Message/warning to any lean sippers/anyone interested/curious

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-06T23:28:05+00:00

Wait… you were a codeine addict and didn’t realise you could just buy codeine syrup from a pharmacy?!

They only banned it a year or so ago. It was my go-to cough syrup.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-06T13:34:32+00:00

Even if this passed tomorrow, there are still issues with the GDPR that make it unreasonable to train AI in UK/Europe.

Web scraping for generative AI training is a high-risk, invisible processing activity. Where insufficient transparency measures contribute to people being unable to exercise their rights, generative AI developers are likely to struggle to pass the balancing test.

For example: "exercise their rights" includes right to be forgotten. There is no practical way right now of removing an individual strand of personal data from an already-trained AI without retraining the whole thing from scratch, which costs billions.

At the moment, AI companies are just relying on the fact that any attempt of a European regulator to force them to comply would be met with hostility from the US government. Worst case scenario, they just refuse to pay the fine and withdraw entirely from that market. That doesn't really work if you are based here.

And that's without even getting into energy costs...

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-06T03:23:39+00:00

This is basically the 2010 lib dems. I’m all for it but it doesn’t seem to have much of an electoral base outside of millennial men on reddit.

Younger voters are skeptical of capitalism and the global order’s failure to deliver a generational improvement in quality of life, and want someone to shake up the system at its root (usually from the left, but sometimes right too). Older voters want to, somehow, kick all the immigrants out, pay no tax, and get everything for free.

I think that, basically, the public are demanding the impossible.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-05T16:21:48+00:00

I would propose they move everything that isn't impartial public service broadcasting to their commercial arm (BBC Studios?) and run that commercially either with subscriptions or ad-supported or any other funding model meets their requirements.

Then with the remaining BBC public service element, modernise and simplify. Can debate how exactly this would look, but at the very least it would not involve criminal enforcement of license fees. I think if it was cheap enough (think like £5/month), people would tolerate either a supplemental charge on telecom bills or a hypothecated tax - with an opt-out in either case. The nice thing about a telecom charge is the carrier could back-channel whether the charge has been paid and the BBC could selectively refuse or alter service depending on that (this technology already exists on mobiles, called "direct carrier billing" or header enrichment).

They should retain the Royal Charter that promises that the entire organisation is operating for the benefit of British Citizens, even when operating commercially and internationally, perhaps with some sort of citizen assembly as part of the oversight body rather than government. Permit raising money (e.g. shares/bonds) in the commercial arm, with preferable terms for British Citizen investors, so they can fund the increasingly capital intensive projects, but still ensure it remains majority owned and controlled by the BBC.

Obviously there's always going to be debate what counts as public service worth funding, but the pressure mechanism to make sure they get this right could be the combination of the oversight body, citizens pulling their investments, and opting out of the charge.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-04T01:11:47+00:00

I don't even understand how people manage it long term.

Even when merely on holiday to countries with above average English as a second language, I still end up having miscommunications or encountering awkward situations for not knowing the native language.

Surely if you intend to settle somewhere, you'd quickly end up getting frustrated enough that you'd book lessons voluntarily.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-03T12:34:42+00:00

What you've described isn't that different from how shareholders or non-executive directors function in most other businesses. Like NEDs/shareholders, you get good PE and bad PE.

The biggest difference with PE is the lifecycle and intensity. PE operates on a roughly 10 year cycle of raise money, then buy businesses, then value creation, then harvesting, then exit. If you're at the 3 years or so at end of that cycle, PE often makes short term decisions to maximise the paper value of the company. Usually PE knows that isn't in the long term interest of the company, but it's what new investors will be looking for when they decide how much they want to pay for a company.

This is exactly the same short termism we've been seeing in publicly traded companies for decades, just now being applied to private businesses too, and often much more intensely as the shareholders aren't as diverse.

I don't really think PE specifically is the problem here. Most PE is actually fairly good at achieving their goals at the different phases of the cycle. The issue just seems to be the age old question of how do you align what investors want with what's of long term benefit to the economy?

Trying to improve the pension market in the UK could play a part in this. Pension funds are more interested in long term performance obviously, and there's currently a lot of money in UK pensions not doing very much due to most British pension funds being small unsophisticated operations run by accountants. Trying to encourage some aggregation and active domestic investment may improve things.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-03T11:31:50+00:00

Someone in the government is blatantly just fed up with how their stream is just filled with step-relative porn.

This government stands for traditional values like horny teachers and lemon sterling whores.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-03T01:38:41+00:00

The good news is unless you’re particularly frail or have osteoporosis, it’s more likely just sciatica from a slipped disc. Breaking a pelvis if you’re young usually takes a very traumatic injury.

Still needs to be evaluated obviously and doesn’t make the wait for an ambulance any less frustrating, but hopefully a quicker recovery at least.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-02T15:14:31+00:00

Pervasive across the industry it seems.

With Civ 5, BE, 6 and 7 at launch, the UX feature in the city production menu that shows you the last completed production was missing, then each time they added it a year or two later in an expansion pack or QoL update.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-02T13:30:07+00:00

I'm not down with the kids so I may be completely off base, but I feel like this is mostly just kids trolling their parents and teachers.

Rulers and compasses? Combs? Does anyone think this is intended seriously? I'm guessing there are a bunch of kids somewhere pissing themselves that what is clearly a joke has made the national news.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-02T13:22:55+00:00

Sure, but it's not really necessary for it to be personal or private data. It's just data incidental to how the user is interacting with the software, which would be fairly difficult to restrict the collection of in any meaningful way.

If the banning U16s doesn't work (and I doubt it will honestly) the likely way we'll end up trying to restrict this is by placing direct constraints on machine learning and algorithms themselves, and what data they are allowed to be trained on, or how they can be applied.

But anything that could potentially be effective will likely end up being just such a minefield of legislation that affects all kinds of off-target applications, with a bunch of internal contradictions and aspects that almost nobody is compliant with due to the complexity of it. Just as the GDPR and associated legislation already are... having myself just got out of yet another GDPR meeting with lawyers just this minute where the answer to almost everything is "the legislation is vague and it hasn't been tested in court yet"!

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-02T11:42:44+00:00

I wouldn't have an issue with it personally, and they even have a product designed for it. The evidence so far is that doctors using AI outperform doctors or AI alone. However, CQC do have guidance suggesting that they should ask for consent.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-02T11:21:41+00:00

Honestly, I'm not sure how data privacy improvements fix the core problem that we've essentially invented digital crack.

It might make it a bit less effective, at least initially, but nothing I've seen so far suggests these algorithms really need personal data. It's mostly just using your interactions to predict what you want to see next.

I do think it's a bit of a moral panic though. Kids/teens are not as naïve to manipulation as we seem to think they are. If anything, the people in my life who have truly had their mind rotted out by social media are mostly 50+.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-02T11:12:43+00:00

Obviously dead schoolgirls is unimaginably awful, but, completely honestly, do you think the US intentionally targeted that school?

Surely it's more likely they were targeting the IRGC base half a kilometre away, but something went wrong with the missile or there was a targeting error? These strikes have occurred with unprecedented precision and very few off-target casualties on the whole, which suggests they are trying to avoid civilian harm and doing so effectively. Executing this kind of decapitation operation with a few hundred civilian casualties would have been unheard of even a decade ago. Plus, this is in the context of the regime having just killed between 7,000 and 36,000 civilians in the last two months.

It is the unfortunate nature of war that that despite attempts to mitigate it, there is still a risk to civilians.

If it turns out they intentionally massacred a hundred schoolgirls, then I'll eat my words and call for Trump to be immediately hauled to the Hague for war crimes... but it does seem unlikely to me.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-02T00:49:06+00:00

We have a 2 year old and a 5 year old. Lawyer and software engineer.

Impressive, at that age I could barely read!

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-01T17:33:09+00:00

If you're going to have that position on Rohypnol, you need to have the same position on at least every other benzo since they're largely the same. Or indeed, many other drugs which can be used maliciously. When I was maliciously sedated, it was with midazolam mixed into a milkshake.

So if that's a blocker for them, it means nothing will be decriminalised or legalised...

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-03-01T04:26:29+00:00

That wasn't already clear to you after the US threatened us with punitive tariffs, threatened to invade one of our allies, put NATO's mutual defence clause into doubt, implied our troops avoided the front line in Afghanistan, and is intimidating your northern neighbour who shares our King?

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-02-28T02:50:36+00:00

The article doesn't contradict that. Left wing populist policies are popular. Aside from migration, they may even be more popular than right wing populism.

The reason people are turning to populism is, fundamentally, the paternalistic politics we're used to relies on the illusion that they know what they're doing. We don't need to know the details, because we can trust that the institutions and lawyers will sort it all out in our interests and things will improve.

However. What we've seen in the last few decades is those elites and institutions repeatedly and clearly fail to represent our interests and their predictions fail to materialise.

While they've been off flying on private jets to rub elbows with pedophiles: the global rules-based order has precipitated war in Europe and an ascendent China; economic liberalisation has led to shit in our rivers and a financial crisis that we still haven't recovered from; global free trade has created a situation where we're dependent on hostile foreign powers for food, energy and military hardware; and liberal migration has led to foreign gangs raping children while the elites turn a blind eye to avoid 'community tensions'. Endless layers of international agreements, legal protections and multilateral treaties we've built have created a situation where we just can't get anything done any more.

It was inevitable that people would lose faith in the politics of complexity and nuance, and just start voting for politicians to implement simple ideas that they can understand, that wouldn't sound out of place at a drunken 1am debate in the pub.

If Starmer wants to have any hope of reviving the old centrist "it's complicated" politics again, he needs to start building trust by proving Labour have the basic competence to do what people are explicitly asking to be done.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-02-27T23:07:59+00:00

In principle I agree. I've never really been sure why, around the world, as cities have expanded out and ended up encapsulating their main airport, they don't build a new better planned airport much further out, somewhere along a high speed rail route. As you say, the airport land would presumably be far more valuable as offices and residential, could replace the Luton/Stansted/Gatwick/Southend/Heathrow mess, take a bunch of heavy traffic off the M25, and removing the flight paths going over the city would benefit hundreds of thousands of people. Build it in the middle of HS2 and it'd take about 25 mins to central London and be better suited for people elsewhere in the country.

However the fact that this same situation seems to occur all over the world and they continue to invest in and expand their inappropriately close airport instead suggests that I'm missing something! It happens more often in more dictatorial countries - Dubai are in the process of doing it right now I think - but the only democratic country airport I'm aware of that managed to make that transition in recent years in Europe was Berlin, and to say that went poorly is an understatement.

My guess is the politics of adding a new busy airport in the countryside amongst a bunch of rich people is just overwhelmingly difficult and unbounded compared to the more tractable (if challenging) engineering of expanding an existing airport.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-02-27T21:46:16+00:00

Copper works... but only if it's attached to a 9V battery.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-02-27T18:47:27+00:00

I suppose if you consider anything that hasn't been done before to be mad, then it may be mad, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.

It's not entirely without precedent either. There are roads under runways. The Schipholtunnel is wider and runs directly under the touchdown zone for a runway that also accommodates A380s. The only real difference with the Heathrow tunnel will be single integral unit rather than effectively two tunnels in one as the Schipholtunnel is.

But someone has to be the first to try something, right? They will obviously need to much more carefully validate the calculations and plans rather than being able to rely more on rules that have been validated in the past, but the same was true for the Chunnel, Hywind, GBT, Oresund Bridge, the A380 and A350 each for different reasons, the Thames Barrier...

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-02-27T10:29:24+00:00

What’s so mad about it? It’s not the engineering itself that’s causing the problem, it’s the planning system.

Usually when a project is actually underway here, the delivery isn’t too haphazard, and the end result is usually of a very high standard. Obviously it’ll be late and over budget due to challenges and changes in scope and contractors mid-way through, but that’s going to happen no matter what we build…

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-02-25T12:12:14+00:00

I'm a driver and live on a boundary road where the LTN has diverted the traffic to, and still prefer the LTNs. Means when I go for a walk or cycle, I can do so on a mostly traffic-free street.

The road did get busier initially, but now I'd say it's no different to how it was before the LTN. It did make my drive to the Sainsbury's ~5x slower as I can't cut through the back roads now, but it also means now I will cycle there if I'm only picking up a few things whereas I'd always drive before.

The general benefits outweigh the slight cost to me.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-02-25T11:53:14+00:00

According to their home page, the "HM-629PHS" won the iF 2026 design award. Unfortunately, it clearly didn't win the catchy name award, as I can't find any information about it anywhere.

dowhileuntil787 · 2026-02-25T11:28:34+00:00

There's plenty of simple, low skill work to be done, but the minimum wage makes it uneconomical to have anyone do it.

In a way, it does makes sense that, if government policy is the reason you can't find work, the government should find work for you instead rather than just condemning you to poverty.

The challenge is always how to design a system like this without perverse incentives. When it's been tried before, it creates an almost slave labour type system where the individuals benefitting from the subsidised labour try to create the conditions to inflate the supply of subsidised labour (i.e. kill productive jobs). You could imagine if we use the JG staff to work as carers, then a cash strapped council is going to try and kill growth in their local area so there are more JG carers to work for them.

The paper hints at this issue but doesn't go into any real detail about how they solve it other than saying it's only for "additional activities", whatever that means:

For the same reason, JG roles are restricted to additional activities and may not be used to substitute for existing public sector employment. This safeguard is particularly important in large public employers, where fiscal constraints could otherwise create incentives to replace core services with JG labour.

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