BoxOfRain

I wonder if the US could learn to love rugby as well? A rather different game in a lot of ways, but it's definitely in the conversation for the most engaging team sport to watch in my opinion. While it has head injury issues of its own (it's still a full-contact football code at the end of the day), the sport has been a bit more open to changing things on this front.

Poor Orwell; the man spent his life fighting totalitarian ideals to the point he got shot for his troubles and was lucky to live, and now we use his name to describe the very things he opposed.

Yeah I've noticed that millennials are often maximalists, years and years of ghastly 'landlord white' paint jobs contributed to that as well I think.

I'm currently renting but looking to buy in my area, I'm sure I'll find the chemical stripping of horrible white gloss paint and the painting over of 'minimal' white walls with a riot of colour outright cathartic. The house I'm renting would look so good if someone took the time to undo all the bodge jobs and cheap decoration choices I think. The lovely hardwood doors have proper brass hinges for example but it's all covered up with decades' worth of horrid white paint. Half the houses round here probably have gorgeous hardwood floors under crappy laminate or lino, and almost all have nice fireplaces I'd love to reinstate and use with a wood burner.

For what it's worth, I really appreciate the author included an e-ink theme. I use an e-ink phone as my primary mobile device and LLMs would never implement an e-ink theme without being explicitly instructed to. For me, this is a more usable site than many.

Having said that, I would eliminate all gradients in e-ink mode in favour of a 1-bit design to reduce ghosting and have an option for pagination over scrolling; some devices handle scrolling fine but others don't.

I find the AI monomania on here a bit tiresome too, but you can hardly grumble that a board dedicated to tech startups and hacker culture talks a lot about AI.

It's the equivalent of people a hundred years ago complaining electrical publications featured radio excessively, yes it'd be annoying but hardly off-topic or outside of their typical wheelhouse.

Of course he doesn't want anyone 'hoarding' their own RAM, for the same reason institutional landlords usually dislike the idea of the housing supply becoming less constrained and allowing people to escape the rent trap. Altman wants to force us into a landlord-tenant relationship, making alternatives more difficult is in his material interest.

Local inference is like buying a house even if it's more expensive than renting, because you (often quite reasonably) don't want to live under the heel of the landlord-tenant power relationship.

Oligarchs don't have hearts, they have gravitational singularities whose hunger only grows the more you feed them.

Because hams are very much a part of hacker culture, they were using the same mentality and skillset of the hacker long before people had ready access to computers. If ham content isn't HN worthy then basically nothing else is.

*land is a common enough suffix in the UK though; I often say things like 'I'm not sure how it's done in Microsoft land' or 'the fallout of my trip to bodge land'. 'Britland' is a fairly transparent construction along these lines.

Her designers were very concerned about fire apparently, if I remember correctly the design called for no wood and the pianos were among the only exceptions to this rule.

The economics and constraints of shipping favour ugliness in this era I think. A sailing ship kind of has to be pretty to be good at its job, and a lot of early passenger steamers inherited the same design features which made sailing ships pretty. While modern shipping is much more efficient the constraints favour maximising how many containers (or tourists) you can fit on a ship instead, which produces boxy, slab-sided things.

Both, actually! Nonconformist Christianity was one of several key influences on the labour movement ideologically speaking. At least in the UK the Labour Party is often said to owe more to Methodism than Marx for its original ideological foundations. There's a long history of this, in the aftermath of the English Civil War a group called the Diggers more or less independently invented agrarian socialism out of the New Testament, and a great deal of calls for humane conditions for workers over the centuries were motivated explicitly by Christian teachings. The New Testament is pretty clear in its condemnation of repressing workers, James 5 for example:

> Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.

This isn't an exclusive or situation, nonconformist religious influence helped create the ideological environment that allowed unions to exist in the first place.

I'd argue it's actually the Tories who are good at getting rid of individual PMs, the 1922 Committee gives their backbenchers a built-in regicide mechanism and the wider party has a culture of using it; even surviving the vote can hole a PM below the waterline. Labour leaders are harder to remove, Jeremy Corbyn for example survived his attempted deposition in 2016 and Reform's leadership entrenches the party leader further still. Having said that recent events support you more than me maybe, since Labour successfully deposed a sitting PM much in the same way the Tories repeatedly did.

Of course any PM still depends on Parliamentary support, by definition the Prime Minister is the one who can convince the monarch they can form a government which has the confidence of the House of Commons. My complaints of presidentialisation are more in the centralisation of power around Number 10, Blair was particularly known for it but it's been basically all of them in recent history.

I wonder what is causing the centralisation around the executive branch in Western democracies? While the US is the more extreme example of the phenomenon, in the UK power has been consolidating in Number 10 for decades and the PM role has become more presidential than tradition dictates; compare say Tony Blair who was a very personal leader with Clement Attlee whose leadership style was more collaborative. The two systems are very different constitutionally, so it feels like there's broader factors causing this.

It's not necessarily spite as well, it goes without saying that international relations between the US and its allies have deteriorated to the point yet another critical dependency Washington can turn off for geopolitical reasons isn't a very attractive idea for many. While I dislike a lot of Anthropic's behaviour, it was not their actions but the fact their models were subject to export controls which really motivated me to not be dependent on US providers alone.

My country has no frontier models; since I've no national grounds to support one provider over another, a strong degree of provider diversity is an obvious benefit to me. I also think a highly competitive global market is a good thing for mankind in general, any hegemonic power having a monopolistic or oligopolistic position in AI provision is probably the 'bad ending' for most of us since it represents an enormous concentration of democratically unaccountable power regardless of the power which 'wins'. I'd argue it's rational, not spiteful to favour provider diversity on those grounds.

Reminds me of the Ystwyth valley lead mines in Wales which were worked from the Bronze Age until about the 1950s. The valley is breathtakingly beautiful (as is basically all of Ceredigion) but to this day the river Ystwyth remains pretty contaminated in places.

That's kind of my point. Constitutionally speaking, the Brexit referendum was advisory and could have been ignored. That would have been completely unconscionable from a legitimacy point of view though, so whatever the constitution has to say on the subject on paper an iron-clad democratic mandate to carry out Brexit was forced to coexist with Parliament's iron-clad supremacy.

This is why I think it was constitution-breaking, the constitution simply isn't set up to gracefully deal with a conflict between 'Brexit must happen' and 'Parliament cannot agree on how to carry out Brexit'. All of this against the ticking clock of Article 50 as well. Instead Boris Johnson ended up brute-forcing his way through the issue with the 2019 election and the purge of his non-Brexiteer MPs. The system did ultimately hold up (even in the face of Johnson's prorogation crisis), but I think Cameron was very irresponsible. Not for holding the referendum, but for not figuring out all the potential complexities of a leave vote before calling the referendum. The constitution got an uncontrolled stress test that didn't need to happen the way it did.

Also to add to that, the limits of Parliamentary sovereignty really were tested with respect to things like the Northern Ireland peace agreement during the Brexit negotiations.

Cameron's policy of offering a referendum in 2015 as an electoral tactic was a stupid political move in my opinion, he learned the wrong lesson from the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and gambled the future of the country not out of any democratic principle, but for short-term domestic expediency. The referendum was a fundamentally ill-conceived thing, it was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Conservative Party who feared a) that Cameron could not maintain discipline over the right of the party and b) that the Conservatives would bleed voters to Nigel Farage's then-party UKIP to the right.

I'm not opposed to voting on EU membership in general, but the way the actual referendum was conducted was poor and it's increasingly clear that Russia attempted to interfere with it as well. Compare it to the Scottish referendum which was pretty well-conceived, the Brexit referendum looks amateurish in comparison. The reason is because it had very little to do with the government suddenly sprouting a love of participatory democracy, and everything to do with Cameron thinking that because he had won one referendum and ostensibly stopped the Scottish nationalists for a generation he could do the same to UKIP and the right of his own party.

In my view the vote should have been held, a democracy is only a democracy if it's allowed to make potentially harmful decisions for itself. However it should not have been rushed into being with zero regard for how it might test the constitution or what a leave vote actually meant, in my view the consequences of a leave vote should have been characterised and defined well in advance; all the debate between 'hard Brexit' or 'soft Brexit' should have happened before the date of the vote was set. It also should have been more credibly secured against Russian influence in light of the threats to democratic integrity that were new at the time, the government appears to have been genuinely lax on this front. They couldn't have carried it out in a more division-generating way if they'd been trying in my opinion, and it's because they rushed it for risky party-political reasons.

> And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.

This fact is why I think regardless of governing ideology, it's in the interests of any government to not write off wide-spread destitution and inequality as merely the cost of participating in a global economy. Even the Romans two thousand years before us understood all regimes require their bread and circuses, and the first one is the more important of the two.

As a Briton it's a particularly frustrating time to live here. We have wasted the 'peace dividend' on luxury policies like giving incumbent homeowners massive regulatory power to constrain the housing supply with lots of harmful knock-on effects, putting economic stupidity like Brexit to a constitution-breaking and divisive referendum, and harmfully constraining the energy supply by letting every self-interested QUANGO and NIMBY block renewable/nuclear power and the associated infrastructure. We spent more on the paperwork before a single shovel entered the ground on a tunnel under the Thames than Norway did building the longest road tunnel in the world. We cannot continue enacting nonsense policies like this and expecting everyone to muddle through as things get bleaker and bleaker, it'll come to a head one day and when it does it'll be destabilising.

Economic prosperity, or at the very least not having lost decade after lost decade, is necessary to avoid more authoritarian forms of politics coming to power.

I've got the Bigme Hibreak Pro, I've de-googled mine but it's not a necessary thing to do if you don't want to.

I have a monochrome e-ink phone as my main portable device, I'm a huge fan of it. Completely cured me of Instagram and short-form video, it really does undo a lot of dopamine-seeking dark patterns. It's a cool aesthetic in itself too, a bit retrofuturistic.

Honestly I'm very sad that the AM broadcast bands (for those unaware there's two in Europe: long wave and medium wave) have been allowed to fall out of use in the UK without regulatory reform. Fair enough the BBC and commercial broadcasters don't want it any more, Absolute Radio stopped on AM because the fine from Ofcom was actually less than running the transmitter estate for example, but there's no reason community/heritage efforts like Radio Caroline need to be subject to a burdensome licensing regime from an era AM was big business when their band is currently almost dead. In my view we should do the opposite, the whole band should be opened to hobbyist broadcasters for a nominal fee and a power limit of a few hundred watts; it's not like most people have the space to put up an aerial that'll go very far on AM.

It feels very wasteful of a scarce resource to leave this spectrum abandoned, especially when it has interesting properties.

Claude's 'nanny knows best' recalcitrance towards any sort of defensive security task is driving me away from Anthropic as a customer. GLM doesn't give me this nonsense, DeepSeek doesn't give me this nonsense; as you say Anthropic's silly paternalism around security prevents nothing in practice, it's just a burdensome morality-laundering tax on everyone's time and lifeblood.

Also imagine having the gall to push a class of technology on the world that dramatically drives up the number of attacks, then refusing to allow said products to be used defensively to avoid the consequences. Who do these people actually think they're kidding?

Dataset of one, but I am struggling to quit sublingual nicotine after using it to quit vaping, which I used to quit smoking. Nicotine in any form is intensely moreish in my view.

I'm not being funny, but how do you expect to find a receptive audience for your belief system when you apparently write off a variety of audiences as 'sneering POSs' who are out to get you from the start?

> It could really have decided the TV show was so bad no one should see it.

Fair play to the vendor of the agent if that were true, they've invented a model which instead of producing slop goes around erasing it. I approve!

I saw a video at some point of someone building one of these, I'm not sure it would have worked terribly well for actual use in the outdoors but the sound quality was much better than I expected at close range. I wonder how you defend against this, short of having your important meetings in depressing windowless basements?

I suspect this varies a lot internationally, in the UK we have a habit of setting up mixed-gender, multi-ethnic, and orientation-diverse teams of middle to upper-middle class Oxbridge PPE graduates in politics and getting limited benefits to cognitive diversity in the process.

Out of interest, what is it about either statements that you consider flawed? Genuinely asking, both of them make sweeping generalisations sure but both of them are statements which may be examined quite sensibly in my view.

The first I would agree with, but more because that's their nature as current elite incumbents than because they are capital owners specifically; I would argue the current state of affairs is merely an example of the general case. I do not think it is an illegitimately-argued point, although I would argue it differently myself. We have indeed seen a long history of divide and rule tactics from incumbent capital owners.

The second I would disagree with as a general classification of communists which are a pretty diverse category of political belief, but it is absolutely a failure mode of certain Marxist-Leninist systems. We need only look at the USSR's Russification policies and efforts like the New Soviet Man to know that central overriding of people's identities has shown up in communist states. Again I think this is explained as much by 'empires do empire things in the cultural sphere' as a specific flaw of communism in general, but I don't think the point is in itself invalidly argued it just lacks nuance and specificity.

The UK learned the exact wrong lesson from Suez in my view, it learned it must never get on the wrong side of Washington when the correct lesson to learn was that it must never be dependent on Washington. France provides an interesting counterfactual here.