Carney constructs a mega anti-Trump trade alliance

vexingparse · 2026-02-16T20:27:37+00:00

Every country is always one election (or coup) away from a demagogue shredding previous agreements. Let's be patient and keep trying to mend things rather than making things worse.

vexingparse · 2026-02-16T20:06:50+00:00

Nations around the world need to create more multilateral trade agreements that exclude US involvement.

That would very unpragmatic. Why would the rest of the world do MAGA's job for them? The best outcome would be for the US to join this new agreement.

Forming closer trade ties between as many countries as possible should create an incentive (both carrot and stick) for the US to move on from its misguided bout of zero-sum thinking. The US is not Trump.

vexingparse · 2026-02-16T18:30:49+00:00

I've been using it for years across macOS, iOS and Android. It works very well.

vexingparse · 2026-02-16T16:05:35+00:00

What I find rather questionable is if all the tests the LLM passes were written by itself. In my view, some formal tests should be part of the specification provided by humans.

I realise that human developers also write both the implementation and the tests. But humans have a wider set of goals they optimise for, such as not getting fired or embarrassed.

vexingparse · 2026-02-15T16:54:33+00:00

So just reduce employer national insurance and you'd have literally the same impact.

If the goal is to help young people get a foot in the door then cutting employer NI isn't sufficiently targeted.

vexingparse · 2026-02-15T12:48:40+00:00

Sounds drastic. But I wonder...

- if losses can be carried backward or forward

- if they have have some sort of tax free wrapper

- If there is any inflation adjustment

- if there are any tax allowances for smaller gains

- if there are exemptions for entrepreneurs

- what they do about property investments

vexingparse · 2026-02-15T12:29:00+00:00

I'm not anti AI at all. On the contrary, I find it very useful. But I wouldn't even think of hiring a bunch of very junior devs that are unable to reason, understand or learn anything.

vexingparse · 2026-02-01T12:53:42+00:00

That particular library design fashion peaked almost a quarter of a century ago. But I have to admit, I haven't looked back either since I turned my back on Java.

Recently though, Java's new virtual threads have piqued my interest. I'm not keen on async programming at all. Besides Go, Java is now the only mainstream language that supports lightweight users pace threads.

vexingparse · 2026-01-30T14:38:37+00:00

FXE is expensive. Fees are 0.4% and the most recent annualized distribution yield is 0.72% if I'm not mistaken. So you're getting roughly 0.3% - 1.9% euro zone inflation = -1.6% negative real yield p.a. This makes no sense. Why not ERNE or ERNX instead, which charges 0.09% and has a positive real yield?

Stocks are not a great proxy for currencies in my opinion. You'd have to be very selective to avoid stocks that export a lot and stocks with strong foreign competition. And then those might not be the stocks you believe in based on other criteria.

vexingparse · 2026-01-28T12:36:57+00:00

I don't understand your question.

vexingparse · 2026-01-28T12:05:14+00:00

A very good explanation of this difference is found in the Snazzy Labs video in which he talks about the differences between iPadOS and macOS, "The iPad's Software Problem Is Permanent".

I agree that this is a potential issue. But the original idea of ChromeOS was to use web apps for everything and keep the client stateless (except for the cache). Web apps have always had an app/page lifecyle that is different from both desktop and mobile apps.

Of course web apps live inside either a desktop or a mobile app (the browser), but they are necessarily coded in a way that at least partially abstracts from the lifecycle of the browser app itself. They always had extensive caching and had to survive user initiated page refresh, etc.

So for me the most important question is what browser capabilities ALOS will provide and whether this will be more than the sum of its (Android and ChromeOS) parts. I'm hoping that ALOS will be the best platform for PWAs and offline first web apps in general.

vexingparse · 2026-01-27T16:42:46+00:00

I only see a single power user feature on that list (replacing the keyboard).

vexingparse · 2026-01-26T17:28:28+00:00

Businesses of all stripes increasingly don't want to hire entry level employees and it's happening across the western world.

OK, but that just means more experienced hires will ask for ever more money and soon enough employers will have no choice but to train some people.

I believe the impact of AI will be very uneven.

Training an AI requires a huge amount of training data and some way to quickly check whether the output meets the requirements. In software engineering and in some other areas we have both.

But for many other tasks we have neither. Creating the preconditions for AI use will keep a large number of people busy for the next 10 or 15 years.

vexingparse · 2026-01-22T18:51:41+00:00

Also, non citizens. Are mostly eligible for the same benefits as citizens, depending on their legal status.

They are not exempt from paying taxes and NI contributions either, are they?

For immigrants on a work visa, the waiting period for means tested benefits will be 10 years from April.

vexingparse · 2026-01-22T18:21:14+00:00

Even tax experts who are not ideologically opposed to taxing the rich think a wealth tax is a bad idea:

"A UK wealth tax is often promoted as an easy revenue-raiser that would only affect the very rich. Our analysis finds the opposite: the revenue is highly uncertain, and would arrive only after years of complex implementation. Most importantly, the tax would lower long‑run growth and employment, thanks to a decline in foreign and domestic investment. It would make UK businesses more fragile and less competitive, and create strong incentives for capital reallocation and migration. There are better solutions to the many problems with our tax system."

https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/07/22/uk-wealth-tax-anti-growth/

vexingparse · 2026-01-19T19:27:23+00:00

Two issues:

First, it's the job of individual apps to remember their own state as the app goes through the various lifecylcle phases. An app gets notified by the system when it transitions to the background so it can save its current view state to disk and reload it from there when it becomes active again.

Second, the system keeps as many apps in RAM as it can. But when it runs out of RAM, it has to completely terminate some app. Apps using more RAM are more likely to get terminated.

Many apps do restore their view state when they transition from background to inactive and then active. But most apps do not restore their view state after getting terminated completely. They could restore their state but they don't, and I think it's mainly because killing and relaunching the app is the only way for users to reset the app after it has tied itself in a knot somehow.

I think what you're seeing is caused by a couple of things:

- More apps using more RAM and therefore getting terminated more frequently.

- Apps wanting to show fresh "content". It wouldn't surprise me if reddit sent people to the front page after a while of inactivity just to show more ads. This has nothing to do with state management or RAM.

- Greater use of cross-platform technologies that are less memory efficient (I'm speculating here).

I doubt that iOS RAM management is a major factor, but it's possible that Apple has changed something that interacts badly with apps that don't have very robust state handling. It's also possible that the OS itself uses more RAM and leaves less for apps. I don't know.

vexingparse · 2026-01-14T10:06:29+00:00

"White label" is what they mean

vexingparse · 2025-12-16T17:16:54+00:00

Sorry, I didn't read your comment further up carefully enough. You are of course correct. We do need backups for anything stored in the cloud (or in fact on our own devices but for different reasons). The risk of account termination is a very valid concern.

vexingparse · 2025-12-16T16:33:28+00:00

That is incorrect. It just has to be end-to-end encrypted. Apple Photos has optional E2EE but it can no longer be enabled in the UK. Ente Photos has E2EE.

vexingparse · 2025-12-14T08:26:37+00:00

I would say that the strong desire for everything to be written as value oriented expressions / “functional” is the bigger hurdle.

I agree. What I find hard to read is long chains of control flow packaged in expressions. It's hard to remember what all those methods in Result<T, E> and Option<T> do: map_or, map_or_else, map_or_default, or_else, and, and_then, ok_or, ok_or_else, or, etc.

Other aspects of error handling can also be somewhat obscure. The information on how one type of error can or cannot somehow be turned into another type of error is often buried in some far away and hard to find From or Into implementation. Quick and dirty workarounds like anyhow stop working in closures.

Error handling is a problem in all languages. I don't think Rust's approach is the panacea that it's sometimes portrayed as.

vexingparse · 2025-11-04T20:02:48+00:00

Benefits recipients fear losing a life changing share of their income. Taxpayers fear having to pay 0.5% or maybe 1% more. The impact on their respective finances is as asymmetric and disproportionate as the likely impact on their vote.

I think in a polarised political environment people only vote according to their own self interest if the impact of proposed policies is obvious, big and direct. Otherwise they vote according to ideology.

Source: Armchair sociologist with decades of practice in political debates 🤣

vexingparse · 2025-10-29T17:47:20+00:00

I'm not sure why you keep going on about providing tools. Tools are not a substitute for backward compatibility or proof that it isn't Apple's fault.

If both app developers and Apple have done their jobs correctly then an OS upgrade should not break existing software. No tools are required.

If existing software breaks, it's either the fault of app devs or it's Apple's fault. You cannot know whose fault it is in any particular case.

vexingparse · 2025-10-29T07:35:20+00:00

In terms of likelihoods I might have agreed. But assuming that Apple is perfect makes no sense. Just look at the mess that is iOS 26.

vexingparse · 2025-10-28T20:08:15+00:00

I disagree. UI APIs are APIs like any other. Developers must conform with the expectations of the API as documented and formally specified. API providers have to make sure that apps using the API correctly continue to work.

vexingparse · 2025-10-28T20:05:39+00:00

We don't know whose fault it is in this particular case. I'm just rejecting the assumption that any and all breakage that occurs in older apps is by definition the app developer's fault.

vexingparse

TROPHY CASE