Same in a lot of the UK, it straight up does not snow in the winter where it used to in the place I grew up. I live in Wales now and it’s scary seeing such a wet country so dried out, it’s not natural.

Second this, of all the very worthy free software contributors out there these people are surely doing some of the most practical work for day-to-day software freedom for many users.

Good call, I enjoyed their videos on the English Civil War.

I think being the only browser with a credible stance on ad blockers will help them in the long run.

If you like anchovies, try Colatura di Alici if you can get hold of it. It’s a direct descendant of Roman garum and is like a magic button for improving a lot of dishes.

True, but not at the same rate as American football.

I’m surprised the US never found a love for rugby, it’s a brilliant sport to play and spectate but it tends to be a fair bit less dangerous to its players than American football. There’s various reasons but the lack of protective gear is a factor people talk about a lot ironically.

Interestingly go far back enough in time and they evolved from a common ancestor, but nowadays there’s little to unite them other than fact they’re both full-contact ball sports.

God damn them all, I was told

We’d cruise the seas for crypto gold

Exploit no box, nor engineer

Now I’m an old black hat and in rent arrears

The last of Donald’s privateers

‘Redneck boomers’ isn’t quite the right stereotype, ‘gammons’ would be the rough British equivalent stereotype (ie they’re bright pink with Facebook-induced rage) but it’s not the same thing because it doesn’t really have anything to do with the rural/urban divide like rednecks in the US do, their grievances with the government are different too. A more apt comparison to the US would be the tourism version of small towns throughout the Rust Belt; ie the major industry everyone else depended on had its arse cave in due to superior foreign competition, everyone who could leave already got out years ago, and you’re left with what’s euphemistically called ‘managed decline’ but in reality is the state abandoning a place to its fate. Add in phenomena like cities dumping people with social needs they’re responsible for in cash-strapped seaside towns to save money, people with social issues themselves often looking to return there due to happy childhood memories, the general economic kick in the balls these places got from the 1960s continuing indefinitely, and you can see why there’s a lot of grievance there.

Believe it or not Clacton was once a fairly cool place to live, before dirt-cheap flights to Europe seaside towns tended to be pretty wealthy in the summer and Clacton in particular would have been a trendy place to be in the 1960s because of the mods and rockers, and to a lesser extent the pirate radio boom; you’d go there and listen to your transistor radios in the sun in sight of the ships with massive aerials very loudly undermining the government’s stuffy monopoly on radio. The problem was (until climate change made them insufferably hot and humid anyway) British summers are generally pretty grey and rainy on a lot of days. As soon as you could get on a plane for the same cost as a train ticket and go to Spain, Portugal, Greece and so many other places, Clacton starts to look about as appealing as the seagull kebabs everyone jokes about when they’re in a seaside town. I’m absolutely not defending Nigel Farage or the populist right in general, but there’s a reason they stick their flag in places like Clacton in particular and in my view the left needs to reflect on why that is and improve its specific offerings to seaside towns.

Yeah to be fair that’s a PR opportunity for Burnham. Like it or loathe it, a huge part of public favour in the UK is knowing when to engage with the bit.

hotter and more humid than Satan’s asshole

Genuinely the UK at the moment, which is not a sentence I thought I’d say but well into our fifth heatwave I’m praying for rain in Wales of all places.

Fuck climate change.

There’s hating technology in general and then there’s hating the US West Coast tech scene specifically in my opinion.

I have a neurological vision disorder which I suspect augmented reality glasses would help a lot, but sod letting Meta see my life from a first-person perspective 24/7, or the lives of anyone around me for that matter. Also I suspect a genuine medical device would have to be made very obvious, you don’t want accessibility tech being mistaken for pervert tech. I wouldn’t take the risk frankly! It’s like if I’m talking to someone and they have a hearing aid in that’s fine, but if they’ve got headphones in I’m going to feel a little cheesed off on the face of it.

Also not American but I work for a trans-Atlantic company, those things sound like a PHI nightmare in a medical setting given Meta’s habit of indiscriminately hoovering up data like as many labradors in a pantry.

It certainly calls into question his judgement, what kind of person hires a skipper who apparently either does not keep the required watch on channel 16, or ignores calls for aid?

If that superyacht’s radio doesn’t have a dual watch function then I’m the king of the Britons.

Yeah it was literally drilled into me as a child that you aid a vessel in distress until the point you would be in distress yourself, provided you are in position to do so. It’s the law certainly, but without highly extenuating circumstances there’s also the matter of serious personal disgrace in my view.

My favourite claudism is when it deletes tens of gigabytes sized models as if redownloading them is trivial for me. It might be for the boys at Anthropic with their sewer pipe sized fibre optics, but for me where my last mile is copper bullshit Openreach probably hasn’t maintained since the 2008 crash it’s a massive pain in the arse.

To expand on this, things like reddit and discord are literally modern-day attempts to enclose the commons in my view. They took all the ground from open protocols that nobody in particular owned and replaced them with an aristocrat’s private property.