samc

joined 2 years ago
[–] samc@feddit.uk 1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

The problem isn't the reward for becoming an MP, it's the cost of campaigning. Candidates are expected to put up £10-30k of their own money to contest a seat. Some spend considerably more.

Personally, I don't think paying MPs more will do much harm, but it won't fix any of the problems with the quality of the politicians we get.

[–] samc@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

You know, the more I think about this, the more I bristle at Dyson claiming this will solve Britain's food security problem.

Firstly, this kind of system seems limited to small cash crops rather than staple foods. (Good luck growing wheat on these.)

More importantly, Dyson has personally done far more to harm British food security than this gadget could offset. He was an ardent Brexiteer, which resulted in substantial barriers to importing food from our closest neighbors. (He also then immediately started relocating his business to Singapore in a stunning show of confidence in post-Brexit Britain)

These people don't want to save the world. They just want to look like heroes

[–] samc@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago

Yes, but it's still competing with a field full of dirt. So the value add has to be pretty substantial to justify any cost.

[–] samc@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Not saying I disagree, but out of curiosity I looked up the yield of a conventional strawberry field, which is apparently 15-25 tons per hectare, or 11-18% of your threshold.

I agree that this would likely never be economically viable for strawberries, as I imagine it'd cost way more than £1M for a "hectares worth" of this setup.

More importantly, I don't consider strawberries vital to our food security, unlike Dyson

[–] samc@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Seems like a pretty fun language with an unfortunate amount of 90s baggage.

However, I firmly believe that trying to de-parenthesise lisp is a distraction. The main reason being that s-expressions make the beloved code=data concept very obvious.

A suitable editor makes it really easy to ignore the parens (until they're useful, e.g. for navigation). When reading, the structure of the code is inferred from indentation and line breaks. Just like C.

[–] samc@feddit.uk 9 points 3 weeks ago

Most of their quotes come from this Ono guy...

Ono, who is also a freelance mathematical consultant for Epoch AI.

Ahhh, there it is.

[–] samc@feddit.uk 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I think the article said CVLR would be battery powered to eliminate the need for overhead cables. I'm not saying I believe it is worse than e.g. and electric bus. But even the company producing it seems to struggle to articulate its advantages.

The reason I care is because I really want more trams in English towns/cities. But not if it's a pared down version that gives the entire concept a bad image

[–] samc@feddit.uk 1 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

That's kind of my concern. I'm worried they're cutting so many corners that the competitive edge over busses all but vanishes and, best case scenario, this ends up being a bizarre PR campaign for public transit.

[–] samc@feddit.uk 6 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

Whilst this is very cool, I'm a little concerned about how the pros for "very light rail" basically amount to having better vibes than busses. Not that I even disagree with that premise, but I'd want something more concrete...

[–] samc@feddit.uk 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Witcher 1 really has old-school difficulty syndrome. Getting past act 1 was a nightmare for me, then somewhere around late act 2 the combat became trivial and I could just stunlock everything.

[–] samc@feddit.uk 4 points 1 month ago

There's something chilling about an expert being asked if a statement represents their opinion, them saying "no", then the statement appearing regardless but attributed to "some experts"

[–] samc@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

If you're able to easily migrate issues etc to a new instance, then you don't need to worry about a particular service providers getting shitty. At which point your main concern is temporary outages.

Perhaps this is more of a concern for some projects (e.g. anything that angers Nintendo's lawyers). But for most, I imagine that the added complexity of distributed p2p hosting would outweigh the upsides.

Not saying it's a bad idea, in fact I like it a lot, but I can see why it's not a high priority for most OSS devs

 

Was trying to install guix on top of fedora silverblue. It's kinda working, but not exactly stable...

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