Why is stirring up conflict here beneficial though? I’m intensely critical of the current US government but me and the average American still have more in common with each-other than either of us have with our respective ruling elites in terms of material interest and daily life.

Yes their crowing about being the most democratic country on Earth is a bit silly but that doesn’t mean they deserve to become an outright plutocracy, nobody deserves that. You can object to Washington’s lofty perch in the global pecking order and to Americentrism in general without wishing ill on a whole nationality the vast majority of whom have done nothing to wrong you personally. The only thing I wish for the Americans is for them to fix their backsliding democratic institutions and to adopt a more realistic view of their country’s place in the geopolitical landscape; I don’t doubt these are goals many Americans support at this point.

Yeah it’s a bit of a stereotype but I feel privileged to live where I do on an essentially invasion-proof island with no major tectonic hazards, cheap but decent grocery prices by international standards, and I can get on a train, plane, or ferry and be in one of dozens of other countries in under a day. Brexit did screw up a lot (like importing obscure fresh food on a whim…) but it can’t actually unanchor us from Europe.

There’s a lot of structural issues and we hardly live in a utopia, in fact there’s massive own goals on housing and energy which probably won’t be fixed until NIMBY homeowners are no longer an electoral majority, but we’re too pessimistic to realise what a good hand we have geographically speaking.

I was really looking forward to my luxury German nuclear-powered car as well >:(

So this sent me down a rabbit hole and it turns out they’re basically not available in the UK full stop as a fresh fruit, even via the European importer I found thanks to Brexit. I can import it dried, or otherwise I have to make a long weekend of it in France to try it!

Reddit is a cesspool but unfortunately so is the wider media ecosystem for the most part.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Fulfilling the rule that all English sayings are either Shakespeare or the KJV.

Yeah age of sail lookouts had incredible eyesight, they had to since every minute you lost determining friend or foe was a minute you’d delay beating to quarters and running out your guns.

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Remember that the fossil fuel industry knew what was going to happen in the 1970s and lied to governments around the world to ensure our future of maximal fossil fuel burning and damn the consequences came to pass.

We have words for people who betray their country, we have words for people who betray their family, we even have words for people who betray the firm they work for every day, but we have no words for people who betray their entire species.

Not played those games but to be fair in a nuclear wasteland you would expect fresh meat and vegetables to be more radioactive than the general environment. Animals and plants can accumulate radioactive fallout, if it’s diffuse in the soil it can be more concentrated in whatever lives off that soil. Radioactive contamination often consists of caesium-137 which behaves like potassium, and strontium-90 which behaves like calcium, so you’re getting screwed by conventional biochemistry as much as nuclear physics.

This is a concern in the Chernobyl exclusion zone even now, there’s mushrooms and other forage that must be avoided for this reason.

Dylan has more good advice here, when it comes to bubbles you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!

I’m usually a rationalist but nothing can convince me that Sod’s Law isn’t somehow baked into the structure of the universe.

Yeah I fully expect not to receive a state pension in the UK, the Ponzi-like economics of it just don’t work for an aging population with a falling birth rate.

The problem is that the government which brings in sustainability measures around this will be electorally annihilated for a generation at least, so the can keeps getting kicked down the road and the likelihood of events forcing a change rather than an orderly change in plenty of time increases.

To be fair there was infrastructure then that doesn’t exist now. Most phone boxes are basically just public urinals now for example, I mean they always were but you could usually expect a phone to be in there too. People were also used to remembering numbers, but the only numbers I remember these days are my own and various landlines from my childhood which have been disconnected for over a decade as people did away with traditional landlines, then the VoIP bridge replacements which just became a way to receive international tech support scam calls more efficiently.

I personally want to see smartphones curtailed more generally; if I had absolutist power a lot of the adtech sector (at least surveillance-based behavioural recommendation algorithms) would be legislated out of existence on public health and democratic integrity grounds for example. I’d like to see e-ink smartphones become a wider market segment too, as these inherently break a lot of ‘dark patterns’ and also make short form video content less viable in favour of text content. I don’t think we can just take smartphones off kids and dump them at eighteen into the psychological manipulation engine that is the modern adtech sector without wider structural reforms to our relationship with smartphones and the internet.

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Yeah this is one thing enshittification apologists never seem to understand, they’ll claim ‘well if you don’t like ads just pay for the non-ad version, I want cheaper prices’ but the reality is no matter how much you pay there’s a mandatory side dish of enshittification.

As a Briton who is throughly bilingual in units and mixes them liberally, Fahrenheit is just about the only one that reliably confuses me. In the past tabloids would put cold temperatures in Celsius and hot temperatures in Fahrenheit to make them sound more impressive but that’s not really a thing these days.

To be fair I can kind of get it if I’d grown up with it, zero is ‘I need my foul weather gear on’ and 100 is ‘bloody hot summers day’ which on a human level beats the Celsius zero is ‘water freezes’ and 100 is ‘you are dead’ but the convenience of water freezing at zero is just too much.

Yeah it depends on the sub but for the bigger ones it’s absolutely infested, if you go to one of the subs which takes removing bots transparently like the Tumblr ones you can get a sense of the scale.

Not really, you can add a prompt to commercial LLM products to alter the persona a bit but the actual system prompt the harness is using is opaque to you. Your Claudes, Kimis, Mistrals and what have you are a polished product on top of the model, they’re not the model itself. A lot of the actual day-to-day software engineering of these things is writing a harness that’s robust enough to deal with a cantankerous non-deterministic pile of linear algebra that doesn’t know the difference between ‘looks good’ and ‘is good’.

I’ll be honest, I spoke in txtspk because SMS was 10p a go and I wasn’t flush with cash as a teenager!