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100 suns

A machine made of wood, metal, paint, bone and magic

A theory

I'm still very puzzled by what the UK junta government is trying to achieve. Here's a theory. While I think it's safe to say they have no long-term plans because they're not smart enough to do long-term planning, they do have the standard fascist authoritarian populist short-term plan, which is simple: blame other people. Blame foreigners, blame the gypsies, blame the Jews or the Muslims, blame remainers, blame experts, blame intellectuals, but blame someone else. So they need someone to ...
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The rule of law

If I see the rule of law being broken in a way that I find unacceptable then, of course, I will go. – Robert Buckland, UK Justice Secretary So if the law is broken in a way you find acceptable, why then, that's OK is it? I'll bear that in mind, then: in future I'll only break the law if I think that I'm doing it in a way that I find acceptable. ...
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Theory of mind

As recorded, [Trump's statement that he wanted to 'play down' CV19 early in 2020] reads like a cold-blooded confession that Trump intentionally concealed deadly knowledge at a time—February and March—when that knowledge could have saved lives. But you can reach that conclusion only if you believe that Trump knows things the way fully rational people know them: as statements about reality that exist independently from the speaker. Trump’s mind does not work that way. He does not observe the worl...
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Their law

The English UK government is intentionally breaking the law. But of course it will expect the people it governs – especially those who are not English – to obey the rules it sets for them: not because they are laws, which count for nothing, but simply because it has power over the people it governs. There is a name for this form of government: tyranny. ...
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Rule by idiot

In 2016, Donald Trump's Twitter password was yourefired: two English words with no substitutions and in a single case. Two English words which would be rather easy to guess for anyone who knew anything about him. This is known because of the 2012 Linkedin leak: Donald Trump has (or had, in 2012) a Linkedin account, and the unsalted SHA-1 hash (07b8938319c267dcdb501665220204bbde87bf1d) of his LinkedIn password was included in the leak. It is easy to verify that the password above hashes to thi...
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Rule by toddler

The UK government admits that it is planning to intentionally break international law. It is staggering to see a British minister brazenly admit to Parliament that the government intends to breach international law. Yet that is what Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, did this week – even if he sought to qualify the move as "very specific and limited". [...] As EU leaders are already asking, how can they do a trade deal with a country that is talking of ripping up a treaty it agree...
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A bit of smoke in the air

The skies are orange in California, but it's 'just a bit of smoke in the air', right? CV19 is a much worse problem. It's not. CV19 might kill 1 person in 100 as a plausible worst case, so 70 million people. And it will go away: there will be a vaccine almost certainly (and there will be other pandemics of course, and they will kill people too). Climate change as a plausible worst case might kill 9 people in 10 – more than 6 billion people – and that 'bit of smoke in the air' is an early s...
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Tantrum diplomacy

So the UK has apparently not just torn up the legal agreement it made with the EU. For which read: the UK has, in fact, just torn up the legal agreement it made with the EU and shown the world exactly what its word is worth: nothing. Populist governments: the spoiled three-year-old children of international diplomacy. ...
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What do they want?

The UK's government is driving the UK off a cliff. What do they think they are doing? In the case of Trump this is easy to answer: he wants to be dictator, for his family to rule after him, and given his vast corruption he is completely terrified about what will happen to him if he loses power and the protections that come with it. For the UK the conspiracy theorists' answer is that Cummings, Johnson and the tories wish to simply extract all of the money from the UK as the tories ever have ...
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The myth of the lone genius

One of the reasons why Stephen Wolfram's crankery is taken seriously by reviewers is the myth of the lone genius: the idea of some brilliant man – and it is always a man, of course – who spends years toiling in seclusion to come up with a theory which changes the world. The exemplar of this is Einstein: didn't he work, alone, on relativity while doing a day job as a patent clerk, only to publish the theory out of the blue in 1905? Well, he did work as a patent clerk, but that's the sort of thi...
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Stephen Wolfram is a crank

There is no doubt that Stephen Wolfram is extremely clever1. Sadly there is also no doubt that he is a crank. He may, in fact be the best example I know of why cranks are not just stupid people who think they are clever: cranks can be – and very often are – clever people. As I wrote yesterday cranks don't realise when they don't understand something: for cranks, there are no known unknowns, all unknowns are unknown. [...] One group of people who very often become cranks are narcissists. I...
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What it means to be a crank

Cranks are not just stupid people who think they are clever: cranks can be – and very often are – clever people. The important thing about cranks is that cranks don't realise when they don't understand something: for cranks, there are no known unknowns, all unknowns are unknown. The reason why this definition works is that when a crank approaches some field which they don't understand in some critical way then they fail to recognise that they don't understand what they are doing, and blunde...
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Godwin

I remember when Godwin's law was a new thing1, and how clearly right it was: how obviously stupid and offensive it was to compare people and injustices to the monstrous horror that was fascism and the Nazis. We should all, instead, be thankful that the horror was in the past, and use language more carefully for the relatively tiny horrors of the late 20th century. And suddenly not. Suddenly calling people fascists is not stupid hyperbole, because there are real fascists – there are possibly f...
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Analytic

Analytic functions are both infinitely differentiable and have a Taylor series which converges in some neighbourhood of every point. I think it's possible to argue that the functions of physics should not only be sufficiently differentiable, but analytic. The reason for thinking this – well, the reason I think it – is that I think these approximation techniques correspond to the measurements we can make: you can measure the position of something, say, and then by measuring the change in positi...
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What are the chances

that the US election on November 3 happens without serious violence or worse – perhaps much worse? I guess not zero, but not much more than zero. ...
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Run from the future

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...
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Chaos and hardship

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...
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The biggest lie

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? ...
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Only following orders

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...
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Just quit

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. ...
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The least bad

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...
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Plain text again

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...
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Plain text

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...
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MRAP

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 $...
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Ten years too late

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...
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While we were distracted

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...
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He has no principles

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 ...
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Hard to remember

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

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

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. ...
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