163 karma · joined May 18, 2019
Ended up quitting school, working through the dotcom boom and bust and found myself in finance at various BigBank places before going back to education to do maths then comp sci. Still in finance tech these days.
Still a hacker - language agnostic. Dabble in hardware and low level stuff in my spare time. I love the library though it's not what it once was.
hner at fastmail dot com
I’m also not sure that i agree with your idea that the core principal of the internet should be in any way related to what information one might discover. The internet and the web provide means to disseminate and access information (amongst much else) but I don’t see how it should have anything to do with what you discover.
Now you’re arguing about implementation, which is different.
There’s no need, with this idea, for you to have to get your info directly from the Vatican. You can decide you trust someone different.
I presume you relate this as a critique of self-reported data rather than a critique of the paper in TFA?
It is interesting though because it’s hard to draw a line between elective stuff that should be covered vs what should not. Breast implants for cancer survivors who had mastectomy? Sure. What about people who have self image trouble? Harder to draw the line. Some people might be having serious mental anguish that diminishes health in turn.
In general i think there needs to be limits on what public healthcare pays for. I don’t know how to draw that line. It is by no means certain that a wealthy person can or should have the public purse pay for elective surgery.
It feels like you are reacting as if it’s cut and dry that since they paid in they are entitled to everything, which sort of defeats the purpose of this sort of distribution of health / wealth.
Also the wealthy should have a larger tax burden in absolute terms compared to the less well off. I say this as someone how is very fortunate - I don’t think we are taxed enough to make things sane and fair.
Now, the fact that the state is often corrupt is another problem that should also be fixed but i just don’t buy the argument that companies should run public services because they’re more efficient.
The UK is suffering badly with this. I’m old enough to remember how badly some state run things were but i still believe that it was then due to underinvestment as it is with healthcare now.
It becomes problematic, for me at least, when the thing i enjoyed becomes a sort of default mode. No longer for enjoyment, more of a reflex. Then it feels like it might be wasted.
I came to the conclusion, like you, that structure is good. Without structure it’s really hard to get started on things or feel a sense of progress.
Now if i take a long break i treat it like i used to back in college days. I have a schedule, high level goals and daily to-do lists. Those lists have productive things as well as free time or gaps of a fixed length to fill with whatever i want.
Sounds hellish when i write it out but without it I’m all about cat videos and noodling around on my guitar. Suddenly a month has passed.
Feels like infrastructure queries shouldn’t come under FOI when i first consider it. Then i suppose there might be legitimate reasons to care; Perhaps things like conflict of interest in contract allocation, or things not being put out to tender.
As you mention, it feels like publicly funded things should be able to be inspected by default, so perhaps having it out in the open all the time is best. That requires funding and it requires a commitment at a governmental level to get it right.
With the lack of funding provided to public institutions in the uk though it’s pretty hard even for the basics to be done well. I’d better not get on to that subject lest i get testy.
Back to your main point though, I don’t know how to differentiate (with a set of unambiguous rules) between the trivial and non-trivial in a way that doesn’t accidentally prevent real use cases.
Perhaps the way FOI is set up is at fault here rather than the people who make use of it, trivially or otherwise.
Perhaps you could define the boundary between trivial and non-trivial uses?
Have you had to deal with requests for information that you regard as falling on the trivial side of things?
Is there a solution to the your dislike of certain types of use?
Apologies for all the questions but your comment feels like it’s missing some genuinely interesting detail.
Your claim of selfishness seems to be unwarranted (and perhaps a little mean spirited), how can you possibly tell?
Running especially is useful for me too in this respect and I feel like you’re right about the root of the problems being how easy it is to avoid being bored.
I also wonder if deep thinking encourages us to live too much of a worry-driven internal life, and we avoid boredom for fear of overthinking.
Perhaps I should go for a run.
Continually adding on user hostile additional revenue streams, like adverts, on top of something i already paid for is one of the major drivers of piracy.
How about i pay for things I’m buying but take a pirate copy as a backup?
It’s already clear that if you make digital content available at a reasonable price people will pay for it. The thing we’re arguing about is who is stealing from whom.
Here’s a genuine dichotomy. Assuming I’m interested in the media, then I’m either buying or I’m renting. If I’m renting call it renting. If I’m buying don’t steal it from me later by hiding the fact that it’s a rental in thousands of lines of legalese.
People are still willing to pay for things, they just want a copy of the thing that they paid for so that it cannot be stolen from them later. The only answer here IS piracy.
I say this as an interrupter who has been kindly made aware that other people have yet to speak.
Stating things without evidence and saying “you find it out” is clearly in bad faith and can be dismissed as low value. That’s what happened here.
Fwiw i didn’t flag it but clearly others found the comment to be of low value too.
People would who are not prepared to make that trade off will skip you and you’ll be left with people that are.
There have been times where I’d have been ok with that trade off but would have skipped over you for not making the salary clear.
There’s also a difference in making a command to another service vs event or state notification. In the case of a command you often want to wait and find out if it went ok. Events or states published onto a queue are more of a case of “here is a thing that happened, deal with it how you wish”
With a queue you don’t need to know, and the recipients can subscribe to information on the queue themselves.
Especially useful in event-driven architectures.
Push vs pull.
They have no right to prevent you from filming them and no right to delete photos.
They can view photos under prevention of terrorism powers but may not take your equipment or delete photos unless they are going to charge you too.
https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/ph/p...
I think part of the joy (for me) used to be in the deep understanding of the hardware and making something out of what felt like nothing.
If I’m doing something with a load of libraries and feel like a plumber more than a programmer then I find that excitement hard to come by.
Playing with modern day microcontrollers, SoC stuff or building software with hard real-time requirements is still a lot of fun - i just don’t get to do it so much these days.
I guess the difference is that it tends to use the search within the site you're searching, which might be less than fantastic.