You’re assuming Britain has genuine Rule Of Law rather than the Law being a tool to enforce the will of a few, a tall assumption.

And the muppets over there claim they live in a country with Rule Of Law…

I shall not lower myself to use the newfangled Mathematical inventions of the Arabs and instead keep doing Mathematics like the Romans!

This one specifically had people’s addresses, so it was reasonably simple to match to people’s identities if you had other data containing identity and address.

Experience has taught me that Intelligence and Wisdom are very different things, and whilst the former can help get the latter faster, having lots of the former in no way form or shape guarantees any of the latter or even that one will get any of it.

I would even say that there’s a level of high intelligence but not high enough (I mentally call them “Entry Level Geniouses”) that leads people who think they’re so much better than everybody else whilst not being intelligent enough to figure out the limits in capability and breath of use of intelligence alone, so they never figure out the whole “All I know is that I know nothing” and don’t really start walking down the path to Wisdom. Elon Musk is probably a good example.

As soon as a kind of Tech starts getting fanboys, you start getting ignorant bollocks about it, not just from the fanboys but also from the kind of people that, just as emotionally, set themselves against the fanboys not because of any understanding of the weaknesses of the Tech itself but purelly as a psychological need to set themselves against the fanboys.

Linux used to have a huge barrier to entry - for example, you used to literally have to understand how CRTs worked in order to configure X and get it running - which kept the fanboyism down and the few whose like for it went all the way into fanboyisms were at least technically savvy so mainly understood what they were talking about, but nowadays the “quality” of fanboys is closer to the level of game, celebrity or or political fanboys - people highly emotionally engaged that don’t have any in depth understanding and are only “experts” on the highly visible superficial stuff.

Anyways, all this to say that fanboyism, whilst being a bad way to relate to Tech (IMHO, and the same for people who set themselves against fanboys as just as mindless contrarians), does indicate to me that Linux is definitelly becoming established as mainstream rather than the OS for mainly server side experts and hobbyists that it was for decades.

The UK is about a decade ahead of the rest of Europe, and not at all in a good way.

About a decade ago, when I still lived in Britain, the project to keep central copies of GP patient data came and it was possible to Opt-Out.

I expresselly filled the paperwork to opt out of it with my GP, because by then I did not at all trust British Governments (all this was after the Snowden Revelations, plus having been in Finance in the 2008 crash and seen how that was dealt with by both British major parties, I fully believed they were corrupt as fuck) and expected that all that healtcare data would be misused including, sooner or later, being sold out (or even given) to the Private sector.

Here we are now, and lo and behold…

PS: By the way, if I remember it correctly this data was already sold to Google years ago, supposedly “anonimized” but in such a weak and inefective way it was proven it could easilly be de-anonimized.

When the BBC is so far transformed into a Propaganda outlet that they relentlessly deploy misinformation, cherry-picking, censorship and heavily biased framing and even reporting to support the XXI century version of the NAZIs whilst they commit multiple Genocides then, clearly, Murdock has already won.

I bet it’s like the one discovered in Portugal which is of a mineral form of it for which there is no technology to industrially extract the lithium.

In other words, about as feasible as “we can extract all the <insert mineral> we want from sea water”.

Indeed: most of present day America, especially the far-right, would be incredibly hostile towards a middle eastern guy preaching a philosophy of peace and equality and who was openly against the “money lenders”.

Real pigs don’t live in their own shit if they have a choice.

It’s obviously meant to be an homage to medical doctors.

From Europe I definitelly want to see this shit go full on fucked up, since it’s the only way the Corrupt and Kompromat-controlled politicians around here stop doing what America and Israel wants because they are fucked either way as even the most selfish and unprincipled of voters will fuck them up in the voting booths if cost of living goes crazy.

We’re already seeing that the crooks not already looking for ways to look less pro-Israel and pro-America are those in the EU Commission and in other EU positions which are not elected.

Since they’re almost certainly the next one’s to reach that status, it absolutelly makes sense for at least China to accelerate the fall of the current World-level Empire if they can do it with little or no negative impact for themselves.

Having a decaying America bleed itself and the goodwil of its allies for years against the prickly wall which is Iran is an optimal outcome for China.

Russia, I doubt it, mainly because Russia has no chance in hell of becoming an Imperial power, plus having a military whose capacities were seriously overestimated being bled by an adversary they seriously underestimated as happening to America in Iran, is what has been happening to Russia in Ukraine.

Well, yeah, we’re well into the stage where it’s not quality that sells Google products and services.

This is the Pillaging Stage of Google’s business: as they screw both customers and users (Google’s customers aren’t their users) for short term “growth” they can only hold market share by taking advantage of market barriers to entry, networking effects and their current market share to force both customers and users to keep on using Google products and services.

In at most 5 years from now there will never be a better time to be a senior developer.

Shit is already cracking (just look at all the spectacularly stupid bugs and deeply flawed design choices that MS has had recently with Windows 11) and we’ve barelly started experiencing what happens when AI coded software goes through the full software life-cycle - the kind of thing where code done by junior developers almost innevitably fails is the indirect stuff like maintenability or security practices and AI is basically a junior developer which NEVER LEARNS no matter how much you explain something to it even whilst telling you it has totally understood what you mean.

Imagine that all of a sudden a large fraction of corporate software development is made entirelly by teams of junior developers who have such a high turnaround that every week the team changes (so you can’t ever help them learn to avoid certain kinds of errors and they never improve). Now fast forward this a couple of years and imagine what happens when all the software done by those devs has been on the Internet a couple of years exposed to all kinds of attackers, gone thorough a couple of cycles of bug-fixing and working new business requirements into it or they’ve been used for long enough by users that the data storages have been storing a year of two of data, all stored according to junior developer’s idea of what and how data should be stored.

Shit crashing with the most stupid bugs, hacked by script kiddies running 1990s scripts because even there is no proper defensive coding for Internet exposed software or it’s riddled with holes from mis-integration of different parts, years of use leading to systems massivelly slowing down to a crawl because databases don’t have the right indices and where the same data is stored multiple times and thus riddled with inconsistent data, pretty much instant spaghettification of the code-base and especially at the design level with each different block of code generated by AI being inconsistent in coding style and software design with every other AI generated block of code, constant and massive integration problems with systems not being at all prepared for upstream data format flaws or with erroneous assumptions and just about every software change breaking downstream systems, the entire life-cycle of software systems from greenfield project to “so unmaintainable it’s cheaper to rewrite it from scratch” running in less than a year rather than 5 or 10 years with entirelly new vibe-coded versions of the software coming out every year WITH DIFFERENT BUGS and DIFFERENT USER INTERFACES with DIFFERENT QUIRKS.

Basically every concern above junior developer level being mishandled in random ways and places even in the same code-base.

This shit is what the adoption of AI coding will deliver us.

Again, look at Windows 11 - we’re already seeing the rates of bugs and the gravity of them going back to how it was back in the 90s and the stupidity and obviousness of the errors exceeding even that early era of early professionalization of software development.

This is like the “all men can fix the plumbing in their own home” version of web development …

All those seemingly disparate things all serve a simple objective:

It’s all about suppressing any attempts from civil society to change the system at a time when it has become obvious that the way the country is managed and working is not delivering anything but decay for most people. The only “disruptive” social and political thing left to run in peace is the safe, controlled outlet for public anger that are the far-right parties as these blame foreigners and social minorities (NEVER the wealthy) for all the ills of the country, thus deflecting that rage away from the people who, having always held power in Britain made things the way they are.

You see this in plenty of other countries in Europe, but the UK is way more autoritarian (if more elegant and discrete) than the rest, possibly because its a far more classist and stratified society, with power and wealth having been in the same families for far longer than in the rest of Europe (literally the last great social upheaval in Britain was in the 17th century and it was top-down and all about religion).

The Snowden Revelations showed that the UK had even more pervasive Civil Society Surveillance than the US, literally levels of surveillance of the public that would make the Stasi in East Germany green with envy.

Further, whilst in the US they walked it back a bit after those revelations, in the UK they just passed a law to retroactivelly make all of it legal, newspapers got a bunch of D-Notices (the UK’s censorship mechanism) to shut up and the editor of the newspaper who brought it all out was canned.

Even if you know nothing about all the other scandals that have come out over the years around that in the UK (such as Green Party MEPs being under surveillance or Environmentalist groups having been infiltrated by coppers), one’s perspective on why those controlling power in Britan would want to “validate” and gatekeep where people go and what people do online, should at least be informed by what Snowden revealed and how those holder power in Britain dealt with it.