I thought the route still hadn’t been finalised for the northern leg of HS2. Also high speed means you’re less flexible, as you need to go in a straighter line than normal rail.

I agree that it seems unlikely that the extra effort to complete the northern leg of HS2 would be greater than that of starting from scratch, but I’ve been surprised before.

Thanks, for computing some useful statistics! As much as I believe the implied hypothesis that working at Amazon is bad for one’s health, I think the guardian intentionally tried to present the largest number possible with no context.

Frankly, “Amazon warehouse employees 10x more likely to need an ambulance” is a more impactful headline anyway.

Please somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I really don’t find the “chip makers don’t have to pay licence fees” a compelling argument that RISC-V is good for the consumer. Theres only a few foundries capable of making CPUs, and the desktop market seems incredibly hard to break into.

I imagine it’s likely that the cost of ISA licencing isn’t what’s holding back competition in the CPU space, but rather its a good old fashioned duopoly combined with a generally high cost of entry.

Of course, more options is better IMO, and the Linux community’s focus on FOSS should make hopping architectures much easier than on Windows or MacOS. But I’d be surprised if we see a laptop/desktop CPU based on RISC-V competing with current options anytime soon.

Am I right in thinking that the article’s main complaint, namely that the means testing excludes those too poor to retire, is wrong? You can still claim pension credit if you’re on a low income.

We have bad/corrupt governments sometimes, that doesn’t mean we should get rid of governments. (Though maybe the libertarian Fraser institute might disagree with me there.)

Firstly, I reckon it’s debatable whether having an active monarchy is a net gain financially (how much could we charge for admission to Buckingham Palace?).

But, for me at least, it’s simply a matter of principle. I believe we are all born equal, and that nobody should be given special treatment due to something as trivial as their ancestry. Having a monarchy flies directly in the face of many values I think we as a nation value deeply.

Also they have a lot of land that their great great … Grandad nicked from the Saxons and I wouldn’t mind that being nationalised.

In my experience it Just Works ™️. I spin up a distro/toolbox, compile some software (e.g. Emacs) then run the executable inside the container, and up pops the GUI window.

If you use distrobox, you can even distrobox-export desktop files, at which point a containerised gui application is practically indistinguishable from one installed on the host system

I suppose a complete history of Tory government was out of scope for what’s already a dissertation-length essay.

Actually, at the end the author begins to slightly contradict himself by arguing that (neo-)Thatcherism is the long-term objective of the conservatives. I suppose the consistent narrative is that the Tories have a long-term commitment to policies that can only ever yield short-term gains.

This does lead to the rather dire conclusion that British politics is stuck in a cycle where Labour slowly rebuilds the British state, only for the Tories to sack it the instant our fickle support for progressive government waivers.

Not that I saw. A nag screen maybe, but it was dismissible

Its just the symbol The Register uses at the end of an article. Like how some papers use a filled in square.

Kotlin targets the JVM right? I think you’d need either a port of the runtime (dalvik?) Or an api translation later a la WINE.

But I don’t actually know anything, so don’t listen to me. Having a fully Foss phone with support for the android app ecosystem would be wonderful though

I always thought that people using searx etc over duckduckgo were just gluttons for punishment. Having gone an entire morning without search, maybe now is the time to dive down that rabbit hole…

Machine learning is just gradient descent through a subset of algorithm-space

Whilst I’ve heard lots of talk that lunduke is getting increasingly politica, and I disagree quite strongly with his politics, I’ll have to agree with him here. IA did something unnecessarily risky (redistributing unauthorised copies of print books), which has more jeopardised their mission of archiving the internet.

I also agree with everyone here saying that current copyright laws are ridiculous (and not just because they are “outdated”, the Victorians had better copyright laws than we do). However, I think only the most radical overhaul of copyright law would condone what IA did, and that isn’t coming any time soon (If ever).

There’s a former apple designer on the team I think, which they’ve been leaning into hard to get the hype train rolling.

Thanks, fixed! (TIL you need the https:// bit on Lemmy)

There is, they just don’t publicise it. Actually one of my favourite features of the service tbf. Just load up a web page and all my messages are there, regardless of where they came from.

Iirc microkernels have been the future since before Linux existed. There was a bit of a flame war between Linus and the guy who wrote the MINIX kernel about how being monolithic would be the death of Linux.

GNU Hurd also wanted to show the world how good microkernels could be, but sadly never got off the ground.

I’m not saying microkernels are bad, but I do wonder if there’s some reason we don’t see them out in the wild much.

Isn’t production JavaScript usually minified/obfuscated to make it hard to read?

Also wasm is actually bytecode, which I believe has a 1:1 conversion into a text-based format called wat.

I agree with your main point though, it’s kinda creepy when you realise just how much we are expected to allow other people’s code to run on our machines.

The mention of cost has me curious. Are by-elections costly for (I’m guessing) the electoral commission to run?

I imagine the main costs involved are party funds for campaigning, but they probably see it as a proxy for the main event, so hardly money wasted. Even if it were, its not public money.