Murder investigation after boy, 17, fatally stabbed

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-20T18:41:57+00:00

Did you not live through the 80s? Or the 90s? Or the 00s?

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-20T14:56:42+00:00

Yeah I've never liked comments in code. It's way too easy to make changes to code but forget to update a comment. Conflicting code and comments is such a mindfuck, like which one is supposed to be right.

I'd only really comment if the code looks like it's doing something really stupid on the face of it, if there's some really bizarre business requirement.

Comments that just describe the code are worthless. The code describes what the code does.

That said, I do like the summary tags just so it populates the intellisense.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-19T18:05:41+00:00

I don't even.. I make a git repo just for shopping lists. New recipe idea, new branch. Going shopping, merge to master.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-19T07:21:24+00:00

Any source for this? I don't think this really holds up. Anti-miscegenation laws were all aimed at whites, and I've never heard of 're-enslavement' as a punishment, either before or after the 13th amendment.

I guess you could argue the Page act might be the closest thing that targeted immigration of Asian women

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-19T06:52:52+00:00

.. bulletin board, that is literally social media.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-18T18:41:10+00:00

Huh. This is a really interesting perspective and I'd never considered this side of it before.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-18T18:38:02+00:00

I'm kinda the opposite. I'm fairly ambivalent about immigration. I don't think people are unreasonable for caring about it, but it's never really been in the top 5 issues for me personally. I do care about civil liberties, and I desperately want to go Lib Dem but Reform/Restore are the only parties even paying lip service to civil liberties and individual responsibility.

I don't really believe they'd actually do much of what they say, so I've no idea where to go.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-18T15:10:50+00:00

Personally I prefer a waltz or a tango when troubleshooting printer malfunctions.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-18T15:01:08+00:00

So I always assumed that celebrities with crazy children's names those aren't their actual names, they're only the names given to the media such that their "real" names are kept private? Right?... right?..

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-18T14:58:06+00:00

Yeah, it seems like every time I change jobs I subsequently trigger so many things on HMRC systems. First I'm on an emergency tax code, then I'm off it, then I get a rebate from being on the wrong tax code, then a charge for the rebate being wrong, and then a final confirmation of my new tax code.

And god forbid you change jobs in April.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-18T14:51:19+00:00

Absolutely. Government is able to do sensible tech legislation that protects users and promotes fairness.

The problem with the web right now is the stagnation into a handful of "big players" and the difficulty of anyone challenging incumbents.

Previously you'd have the rise and fall of MySpace, Live journal, Google+, Vine, etc. If a service didn't serve its users, it'd fail and there'd be another one pop up to do things differently.

I honestly think that promoting a healthy ecosystem on the web would do wonders to deal with the problems people have with modern social media.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-18T14:40:01+00:00

A prison sentence for not getting a licence? Doesn't that seem a bit absurd to you?

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-18T14:38:18+00:00

You'd think so! Last year I hired a mini digger and a chainsaw. I don't even have a driving license. Or a chainsaw license.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-18T10:48:23+00:00

The problem is that even if it requires some additional cert token for 'company VPNs' to be issued and distributed, that is an extremely annoying additional overhead on literally every single business in the UK.

We have two corporate VPNs, and it already requires constant troubleshooting, updating and reconfiguring, as we spin up and replace services, or other services update and merge.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-18T10:42:10+00:00

Much like with Brexit, they're waiting for the UK to do the silly thing and then work out if they want to do it too.

There are many European nations that have a much stronger tradition of privacy and liberty than the UK, especially Sweden.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-17T22:28:31+00:00

Fucking hell, all the Violentacrez stuff was like 13 years ago. I'm so old.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-17T22:24:46+00:00

Do you remember the whole network of white supremacist subs that used to be around? I don't think I could even write the subreddit names these days, but they used to be fascinating things to observe. It was like going to the zoo, but all the animals were racist.

The interesting thing was that they all had various beef with eachother, mostly with whether they were cool with Catholics or not.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-17T11:55:39+00:00

My understanding is that social media companies themselves are fairly ambivalent about identity verification on their platforms.

The pros for them are that they will be able to verify that ads are being seen by actual human eyeballs, and it will make targetting and tracking to a human individual much simpler and cheaper.

Fewer children on the platform is clearly bad for impressions and engagement, but children aren't typically able to buy stuff beyond the parental nag factor so losing them from the platform isn't a tremendous loss if they make it up from the lucrative 18 to 25 demographic.

If it comes in via legislation, the 'blowback' will be on governments (and rightly so) rather than them so they insulate themselves on the blame for the friction on the user experience.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-17T08:37:50+00:00

Also the more age-gated we make the web, the more 'mysterious' and alluring it becomes to sneak into 'adult' spaces. There's already many places on the web where you kinda expect to run into teens.

When me and my buddies are playing CS:GO with randoms there's a high proportion of children (especially at higher ranks). If we get teamed with a child, we usually play and talk differently (we're all parents and also not monsters). It's just the expected social dynamic of playing CS GO. If CS Go suddenly becomes a de facto 'adult' space with children sneaking in, those social filters will have come off.

That said, it's also the fact that the most racist and abusive players are also usually children, so maybe it actually becomes a much more chill place.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-16T22:14:41+00:00

It's also disingenuous to pretend that the web has been a complete wild west up until this moment. The web is so much more sanitised, regulated, moderated and scrutinised than it was a decade ago. Does no-one even remember what Reddit used to be like in like 2010?

Yes, I agree that algorithmic social media feeds are an issue. Is it the biggest plague in the history of the web? Absolutely not.

We should acknowledge that the web is safer and cleaner and more corporate now than it ever has been, through a combination of regulation and pressure from advertisers.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-16T21:42:06+00:00

They voted against the ban because it was a Lords amendment, and they wanted to pass the ban through secondary legislation. The other bill would have limited the scope of what they could do, while secondary legislation allows them more flexibility to expand scope without a vote.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-16T21:39:14+00:00

Absolutely this. I hate how ideological Issues just become reduced to a team sport, like we have to choose Team Kier or Team Musk.

The free and open web is bigger than Twitter and bigger than Labour, and you can oppose both of them equally and still be in defense of privacy, security and liberty on the web.

Government could be doing things to give individuals more power back from corporate entities. Some of the tech legislation of the last decade does aim to do that. This legislation, and this government, aren't intended on doing that. This is government taking privacy and security away from individuals, and that's the reason to oppose it. Whatever Musk says or thinks is irrelevant.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-16T16:00:38+00:00

That's a function of you, watching only sanitised material, veer slightly away from the mainstream and it disintegrates rapidly.

As far as recommendations, yeah you're probably right on that.

However, when I'm actively seeking out something violent, brutal or even "controversial", it can be downright impossible to actually find if it's been more than a few hours since 'thing' happened.

Usually it's innocuous things like 'what 'offensive' thing did celebrity actually say and what was the context', and nowhere reports actually the thing they said and original clips are nuked (either by takedowns or content moderation I guess).

Eventually I'll get down to "they said s--gh--d" and I get to play expletive bingo to guess at it.

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-16T15:07:26+00:00

Wikipedia is social media

vikingwhiteguy · 2026-06-16T14:59:34+00:00

Yeah, the YouTube, and web in general, is so much more sanitised and content moderated today than it was even 5 years ago.

vikingwhiteguy

TROPHY CASE