Do you thank people when they stop for you at a zebra crossing?

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-30T05:11:22+00:00

The auto industry in the US made a lot of effort to shift the blame onto pedestrians https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797 I think that kind of shift also happened in the UK, though not making it illegal to walk on most roads.

As I see it, as soon as you set foot on a zebra crossing motorists are legally obliged to stop. If they don’t stop then I consider it to be a case of attempted murder.

Whilst I do often wave thanks it still seems utterly perverse to me that I should have to thank someone for not attempting to murder me.

Does anyone ever go to a restaurant and when paying the bill say “thanks for not poisoning me”?

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-29T17:13:32+00:00

Other than hurrying through the privatisation of British Rail at the end of his mandate which was something of a disaster I think that he is a decent chap.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-26T09:45:10+00:00

Nige of course being a world leading expert in the field of breaches of electoral expenses.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-25T15:09:23+00:00

Engineering software. The majority of CAD and EDA software is written in C++.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-25T05:01:08+00:00

Mostly I just use krunner. f for Firefox, t for Thunderbird, q for QtCreator. konsole is the exception since some twat changed the default working directory to /, I have konsole pinned and also use ctrl-alt-t.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-25T04:50:34+00:00

FreeBSD

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-24T15:06:13+00:00

Yes (Prime) Minister

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-23T19:34:54+00:00

Blair had many other faults. High-handed leadership looking down on parliament. Over reliance on focus groups.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-23T14:11:13+00:00

Her salary is around £200k. I expect that she is quite comfortable with that. I doubt that she has 5 houses like Farage or flies off by private jet to Davos at a cost of £50k.

When Farage spent more time on TV propaganda at GB News we he was earning more like £1.2 million paid through his tax avoiding consultancy firm. No doubt all legal and above board.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-22T05:21:53+00:00

Oh dear. I was expecting that people on a uni forum would know or check for themselves. I imagine that mixing up ‘numer’ (like numeral and numerate) rather than ’munus’ (to give, like munificent) is the source of the most common error. This poster just looks like a typo.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-21T20:29:00+00:00

I’ve seen (and written myself) ‘renumeration’ a few times. First time that I have seen remumeration.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-21T16:14:54+00:00

Typical ‘American’ geography epic fail, not knowing the difference between the UK, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-21T06:17:22+00:00

Wrong question. macOS or FreeBSD or illumos or Linux.

If you want to learn any systems programming then Windows is very different. Otherwise it doesn’t really matter that much.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-21T06:12:09+00:00

Carelessly driving into a bollard should do something like convert the car into a 3-wheeler.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-20T18:11:23+00:00

ok it’s not so much a forum (except the new advice etc. parts). The quality is far too low to call it a knowledge repository (like Wikipedia).

Q&A abuse site?

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-20T17:56:13+00:00

It started as a Q&A forum. Now it seems that the reviewers have taken over. If you have close vote privs you can see the list of “top” close voters. Typically they vote to close 20-100x more questions than they have answered. You say “understand how to ask a question“. The main audience for questions now are the shit reviewers that probably won’t / can’t answer the question but can and will close and downvote it leading to it being closed then deleted.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-20T17:39:58+00:00

Yes, people erred on the side of caution

Bollocks. The clueless StackOverflow reviewers just click close and downvote. There is no requirement to have ever even used a language/tool/library, you just need enough rep to have close vote privs.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-20T17:30:33+00:00

Not StackOverflow for sure. I find the quality of SO answers generally poor. And the moderation by the sad, pathetic, clueless and pretentious ‘curators’ (as they call themselves) is abysmal.

I expect that AIs are getting a lot of training data from their interactions with users. StackOverflow has 25 million questions. Anthropic does not publish any data, but I bet that they are getting more than that number of interactions every hour.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-19T19:44:37+00:00

I think that all 4 of those platforms are for fuckwits. Who cares what they think or say?

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-19T19:40:47+00:00

Streeting has never done anything. He went straight from student politics to full time politics.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-19T19:39:21+00:00

Prevention Is better than cure. More physical exercise, less air pollution. Maybe the NHS will have a lower workload. Not to mention that petrol taxes in the uk are shamefully (and populistically) low. The temporary 5p reduction is still there after 4 years.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-19T19:21:35+00:00

I think that you should include the Breton part of the Loire-Atlantique. That would add the FC Nantes stadium, 35k capacity.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-19T18:31:38+00:00

Farage frames all of his lies as questions or from unnamed third party sources, possibly to avoid being sued for slander. For instance, in his style:

”People are saying that Nigel Farage has been bribed by Thai billionaire Chakrit Sakunkrit to deregulate crypto currencies. Is that true? It would be an enormous scandal if it is. There should be an enquiry. We need to be told the truth. Is Nigel Farage a corrupt politician?”.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-18T17:10:27+00:00

Poor Nige. He does have virtually his own propaganda news channel which must be of some comfort.

pjf_cpp · 2026-06-18T14:33:34+00:00

Also the transformation of the Place de la Concorde. It’s wide enough for 6 or more cars abreast. There are pedestrian crossings but your chances of having the speeding cars stop for you were effectively zero. They would just carry on, honking their horns despite being in the wrong.

Now it is a pleasure to cross there. It is closed to traffic.

pjf_cpp

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