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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • This completely ignores why local authorities became more centralised and the Scottish Parliament limited their remit. Corruption.

    Local councils have terrible oversight and accountability. People don’t follow the developments in their local council, so their votes largely don’t reflect them. Larger councils are easier to oversee and more accountable to voters.

    The centralisation efforts has also made services more consistent and more affordable. Most of the UK has seen a reduction in the services delivered by local authorities. This hasn’t been as much of a problem in Scotland because centralisation helps to cap costs. In England local authorities struggle to build as many homes and they have many schools no longer under their control.

    The idea that local people should be involved in local decisions whilst an admirable idea, is practically very difficult with small local authorities. The elected members become less capable, easier to corrupt and less accountable. When only 500 people turn out to vote for you, no one even knows what you stand for or what your previous record has been. They are voting for the rosette. The end result is local affairs are regulated by the parish council tyrant. People with fuck all else to do and fuck all care about their impact on their community. Typically the local nutter that dodging the care home they should be confined to.




  • Nixos is an os that’s defined by its config stored in .nix files. Everything is defined here all the software and configurations. Two people with the same script will have the exact same os.

    Any changes you make that aren’t in the scripts won’t be present when you reboot.

    You could maintain a very custom linux distribution (kinda) by just maintaining these config scripts.

    So a user wouldn’t need to install all required software and dependencies. They could get a nixos and the self-host config and adjust some settings and have a working system straight after install.





  • I think they are suggesting this man developed bird flu with no evidence of interaction between animals. Suggesting a person with bird flu gave him this strain of bird flu.

    The big concern with bird flu is that transmission between humans becomes viable. Then it can spread. When it’s confined to birds, only humans that work in chicken farms are going to catch it. When it can spread between humans then we are at risk of a pandemic.

    This just raises the alarm that human transmission of bird flu could be happening. Because they haven’t ruled it out yet.



  • The risk reward of doing that isn’t great. Ukraine is unlikely to end the war sooner using the current western weapons against long range targets in Russia. They will need a recurring supply. If they blatantly ignore the terms of the weapons they have already received then they won’t get anymore.

    Best case scenario, Ukraine gets the go ahead and we hear about it after they start using them. But Ukraine won’t use them without permission, it’s too risky. If (hopefully when) they get permission it will be alongside a large delivery of these weapons.



  • The UK is Europe. Always has been, always will. Shifts in tectonic plates would have to happen to change this.

    Cats have been in the UK for far longer than the Americas were colonised. The UK doesn’t have much of a natural ecosystem to protect in the same way the Americas still have. Despite that small cats have always been part of the ecosystem in the UK. We have wild cats, they are one of the last predators that aren’t pests we have in the wild. Our lack of predators is a problem, to the point people want to reintroduce wolfs.

    So your wrong on both accounts. Letting cats outdoors is fine in the UK. Some animal shelters won’t let people adopt cats if they live in a flat and can’t let the cat outside.

    Cats even have right to roam protections that are greater than most people in the UK have. Cats can’t trespass, so you can’t take action against them on your property.

    The biggest threat to the local ecosystem they pose is breeding with wild cats. But is always recommend to neuter outdoor pets. Most birds here have always had the threat of small predators, and most of the birds are domestic breeds of pigeons that are pests.


  • An undeterministic system is dangerous. A deterministic with flaws can be better, the flaws can be identified understood and corrected. The flaws are more likely to be present in testing.

    Machine learning is nearly always going to be undeterministic. If they then use continuous training, the situation only gets worse.

    If you use machine learning because you can’t understand how to solve the problem, then you’ll never understand how the system works. You’ll never be able to pass a basic inspection test.





  • Yeah. I think they will struggle to match apple. By the time they do apple will have progressed further.

    Another big issue, is these features need deep and well implemented software. This is really easy for apple, they control all the hardware and software. They write all the drivers and can modify their kernel to their hearts content. A better processor is still unlikely to match apples overall performance. Intel have to support more operating systems and interface with more hardware of which they have little control over. It won’t be until years after release that these processors even realistically reach their potential. By which time intel and apple with both have newer releasesed chips with more features, that intel users won’t be able to use for a while.

    This strategy has intel on the back foot and they will remain their indefinitely. They really need a bolder strategy if they want to reclaim best desktop processors. It’s pretty embarrassing apple laptop and integrated GPU completely wipe the floor of intel desktop cpus with dedicated gpus in certain workflows, it can often be the cheaper option to buy the apple device if your in a creative profession.

    Qualcomm will have similar issues, but they won’t be limited to inferior x86 architecture. x86 only serves backwards compatibility and intel/amd. Arm is used on phones because with the same fab and power restrictions it makes better processors. This has been know for a long time, but consumers would accept this till apple proved it.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if these intel chips flop initially, intel cuts their losses and stops developing new ones. Then we will see lots of articles saying intel should never have stopped developing these, there really competitive relativel to their contemporaries, not realising the software took that much time to effectively utilise them.


  • Extra components mean more specific hardware to complete each task. This more specific hardware can process the same data often faster and with less power consumption. The drawback is cost, complexity and these compose are only good for that one task.

    CPUs are great because they are multipurpose and can do anything, given infinite time and storage. This flexibility means it isn’t as optimised.

    People are not creating custom code to solve their own problems. They are running very common applications, using very common libraries for similar functions. So for the general user specific hardware for encryption, video codecs, networking etc will reduce power consumption and increase processing speed in a practical way.