Tim

Honestly, if I thought most homeschooled kids were “learning … from very knowledgeable people” I might find it less disturbing, but the reality is most of them are learning from religious zealots, conspiracy theorists, or other fruitloops who think going to a proper school will make them catch the gay. It creates a self-perpetuating underclass, and the parents should be locked up for child abuse long before the diddling starts.

Because you can drop a few people with parachutes who can move the large heavy things? Plus it’s a lot quicker if you’re not expecting any warning.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the first warning sign of a society heading for collapse is when “home schooling” becomes normalised, instead of being prima facie evidence that the kids are being abused and should be immediately taken into care.

Isn’t that what I wrote?

It’s an imperfect mitigation, though - the typical fuse in the plug is 13A, so you only need two fully loaded sockets and you’re already in trouble. Fortunately these days nobody is plugging in 3-bar electric fires or immersion heaters, and it’s quite hard to find those kinds of loads outside the kitchen, so it’s less of a practical issue, sure. (This is also why UK electrical code recommends that any load greater than 2kW should be given its own radial instead of being plugged into the ringmain. It’s not unusual for the kitchen to be on a dedicated radial (or two) even if the rest of the house is on rings.)

(You could instantly make UK wiring a lot safer by just eliminating the over-rating of the breakers - i.e. if you have a 24A ring, put a 24A breaker on it. In the olden days that would probably have caused nuisance trips (3-bar fires and all,) but these days I doubt anyone would notice.)

Easier, but more expensive. The driver for the ringmain system was to save money (& copper) by using less & cheaper cable in the walls than an equivalent radial layout (as used everywhere else in the world.) It has half as many fuses and uses less wire than radials, with the only downsides being risk of fire and some horrible undetectable failure modes - what’s not to love?

(e.g. Undetectable failure: if there is a break in the cable in the wall (bad DIY, say,) everything still works - because although you broke the ring, the other end of each half is still connected, and all your appliances still work. So now you have two 24A radials in your walls, connected to a 32A breaker, and nothing stopping one of those cables being overloaded (if the break is nearer one end than the middle, it’s practically guaranteed that the longer half is overloaded.) Horrible design.)

They are also weirdly patriotic about their plugs. Suggesting that BS1363 was driven by necessity of poor wiring standards rather than being a gift from God to her chosen people is tantamount to standing in the street and pissing on the Union Jack.

(Source: Am British. Well, was. BS1363 plugs are very nice. But honestly, Schuko is fine as well. They’re just plugs.)

That is not why UK plugs have a fuse in them. UK plugs have a fuse in them because the wiring standards date from a time when the UK was trying to save money and copper because of the war, so they allow for the fuse in the breaker panel to be higher rated than the actual wiring in the wall.

The fuse in the plug is to prevent a broken device, or overloaded power strip, drawing the full current the breaker will allow, causing the in-wall wiring and/or appliance cables to burn.

It’s a terrible design. [ETA: Ringmains/UK domestic electrical distribution are a terrible design, I mean. The BS1363 plug/socket is a nice design driven by compensating for that.]

The UK though has the added spice of the uniquely unsafe ringmain wiring standard, in which 24A cable in the wall is protected by a 32A breaker at the distribution panel. It’s only “safe” if the load is evenly balanced around the ring, and the ring isn’t broken (that’s why UK plugs need fuses in them - to make it harder to severely unbalance the ring by pulling 32A out of a single socket, and equally to try and protect the appliance cable if a short or similar tries to.)

I’ve not sat down with a pen and paper to work out how having a generator somewhere on the ring affects things - presumably the authorities have…

If you’ve seen how badly specified, documented and behaved OpenAI’s APIs are, you’d guess this was already the case.

I don’t see the pitchfork mob making that distinction. (And I think you are severely underestimating the capability of, say, the qwen-3.5 models locally hosted with a good CLI agent like Mistral Vibe.)

Personally, I run them on my own hardware, and am trying to learn to use and supervise them appropriately. The things they are good for they are amazing at. And yeah, they are also often mendacious and unreliable with the possibility of going rogue - but no more than any junior developer or intern. If you can’t manage an AI, you can’t manage hires either - which for a hobbyist is just fine of course, but if you’re a professional it’s not a good look.

You either learn to ride the wave, or you let it drown you. Shaking your fists at the tsumani though is a sure fire route to involuntary early retirement.

You’re exactly right.

I started my career writing assembly code, by hand, for money; I did not throw my toys out of the cot when that ceased to be a particularly useful skill. I spent a great deal of my career rawdogging malloc(), but then managed runtimes came along… And I also didn’t quit because I didn’t like having training wheels forced on me. Because I understood that writing code was never my job, solving problems was and code was just one of the tools at my disposal to do so.

AI is another tool. It’s fantastically useful in the right pair of hands. Any developer who refuses to use it is simply going to be left behind - and that’s ok, because those people are not software engineers, they’re coders with a hobby - and I’d never expect to tell someone how to enjoy their hobby. But nobody should expect to be paid for it.

I ain’t reading all that… All I can say is, sync (both ways) with Keepass & Nextcloud on Android works just fine for me.

What’s the problem with Nextcloud? I use KeepassDX (on android, KeepassXC on desktop) with the database on Nextcloud and don’t have any problem syncing.

Some slot machines do. Some slot machines have a fixed wager. Does that make them not gambling?

And I’m not sure what the relevance of casinos having more than one type of gambling is. I’ve worked in the industry more than 30 years, and not once do I remember a regulator saying “it’s OK, as long as you only do one of these things, you don’t need a license.”

You seem to be trying to define sports wagering as the only thing that qualifies as ‘gambling’. Casinos would like a word (or actually, they probably wouldn’t, they’d love this world of yours where casino games are apparently not gambling.)

(And trust me, if all that was required for a slot machine to avoid gambling regulations was “you always get something back”, they’d all be paying 1c or giving you a discount voucher for your next Happy Meal on every losing spin tomorrow.)

find . -name LICENSE.md -print

There, arduous search complete.

I thought it was well known/understood that the server component was how Joplin pays their wages, and thus being under a different license is hardly a big shock; it’s entirely optional, and the fact they’re still sharing the source seems like a good thing rather than bad.

As for “they could just keep adding licenses!!!” Well, yeah, but so could any project. Apache could stick a proprietary license deep in a folder of httpd tomorrow and unless you were looking, you’d never know. Even a GPL project could incorporate a proprietary licensed component tomorrow provided it wasn’t linked into the binary/was a separate piece of software - like, say, the server component of Joplin. You just trust that they won’t, and/or properly check changes whenever you pull a new release like you were supposed to be doing anyway for security (hahaha, ok, no you weren’t,) or trust that if they did pull shenanigans it would be ‘news’ and you would hear about it.

That Joplin is open about it, and they retain the original licenses of FOSS they have incorporated instead of deleting/hiding the original license is a good thing. I wish more did it.

Actually it was Sequoia that was the last straw for me to get rid of most of my Macs (replaced them with Linux machines in the main - I was just so sick of Apple trying to turn the OS into a phone while not fixing basic known bugs that have been around for years - like forgetting external display layouts one in ten boots, not restarting external drives properly after sleep, and the finder being, well, everything about the finder…) And constantly having to fight with crappy “oh, today all your builds are going to fail because I’ve decided ld.so isn’t trusted any more” locked down platform nonsense. And creeping “you don’t need to know where your files are stored, they’re In The Cloud, stop asking for a file dialog (and that’s why we’ll never fix the finder btw)” type crap from the ever increasing number of un-uninstallable crapware applications wasting disk space with every update…

But yeah, you’re right - the visual horrorshow that is Tahoe was the trigger to finally give Asahi a try on my last remaining Mac.

Shame really; until a couple of years ago I’d had exclusively Macs for desktops & laptops since the late 90s (from the lovely Powerbook G3 Lombard on.)

It would be quite nice if they added some MacOS features back to MacOS instead of trying desperately to turn it into a mobile phone OS.

That said, Sequoia is so objectively awful it finally gave me the kick I needed to nuke my MacBook Air and install Asahi, and I’m genuinely really impressed. The only shame is having to waste 80gb of disk for a MacOS partition that I’ll never use, but otherwise it’s actually good enough to be a daily driver.

Coding is a solved problem; people with zero understanding can do it by copypasta from stack overflow, and similarly skilled LLMs can do it right now, cheaper. If you’re a “coder”, you have a lovely hobby but no career. Sorry.

If you’re a software engineer though, you have nothing to fear from current LLMs. But there is much more chance of LeCun’s models learning engineering - i.e. problem solving, in which writing code is just one of the tools, and not even the most important one - through physical experience and not just text. It is, after all, how all the software engineers today did the vast majority of their learning.