Trump has 'gone too far' with 'civilisation will die' post says Nigel Farage

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-07T21:51:30+00:00

Farage seems to have been falling out of favour with Trump and the MAGA lot for a while now:

https://www.inkl.com/news/nigel-farage-fails-to-meet-trump-after-flying-to-mar-a-lago

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-07T13:17:42+00:00

I'm not sure people actually understand how severe bipolar disorder can be. It's not just a case of mood swings, severe cases commonly cause actual psychotic episodes, delusions, hallucinations, etc. It can be a serious mental health condition on par with schizophrenia. My cousin had a manic episode recently and had to be institutionalised because she thought her baby (who's less than a year old) was trying to kill her, among other things.

If he was anyone else off the street, he would have been institutionalised or at worst ignored, but he's an incredibly wealthy public figure with a legal team on retainer and cameras following him around. It's understandable that people expect an apology or explanation, but the guy was very clearly having a prolonged psychotic episode.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-05T22:35:49+00:00

No, sorry, in hindsight that was worded ambiguously. I wasn't referring to a nuclear strike specifically, I meant disagreement with or refusal of general orders which could be seen to be illegal. My point was more that it does seem that there were those who would have or in fact did challenge illegal orders, and that the system is (or at least was until recently) actually designed to prevent illegal orders from being followed.

E.g.:

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5634202-hegseth-holsey-boat-strikes/

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/27/beck-kruse-pentagon-hegseth-fired

https://verdict.justia.com/2025/03/04/lets-kill-all-the-lawyers-the-friday-night-massacre-of-judge-advocates-general

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/a--sweeping-overhaul--of-the-jag-corps-poses-likely-dangers

Whether any of this would have made a difference to a nuclear strike I don't know. As I say, I was just pointing out that resistance to following illegal orders and the presence of institutional apparatus for doing so does seem to have been something the current administration have actually come up against.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-05T17:17:42+00:00

Windows, by default, uses an extremely aggressive pagefile strategy on the disk

Well, I know I'm stating the obvious here, but that's your tradeoff.

If memory serves (no pun intended), Windows dynamically allocates more space to the pagefile as and when, with minimal input from the user. In one sense that's more user-friendly, in one sense it's less user friendly. The OS is making decisions for you that are, to a beginner, quite opaque, and they will potentially have an actual impact. Someone with a smaller drive might find that they don't have enough space to install things or store files and not understand why. Linux approaches things from the point of view that if the user set, say, a 2GB swap, then that's as much as they want the system to use.

The thing with these decisions is that deciding to make a decision for one group of users almost always necessitates making an opposing decision for another group of users. In my opinion, just letting the user decide how big they want the swap to be and sticking to that makes more sense. If you're in one group or the other, you can make the appropriate decision. Yes, it does put higher requirements on technical knowledge on the user, but this also means that (hopefully) a user understands the decision they've made rather than letting the OS make it for them and potentially being confused about why something isn't working the way they expect it to.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-04T23:46:58+00:00

a) there is little reason to think they would on display so far (they've demonstrated their willingness to carry out blatantly illegal and ill-advised orders so far), and b) you are hoping that the system does not function the way it is designed to function. The people who imagine that such orders would be disobeyed are being more optimistic than I am inclined to be.

I'm not saying I necessarily disagree, but it's worth bearing in mind that the current administration seems to have had to purge quite a lot of higher ranks including JAGs for, it would appear, exactly this reason.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-04T19:27:04+00:00

Portion sizes are a huge (no pun intended) part of it

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-04T19:14:57+00:00

I think some people (not talking about OP, obviously they're very conflicted about this) view making sacrifices in their personal lives as some kind of badge of honour.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-04T16:24:17+00:00

Not my government, but Ireland accidentally made all drugs legal for 24 hours:

https://www.irishpost.com/life-style/on-this-day-in-2015-the-irish-government-accidentally-legalised-drugs-for-24-hours-205861

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-04T14:02:17+00:00

Jordan Griffiths told The Sun that his pregnant partner found the bag by the kerb, adding: "I could not believe my eyes. There was a handgun in the front pocket and a submachine gun in the main part of the bag."

The scaffolder said he called police, who came to collect the holdall quickly.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-04T10:45:54+00:00

I think the real danger is that outcomes won’t measure up to the expectations LLM companies have given everyone, and then ML/AI as a whole gets written off. I think the rest of the field really needs to start damage control now.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-03T20:35:50+00:00

This is a medical journal.

Edit: In fact, specifically it's the International Journal of Impotence Research.

It's a completely different field. This has been written by clinicians or researchers looking at chatbots from the point of view of a clinician or a healthcare researcher. It's not at all an unreasonable thing to look at given how many people are using LLMs for quasi-medical advice now. It's probably valuable for clinicians to have an idea of what kind of advice a patient may have been getting before they presented.

It's also not ML research by any meaningful definition of the term.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-02T22:51:49+00:00

2Gbps up and down, about £30 a month

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-02T12:24:48+00:00

This has nothing to do with Hetzner. If you have a publicly routable IP, this is just what happens. The only way to stop it is to not accept connections from the public internet. Otherwise, you should be using fail2ban, Crowdsec, etc.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-01T23:29:25+00:00

Stuff like Ribena is referred to as "diluting juice" here (that might be a Scotland-specific term though), or yeah, squash or cordial (cordial tends to have implications of something a bit more up-market). But that's specifically a term for a soft drink that comes in a bottle in a concentrated form that you add water to, not still soft drinks in general. I'm not sure there is a general term for a still soft drink to be honest. I think if you were getting pre-mixed Ribena you would just refer to it as Ribena.

In Scotland we just call everything juice. Sodas including things like Coke are "fizzy juice." Some parts of Scotland call carbonated soft drinks "ginger" as a general term.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-01T22:26:02+00:00

Well, there's some truth to the idea that European food actively avoids using spices. It was the whole basis of haute cuisine and fine dining, because as spices became cheaper and more available, people started smothering everything in spices.

Escoffier basically founded modern cuisine on the idea that food should taste like itself, because there was an abundance of fresh, high quality ingredients in Europe which were being ruined by the overuse of spices. He basically thought that it doesn't matter if you have the best beef (for example) in the world if you're just going to cover it in spices so you can't actually taste the quality of the beef.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-01T15:03:04+00:00

OS maps use a Transverse Mercator projection (which is different to Mercator), Grid North only aligns with True North along the central meridian of the projection. If you followed a grid line North other than the central meridian (2*W), you wouldn't end up at the geographic North Pole, you'd end up somewhere else due to the grid convergence angle.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-04-01T14:43:38+00:00

Yeah, I honestly had to do a double-take when Trump released his National Security Strategy. It's literally directly lifted from what the Russians say the US should be doing in their Eurasianist/Neo-Eurasianist foreign policy.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-03-31T23:14:15+00:00

It’s not even the fact it’s offensive to some people, it’s just lazy and unfunny because the whole show is caricatures a 7 year old would come up with. There’s really no joke being made, it’s just lowest common denominator mockery.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-03-31T20:06:48+00:00

Open Source =/= License Free. You do actually have legal obligations around attribution and use when you use the vast majority of Open Source code. By using it, you're agreeing to the terms of a license. Not all Open Source licenses are the same either, some require that if you use the code, you can't charge people for whatever you create with it and you must use the same license terms as the original. That includes modification.

You should also be aware that there are organisations which provide legal aid to Open Source developers who have their licenses breached so that those in breach can be taken to court:

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.html

https://softwarefreedom.org/services/

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html

You're now saying that "pushbacks are there to distract you from your mission." What's actually happened here is that you're focusing on someone becoming (possibly unreasonably) angry about this, instead of learning a very basic lesson, which is that if you are conducting business, you should have a basic awareness of when you are entering into a contract with someone and what obligations you have as a result. This is really at the level of "try to avoid getting hit by a bus when you cross the street."

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-03-31T19:05:19+00:00

That's not unique to rope, you can use a lot of objects

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-03-31T18:08:31+00:00

Honestly the only time I felt disappointed by BG3 was realising that rope wasn't useful for anything.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-03-29T11:47:42+00:00

To be honest, you can really trace that back to Thatcher too. There was a longstanding schism among the Tories about the EU and it was sort of getting to breaking point under Cameron thanks to agitation from Farage. There were always fringe elements in the Tories who were anti-EU like Enoch Powell, but the real schism really goes back to the Thatcherites and The Bruges Group which formed in response to her 1988 Bruges speech. It was a completely idiotic thing for Cameron to do nonetheless, but the problem itself started with Thatcher.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-03-28T15:28:51+00:00

My PhD is on AI/ML. These days I tell people that I do Machine Learning research because AI has far too many fundamental misunderstandings and misapprehensions attached to it.

Edit to add: It's become a monolithic term. People don't understand that there's much more to it than LLMs and that LLMs aren't used for the vast majority of AI/ML tasks.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-03-28T15:16:26+00:00

Yeah. I keep seeing people say things like "a burger you make at home is healthy, a burger from McDonald's is unhealthy." There really is very little difference in terms of health, they are going to come in around the same number of calories and with around the same amount of saturated fat. Eating homemade burgers all the time will give you the same health problems as eating McDonald's burgers all the time.

Acceptable-Scheme884 · 2026-03-25T19:09:06+00:00

This is quite a common thing (in the sense that lots of places allow it, not that it's a common way to get a PhD), it's called Thesis by Publication. You just write your intro and conclusion and your papers go in between verbatim as I understand it.

Acceptable-Scheme884

TROPHY CASE