) and achieve consensus get bogged down in long and complicated discussions while those who have selfish motivations just do whatever they want largely without any cost. The overlap between people who are 'well-meaning' and 'successful' shrinks, leaving the well-meaning people angry and bitter - not generally at each other, but still sometimes unfortunately.

There is a component that is directly paid to the card schemes such as MasterCard and VISA. See this page from Barclays[1], for example:

> Interchange: the fee we pay to the card issuer, i.e. your customers’ banks > Scheme fee: the fees we pay to the schemes, i.e. Visa or Mastercard

> Visa Consumer Debit > Interchange fees 0.1% to 0.2% or 0.02€ > Scheme fees 0.0082€ + 0.11% to 0.312%

Obviously all the large payment card schemes have investors and subsidiary legal entities all around the world, and not all of the card schemes are from the USA. However I think it's fairly clear that at least 1/1000th of total card transactions everywhere in the world ends up flowing into the USA eventually, and that's without accounting for licensing and accreditation fees for the technology underpinning the system, also mainly from the USA.

I'm not surprised that European politicians would like to get hold of that money for domestic purposes by promoting Wero, and no doubt if political/propaganda gains can be made by presenting this as patriotic, at least some will try.

[1]: https://www.barclaycard.co.uk/content/dam/barclaycard/docume...