100 suns

One of the great dreams of the internet is that people who do office jobs will be able to, by and large, work from anywhere. I don't think it was clear in March that the infrastructure or the people were ready for this dream. But, wonderfully, it turns out they were: the great dream came true and now many millions of people in the UK will be able to work from anywhere once CV19 is over, and won't need to spend hours a day commuting. Enlightened companies will soon realise that they can provid...

Holidaymakers will face 'chaos and hardship' if coronavirus quarantine measures are reintroduced for those arriving in the UK from Portugal, a travel industry leader has warned. – BBC news Forgive me for being heartless but you chose to go on holiday during a pandemic and not only that but you chose to go on holiday abroad. Obviously, when you chose to do that, you decided that the risk of getting quarantined on your return, or even stuck in Portugal, was something you were happy with. Cer...

While claiming to be the 'law & order' president, Trump is, of course, intentionally trying to cause a breakdown in law & order so that people will vote for him to restore it. On whose watch did that breakdown occur? ...

Yes, quitting from Facebook, or Twitter, or Google will mean you have to find another job or be poorer than you are now, or both. But not quitting means people will die: this should not be a hard decision to make, should it? And you have all these really desirable skills, after all: you know how to build hugely scalable computing systems, how to do all this fancy AI-big-data cleverness: you're not going to be out of a job for long, are you? Of course, you won't quit. You might tell your frie...

At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services? Anti semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services. – Facebook employee Here's the thing: if you, a Facebook employee, want to stop this evil then fucking quit already. How hard can it be? If you don't quit, you are supporting what Facebook stands for, which is white supremacism and worse. And if you support racism, you are a racist. Stop whining, just fucking quit. ...

Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms. – The Register Does this make Apple the good people now? No, it doesn't. But it might make them the least bad people. Apple have what I call a first-order business model: you pay them for their expensive hardware and expensive services, and in return they wor...

I realised that there is an easier way of describing the difference between the several versions of 'plain text' email. Three definitions of 'plain text' What people want to transmit by email is generally some sequence of graphemes, possibly together with ancillary data, such as how they are to be laid out, related images, sounds, and so on. Graphemes are mostly the same as characters, but not completely so: to understand this requires understanding Unicode, which I suspect almost no-one does...

Sarah Novotny is worried about the reliance of the Linux kernel development process on plain text email. Inevitably a lot of people are sniping at her1, because 'it's easy to configure email clients to use plain text'. She is, however, right. The reason that she is right is that 'plain text' now has two different meanings. The first, newer, meaning is now the most common one, which is that 'plain text' means that the you can only type text – there is no support for tables, boldface or anyth...

I didn't understand this until today. In some of the more recent wars the US has lost fought, there has been a serious problem that people kept blowing them up using improvised explosive devices. To deal with this problem they built 'Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected' vehicles, or MRAPs. These are designed to make IEDs survivable, and they probably do so. MRAPs weigh from approximately 14 to 18 tonnes and they're around 3 metres high. They cost an enormous amount of money: from $500,000 and $...

We live in a world where we have to have a huge fight to persuade people to take some trivial action to reduce an immediate and very obvious risk to them and others, and even then a lot of them refuse to wear masks because, oh I don't know why because. What's the chance that we're going to persuade people to take some fairly non-trivial action to reduce a risk which will kill mostly their children and grandchildren, about whom they only pretend to care. And the people it's killing now? Well t...

The ice caps are melting, and California is on fire, again. If we had done nothing, CV19 would kill perhaps 70 million people. If we do nothing, climate change will kill perhaps 5 billion or more people. And nothing is what we are doing. But we don't need to worry about climate change: It will, almost entirely, kill only future people, not us. And the people it's already killing? Well, they're just poor people with skins the wrong colour who live far away. Of course we pretend to care abo...

All he wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this. – Maryanne Trump Barry ...

That, although it is getting there, it's not dark yet. And, just possibly it may not get dark. ...

omnium consensu capax imperii, nisi imperasset – Tacitus ...

He's not perfect, obviously. But when the alternative is Trump and a descent into authoritarianism and, probably, fascism then, really, there is no alternative. ...

The UK is governed by a malign Dunning-Kruger government: a group of people so incompetent that they don't realise how incompetent they are, led by Dominic Cummings: a low-level crank who has persuaded both himself and them (easy to persuade them) that he is a genius. Because they are so incompetent their useless plans – or lack of plans – fail, predictably and repeatedly. Because they think they are brilliant, or at least that they are led by a genius, this makes no sense to them: the great C...

In the past 20 years, over 60 billion words of fan fiction have been written and posted on Fanfiction.net, the world’s largest repository. The site’s 10 million members have collectively authored a corpus about three-quarters the size of the entirety of published English-language fiction. This outpouring of creativity has been generated primarily by young people, with a median age of 15.5. – Cecilia Aragon, MIT Technology Review Yes, you read that right: people with a median age of just over...

If I am right and the only effective way to defeat Trump will be to vote in person as he will have destroyed the USPS, then defeating Trump means that many people will die. This is a terrible cost to pay to win an election, and it is a terrible choice for people to make, especially as the risk you take by voting in person is mostly a risk to other people. To defeat the person who cares only about himself people have to behave, for a moment, like people who care only about themselves. But it's...

Probably, a good way for people who don't want Trump to steal the election in November to do so is to vote in person. Which, of course, will kill people. ...

I think that Trump will win in November. He won't win democratically: he will win by openly subverting democracy. He is already doing this by refusing funds to the USPS with the explicit aim of preventing people voting by post1. Together with his successful campaign to downplay the dangers of CV19 to his supporters, this means that, while most Trump supporters will vote in person, Biden's supporters will be far less likely to do that, and thus fewer of their votes will count. This strategy wi...

Old physicists Physicists1 – usually old physicists – are famous for turning up in other fields and assuming that, because physics is hard and they – as physicists – are therefore smart, those other, lesser, fields must be simple and the people who work in them mere buffoons, labouring in the dark and unknowingly waiting to be enlightened by the great power of physics and the great intelligence of physicists. This does not endear them to people who work in these other fields: partly bec...

Gavin Williamson is worried that adjusting exam grades will result in people being promoted beyond their competence. People who have been promoted beyond their competence is something of which he has deep personal experience, being part of a government composed almost entirely of such people: notably him. If only he was smart enough to realise this. The UK is so fucked: the only thing that prevents us being the laughing-stock of the world is the US. ...

So, OK, the operas are not explicitly antisemitic. Not explicitly. But, you know, it just might be the case that operas about Germanised versions of Norse gods are at least a little bit problematic for some people. And, just in case you weren't aware, that kind of mythology has been used by people who were extremely antisemitic to put it rather mildly, and that mythology is still still used by such people today (just do a few searches ... but do them in a private browser because you really don't...

http://n-gate.com/software/2017/07/12/0/ Quite. I also make jam, which I sell to people in unsealed jars. I mean, it's sterile when it leaves me: I can certify this: my jam-making systems are most secure. And the whole installing-a-lid thing is really a pain to do and takes fractions of a second per jar. After all, it's really not my problem if opportunistic nasties sneak in and breed in it in transit so that what reaches people is not jam but some horrid bacterial stew. Anyone who cons...

Years of education are not fungible: if a person misses a year of education when they are, say, 6 then they can't really make it up when you are 8, because 6-year-olds and 8-year-olds are hugely different. This disadvantage generally goes down with age. So if CV19 means that children – especially young children – miss significant amounts of education, the consequences will be severe for them, and some of those consequences will last the whole of their lives. The consequences of missing formal...

The nice thing about exponential processes is that everything stays the same. If, a year ago, I could assume that processing power would double during the development of my bloated application, I can assume that now as well, so long as processing power keeps increasing exponentially with time. This is why it's so hard for people to deal with the ending of exponential processes: they son't deal with change very well. It's also why the whole 'singularity' thing is junk: exponential processes d...

'Information wants to be free'1 is a glib lie with horrible consequences. Let's take the example of journalism. Journalists need to make a living. Since what they produce is information, in the form of journalism, they need to get paid for the production of it, somehow. The information they create is, in fact, not free to create, and when people refuse to pay for it this means that the journalists don't get paid for what they do. Well, perhaps they can get paid some other way? Perhaps, for...

It's kind of depressing that I've just spent a couple of hours working out just which toxic googlebook cookies I need to temporarily allow in order to get the site of a newspaper which regularly campaigns against the awfulness of these companies to allow me to log in. ...

A good picture may well be worth a thousand words, but on the internet even a bad picture costs tens of thousands of words. (Paraphrasing Erik Naggum) ...

A word is autological if it describes itself. 'Autological' is autological. All words are either autological or heterological, except one. ...