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VikingMiner

Re:Online Safety Act: What went wrong? on Friday August 01, 2025 @02:46PM (#44760783)
It isn't a swipe. He is literally engaging in the same thinking. What else am I supposed to say?
Re:Online Safety Act: What went wrong? on Friday August 01, 2025 @02:10PM (#44760341)
No I didn't. I said there was many different types of knives in the kitchen and they have different usages.
Re:Online Safety Act: What went wrong? on Friday August 01, 2025 @01:32PM (#44759791)
I too have watched Brass Eye, and they literally had MPs telling people about the dangers of "cake" in a previous episode. It showed that MPs and TV celebrities would literally say anything Anchorman style if it was put on a teleprompter / script in front of them. They are nothing other than paid actors.

While I don't believe everyone in Parliament is a moron. I think more than enough of them are moronic, out of touch, malicious or home combination of the three for it to be a problem.

Generally the only solution presented for any issue in the UK is banning something. There is no other course of action that they can envisage. So you end up in a false dichotomy, discussing whether something should be banned or not. There is no discussion why the issue is happening in the first place, only whether <thing> should be banned or not.

Re:Online Safety Act: What went wrong? on Friday August 01, 2025 @12:34PM (#44759146)
Re:Online Safety Act: What went wrong? on Friday August 01, 2025 @12:33PM (#44759127)
> Nonsense. Promoting the petition and keeping talking about the law is one of the most effective things that can be done to make life uncomfortable for the politicians who are responsible for this mess.

They frequently ignore these petitions, especially when it comes to privacy, freedom of speech, surveillance etc.

When you do get a response back from these petitions, they are frequently either don't address the issue properly or you get some gaslighting response back.

My pessimism has be undefeated thus far.

> More pressure is needed and politicians will have to face journalists asking unpleasant questions when people continue to complain.

I am sorry this is utterly naive. Have you've seen the responses from Politicians so far? They basically call anyone that opposes them a paedophile.

I wouldn't put any faith in the journalists either. Most either work for the state directly or they have corporate masters.

Re:Online Safety Act: What went wrong? on Friday August 01, 2025 @12:19PM (#44758950)
[flagged]
Re:Online Safety Act: What went wrong? on Friday August 01, 2025 @12:04PM (#44758775)
> As someone who is clumsy and easily distracted, I have such a kitchen knife. They are commonly available. It works absolutely fine and it has three times minimised an injury that would have been nasty.

I am clumsy, I am dyspraxic actually. I managed to learn how to handle a knife properly. Not sure why you can't, but different people have different abilities I suppose.

However that shouldn't preclude me (or anyone else who is law abiding) from buying a knife with a pointy bit on the end. I have never thought about stabbing anyone. I am not a violent individual and I can handle dangerous tooling responsibly.

> The point of a knife is only needed in a handful of applications. Most knives do not need to be able to stab, at all.

False. I use it all the time actually. It is insanely useful for getting into annoying plastic wrappers, piercing the skin of fruit / veg / meat, which is all frequently done in any normal kitchen. Sometimes when I can't find my Stanley knife, I use it to get through parcel tape on packages.

BTW you are aware there are different knives in the kitchen for different uses right? You don't use the bread knife to cut veg, and you don't use a butter knife to eat steak. God forbid you find out about a carving fork.

I really shouldn't need to explain this, but here we are.

> And combined with rules on the lengths of blades that do have a point, this idea could genuinely be part of reducing knife crime (especially among the youngest).

No it can't be. You are believing in the same stupid delusion the MPs that suggested such things are suffering from.

Anyone (and I mean almost anyone) can make a shiv. IIRC Chimpanzees can make shivs. Not even in super max prisons can they stop prisoners from making shivs.

There are still shootings in the UK (guns are heavily restricted). I would wager there in an dingy industrial estates somewhere, there are guns being manufactured illegally. I can 3D print a bloody gun if I wanted to.

If you can't stop people making guns (which are much more difficult to make), how the hell are you going to stop people making knives/shivs?

The issue isn't someone having access to a weapon. isn't the blade or access to them. The root cause of violence is something else.

Re:Online Safety Act: What went wrong? on Friday August 01, 2025 @11:20AM (#44758138)
> In reality, this wouldn’t happen, because, generally, people understand that stabbings are a cultural issue, rather than a technical one

Many UK MPs don't understand this. I've heard of MPs making (moronic) suggestions such as selling kitchen knives without the point on it. I've literally seen this advertised as a solution on the news.

For whatever reason they don't seem to understand that literally anyone can make a shiv.

Re:Online Safety Act: What went wrong? on Friday August 01, 2025 @11:07AM (#44757927)
The whole country could sign that petition and it will be ignored. There is no legal/political solution to this. The sooner people accept that the better.
I didn't have someone looking over my shoulder constantly while I was solving A-level Maths proofs. Which is what they are typically asking you to do.
The mistake you are making is that you are taking a LinkedIn post at face value. The LinkedIn post is rage/engagement bait.

The problems are usually harder e.g. write a Roman Numeral Converter in 25 minutes that satisfies these tests. Just setting up a test project in Visual Studio and then installing the Nuget packages can take few minutes (You will need to install XUnit/NUnit. So in reality you only have 20 minutes to do it).

One of the ones I had. I didn't understand. I sent the test to several other contractors I know after snapping a screenshot. I literally said "Am I being dumb?" to the group and all of them said said they didn't understand it either.

Sometimes the machine isn't setup the way you are used to, different version of the IDE, keyboard bindings are wrong. So you end up fighting the IDE setup or faffing with settings in the interview.

Then some of the reasons your code is rejected (especially TDD places) is because you didn't use some over-engineered language features e.g I had feedback on some code where I didn't use some Functional Enumerator Constructor thingy. Apparently using a foreach loop is too simple.

All of this adds to your stress level.

Some of this I swear is to see how you act "stressed".

2 years ago given a coding assessment "Roman Numeral Conversion". Was given a set of test cases. I got near the solution. I think if I had another 5-10 minutes I would have solved it fine. Sat down that evening with the same test cases and did it from scratch in 20 minutes.

5 years ago, I didn't get a job because I while I did well technically. The reason for the rejection was that I appeared "stressed" while being assessed. What do they expect?

10 years ago. I walked out of an interview essentially after about 10 minutes. The interviewer(s) interrupted me the moment I started writing any code, constantly interrupting my train of thought. I think it was intentionally done to irritate me. I've had companies play these stupid games in interviews before.

Re:How to Secure a Linux Server on Friday August 01, 2025 @08:36AM (#44755858)
It has the benefit of banning bots that hammer you SSH trying to log in. Even if password auth is disabled. I've had friends that setup a small VPS and they've been hammered by bots, which can use a lot of resource on a £5/£10 VPS. Told them to install fail2ban, and the issue was solved in a few minutes.

Good security is about having multiple layers of defense. Fail2Ban protection is one of those layers.

Re:Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++ on Thursday July 31, 2025 @09:26PM (#44752105)
IMO it is far easier to read this:

    function add(a: i32, b: i32): i32 {
        return a + b;
    }
Than the example you provided and it is approximately the same length. I used to arrow functions everywhere in TS/JS and it made it difficult to read IME, and there was zero benefit. They are find for things like event handlers, promises chains etc. But I'd rather just use function when I don't have to worry about the value of this.
The large tech companies benefited immensely from relative few regulations in the 2000-2010s. Once they are established, they are happy to comply with regulations which will make it more difficult for competitor to even exist since complying with regulations is often prohibitively expensive for new player.

It is known colloquially as "Pulling up the ladder behind you".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_alright,_Jack

Re:The EU could be scanning your chats by October 2025 on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @08:13AM (#44722317)
No it isn't a "generous interpretation". That is literally what people are talking about. You seem to be taking very uncharitable interpretation while insinuating they are some sort of unrepentant racist. I see no evidence of that.
Re:The EU could be scanning your chats by October 2025 on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @06:52AM (#44721671)
Partly. But it isn't necessarily Xenophobia. Those who have different cultures happen to be typically immigrants, but not always.

e.g. In Northern Ireland (and parts of Scotland) there were clashes between Protestants and Catholics. I used to see them all the time on the news when I was a kid. There are two distinct groups (both Christian) that have not co-existed very well historically. I don't know if you would call them different cultures but they are distinct enough to cause a schism.

If you have immigration into one country. These people with different cultures, have different values. That creates a schism between them and the natives.

e.g. You can see this in Spain between British Expats and Spanish Nationals. The British Expats essentially live in particular areas and they are their own subculture in Spain (I know I was one). I lived the entire time in Spain learning nothing more than being able to order Beer, Lunch, Taxi and working out how to use the automated bill payment machine at the BBVA.

The UCI weight limit still seems to be in place. Disc brakes have been allowed since 2018 it seems.
Re:The EU could be scanning your chats by October 2025 on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @06:19AM (#44721449)
The irony is that they cannot deal with an insurgency if it was organised offline or via secure messaging platforms. They simply don't have the man power to deal with it. At the moment only a few people realise this, if that changes and any insurgent activity actually do halfway decent OPSEC they are finished.