Americans: if you're thinking of leaving, beware before considering an asylum claim.
"Safe" countries have treaties recognising each other as safe, and do not recognise asylum claims from each other as valid. So if you as an American try to claim asylum there, at the moment you will be automatically rejected.
Instead, travel on a tourist visa. If things get bad for US trans people, this may eventually change.
The Netherlands and the US have a bilateral treaty called the DAFT (Dutch American Friendship Treaty) that will grant any American an automatic visa if you have investments in a Dutch business.
This can be your own business, so you can start a small business and just move. Talk to an immigration lawyer, but moving to The Netherlands should be comparatively easy for all Americans.
@hp You will need to deposit 5000 EUR in a Dutch bank account, set up a Dutch company (easy) and you will only be able to work for your company. And you must demonstrate you are 'highly skilled'. But it's an excellent alternative. The company can be a consultancy. We can assist folks with it. drop a line to usa-campaign@transrescue.org with a suggested time in NL+US friendly times for help
Well, we used a lawyer, maybe they just made something up then 😀 We weren't asking for any proof of any kind. My partner had to make a business plan but that was it as far as I remember it.
- I can imagine a university being scared of personal web pages because of legal liability: someone could say something nasty on their web page. But a university that doesn't have personal web pages seems to be treating the faculty as mere employees rather than members. In end, having your own separate web page will make you seem more like your own independent entity. A lot of young academics I know have their own independent web pages:
The same argument I gave to them. Originally they agreed and paused the discontinuing. But now IT services decide everything, regardless of impact on research visibility or student experience, or anything academic.
For people in the UK, discontinuing academic web pages is REF suicide.
When a Computer Science department loses its individual tech support war with university IT services, it's the beginning of the end. Sadly, we also are heading that way.
Honestly I remember one university who's main IT help desk was comically incompetent, and incredibly user hostile. For example, you could customize parts of your user experience on lab computers, but the settings would never stay.
The CS department handled their own IT at the time, and it was a _much_ more tolerable situation.
I've yet to understand why IT departments are typically so incredibly user-hostile, like they forget what purpose they actually serve.
@leon_p_smith @johncarlosbaez They want to get away with the lowest common denominator and address nobody's specific needs. A CS department obviously has specific needs. (I used to specialise in manufacturing specific needs. In fact, I still do.)
@leon_p_smith @johncarlosbaez Essential context is that my father ended his university career as Director of Information Services at the Queen's University of Belfast. I have so seen both sides of this game.
> I used to specialise in manufacturing specific needs. In fact, I still do.
Nice quote. That's certainly true of myself as well, to greater or lesser extent depending on whatever tends to capture my attention at that moment in time.
That's probably also why I found it pretty easy to get a bit crosswise with IT departments of all stripes.
Words should mean things.🎤 Check Out my Tour Dates! 🎤Tour Dates: https://beacons.ai/gianmarcosoresi📱 Get a text next time I'm performing in your city 📱ht...
Big fan of Bernie Collins on Sky F1. Whereas usually a lot of the presenting team is drawn from former drivers, she used to be a strategy engineer for several teams in the paddock, so she brings a lot of insight from the "behind the scenes" part of the sport. Also unlike some of her counterparts she doesn't feel the need to chip in when she has nothing useful to contribute!
Janey Godley has died.She's been going to do so sometime soon for a while now, and very soon indeed for the last couple of weeks, and now she's gone. She was always a proper ally, and the world is poorer for her absence. Long may she be remembered and celebrated.
So I know it’s all very funny, ha ha, but here’s why the orcas don’t go after the boats of the ultra rich.
Two photos. One a multi million euro luxury yacht. Notice it has two props. They steer by vectoring the thrust. There is no rudder.
The other, my boat. It costs what a new car costs (like if you were buying a low end Tesla. Expensive, but not stupid money). It has a rudder because it’s a sailboat. It can’t rely on thrust being present.
No rudder - no orca attack. People who can afford sailboats, which the orcas are attacking, cannot afford luxury motor yachts, which they aren’t.
A sailboat is like a mouldy caravan, but floating, and slower.
@Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻 same. I run the gauntlet next summer. Somewhat worried. I have a life raft and a phone that can do satellite distress, and I don’t taste like tuna.
I've been setting up Jira for people for a couple of decades now. I like the separation idea you describe. The good and bad part about Jira is how customizable it is, so you can get rid of Won't Fix and add a new resolution value. And having different issue types with different fields on each isn't that hard to work with in searches.
I like your point about facts vs. plans, and I think tooling that makes it easier for contributors to work in planning mode *or to deliberately avoid it* would be a step toward maintainer equanimity
[Attention conservation notice: probably not of interest to lawyers; this is about my previous life in software development.] Someone recently mentioned JWZ’s old post on the CADT (Cascade of…
@brainwane at a glance (lots of words!) I do think that’s a pretty useful distinction; I’m not sure it completely resolves the problem (because at some point, facts still become a set too large, and with too many data quality problems, to usefully query) but it certainly indicates the right mindset where you’d start to solve it.
@luis_in_brief @brainwane I've been known to get really angry at bulk or automated closing of old bugs, for purely sociological reasons. No matter how stale the bugs are, closing them without going through them by hand and attempting to reproduce each and writing a personal note for each is disrespectful of the original reporters' time and effort.
But I don't think this argument would carry over to a tracker with Simon's facts/plans split, as long as automated sweeping only applied to the plans side. "We don't have the capacity even to investigate whether this is still relevant, so we're not going to make plans to do anything about it" is not what a reporter wants to hear, but it's honest and doesn't disrespect anyone.
@zwol @luis_in_brief @brainwane I hadn't heard of this controversy before, so I had to spend time forming a thought about it.
I think with my facts/plans split, if you rewrite OldFoo and make NewFoo, you wouldn't need to close bug fact records against OldFoo: they still _are_ bugs in OldFoo, whether or not anyone's still using that.
(In fact perhaps some poor soul stuck on a legacy installation still is! So they might still be a useful resource, to at least _know_ what's likely to go wrong.)
@zwol @luis_in_brief @brainwane The OldFoo bugs need not pollute a search for still-relevant bugs, because you probably already wanted to search for bugs in a specific component in any case.
But probably someone will still _want_ to check the OldFoo bugs to see if they're fixed in NewFoo. And if the dev team doesn't have time by 2 orders of magnitude, they'll still have to ask the users to do it, one way or another.
So probably the JWZs of this world would still have been annoyed about it!
"bug as perceived by user" makes me think two different things, neither of which is what I was mostly talking about in this article, but both are important.
One is "not a bug, the user just misunderstood". One has to be very careful saying that, because _why_ did the user misunderstand? The root cause can very easily be "documentation is confusing", or "UI is misleading", or other things that _are_ bugs. Maybe the user misunderstood _because_ of a bug!
@jackv the other almost unrelated question is: does a bug describe a user-visible misbehaviour, or an error in the code? They don't match up 1–1, because sometimes one code error can lead to what _looks_ like three separate bugs. And I've seen people have arguments about whether to merge them in the bug tracker, because some people want to count the errors in the code and others want to document all the user-visible badnesses.
@jackv ah, I see – you're distinguishing the notion of 'bug' vs 'feature' as users see them, from the strongly correlated but not identical idea that 'bug fix' means finding one small typo or missing statement or whatever in the code, whereas 'feature' means writing a whole pile of new stuff or massively refactoring things?
Yesterday was day 3 in Oxford, and the day I went into the MRI machine. They put me in scrubs and then I was fitted with some MRI safe glasses to my approximate prescription, and some earplugs. MRI machines are loud and they were very careful to make sure that the earplugs were snug enough that I wouldn't have my hearing damaged by the loud noises. This took some doing, as my right ear is not good at keeping things in it, but eventually the radiographer managed to wedge a lump of wax in there hard enough that it stayed put.
Then I was wedged into the machine itself, with a SpO2 measuring clip on my left middle finger and a squeezy alert bulb in my right hand, to squeeze if I panicked, or the machine got too loud, or basically anything. Under the fingers of my right hand were buttons to press to respond to computer tasks. A mirror above my head reflected a screen at the far end of the tube, which had instructions on it telling me what to do.
The first task was recalling various memories, good, neutral, and negative, so they could see what my brain did while I was d
... show more
Yesterday was day 3 in Oxford, and the day I went into the MRI machine. They put me in scrubs and then I was fitted with some MRI safe glasses to my approximate prescription, and some earplugs. MRI machines are loud and they were very careful to make sure that the earplugs were snug enough that I wouldn't have my hearing damaged by the loud noises. This took some doing, as my right ear is not good at keeping things in it, but eventually the radiographer managed to wedge a lump of wax in there hard enough that it stayed put.
Then I was wedged into the machine itself, with a SpO2 measuring clip on my left middle finger and a squeezy alert bulb in my right hand, to squeeze if I panicked, or the machine got too loud, or basically anything. Under the fingers of my right hand were buttons to press to respond to computer tasks. A mirror above my head reflected a screen at the far end of the tube, which had instructions on it telling me what to do.
The first task was recalling various memories, good, neutral, and negative, so they could see what my brain did while I was doing this. After that there was a task where I had to select the "better" one of two symbols to win money, but there were no clues given as to what was better. I guess they wanted to see how my brain made decisions where there was a risk or reward at stake.
Being in the MRI was rather nice actually. Not too loud with the earplugs in. It just made random beepy buzzy noises while I got engrossed in the tasks I was being told to do in the screen. Really the only bad thing about it was that after 45 minutes or however long it was my neck really ached!
9/10 would have my hydrogen nuclei resonated again.
Day 2 in Oxford for medical trial fun and games. Today was the infusion, 50% chance of ketamine vs placebo. After doing a variety of questionnaires and having blood and urine samples taken it was time to be infused. It was fairly relaxing. Maybe a bit boring. I idly let my mind wander. I think I either didn’t get ketamine or I did and it had nearly no effect on me. I felt maybe slightly lightheaded at one point, and now feel a bit weird, but nothing especially noteworthy.
After that there were more questionnaires and computer tasks. Rather cruelly one of these asked me to remember things from another task, which they hadn’t warned me about. Testing memory when you’ve not been asked to remember stuff is a valuable thing to do.
Tomorrow afternoon is an MRI session where I remember various things while in the machine and they look at what bits of my head light up.
A story I like telling is how I ran the AV at a place and when I deployed adblock the detections fell off a cliff. I wish more people had this visceral "holy shit" moment. "It was this easy the whole time?" ~2012. I recently deployed uBlock Origin to an F500, on my insistence.
At previous employer, "Security" got the thankless job of "securing" new DNS servers (after minor incident revealed owners of 'old' servers weren't maintaining them)
We implemented reputation based DNS +ad blocking w/ new servers
After change: 90% of all new malware infections were either people who ran sketchy email attachments (because: 'fail open') or laptops connected to untrusted internet (because 'off-site' connections didn't use our DNS)
It's something I'd love to do at my work but the marketing department would shit a brick the moment they couldn't see their own ads. They have enough power to reverse any attempt at it the moment it, especially who our CIO reports to came from marketing. @catsalad
It's just very unfortunate that MV3 is killing uBO although there's now uBO Lite. Probably good enough for security purposes, but still sucks.
I actually /like/ the initiative of MV3 to reduce code exec in extensions (duh), but I'm convinced one could've found a solution that would have allowed to keep the power of uBO at similar levels. This would've also been a good spot for Mozilla to step in and propose a better MV3+...
god, it really is like the face mask of antivirus protection. every time i set up a computer for my dad or one of his friends (in their 60s) i will install ublock immediately. i think the amount of viruses since the install is basically nonexistent, even months later
Antivirus Vendors are already one of the richest sources of aggressive malware.
What if the false dichotomy was simply scrapped?
“Improve your corporate security with Phageware!” “Self deploying” “Eradicates all other malware undetectably” “Attacks and cryptographically detains hostile actors on your network” “Make the C&C seat YOUR seat for a change!”
DISCLAIMER: This is a fucking awful idea and under no circumstances should it be allowed to happen (as if we had any say in it)
This from Wikipedia made me giggle. "[New Zealand] Inland Revenue continues to spell its Māori name Te Tari Taake instead of Te Tari Tāke, mainly to reduce the resemblance of tāke to the English word 'take'"
How odd. This Portuguese listening comprehension exercise has a person in who's invented a folk etymology for the English word "vintage". They've decided that rather than being < French vendage and ultimately Latin vinum + demo, it is related to the word for twenty (vinte in Portuguese, vingt in French, viginti in Latin) and thus vintage clothes are ones which are 20 years old.
My "we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience through tokens, crypto trading or NFTs" t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my t-shirt.
Everyone who read this post and responded with, "This is just FUD, the press release CLEARLY said they would NOT do hyperfinancialization, you are overreacting, here is a link to primary journalistic sources, I am very smart" --
for the peanut gallery, on my fresh new 10000-char-limit masto account, i wrote up in a bit more technical detail how BlueSky is not decentralized, even if ATProtocol is, which it also isn't
for the peanut gallery, on my fresh new 10000-char-limit masto account, i wrote up in a bit more technical detail how BlueSky is not decentralized, even if ATProtocol is, which it also isn't
So, you know how Facebook is a corporation with a lot of spread-out servers that talk to a centralized database and algorithm that controls and manages all your posts, opaquely, for profit.
And so is Xwitter. And so is LinkedIn. And so is TikTok.
And so is BlueSky. 😲
BlueSky's big claim is that they're "decentralized" with "no algorithm". And yeah, technically, ironically, everything's an algorithm, but I'm not well-actuallying that word. Their current default feed algorithm is not The Algorithm; it lets you see all the posts from all your friends and that's great. It also lets you block at will, and won't shove spam on your feed, or shadow-ban your friends' political posts. It's not evil (yet). It's fine.
But. It's not decentralized. BlueSky is a centralized corporate app, running a theoretically-decentralized network protocol that currently has only one (1) active node on the network: BlueSky. The other minor members of the ATP network are just piggybacking on BlueSky's 13 million captive users for auth and reach.
It (allegedly?) uses ATProtocol to pass messages between its edge nodes. But all its central features are still centralized, and the protocol allows "reach" to be centrally managed separately from "speech" (to enable centralized blocking, and goosing and filtering in various feeds), and the protocol isn't even fully implemented as designed.
For example, ATProtocol allows for "DID"s for identity portability, so if you later want to switch to a hypothetical GreenSky competitor, you won't lose your followers and blocklist and post history.
But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.
And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto company named Blockchain Capital.
Their general partner Kinjal Shah -- whose cryptocurrency-fueled career has careened from Bitcoin to NFTs to DAOs to VC -- is now on the BlueSky board, and methinks the press release doth protest too much when it defensively claims, with just a pinky promise, "the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)."
Go ahead and enjoy BlueSky. It's better than Facebook. It's easier than Mastodon. It's sassier than TikTok. But it's not decentralized.
Bluesky now exceeds 13 million users, the AT Protocol developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped highly requested features like direct messages and video.
New regulations set out circumstances in which the Secretary of State can intervene in the running of internet domain registries for UK-related domains
This somewhat lengthy blogpost about The Internet Domain Registry (Prescribed Practices and Prescribed Requirements) Regulations 2024 is probably of most interest to people running domain registries, and domain registrars, for .uk, .scot, .wales., .cymru, and .london.
To be honest, until yesterday, I had no idea that the Secretary of State had these kind of powers...
@Neil Brown Idly wondering if .io is "UK-related" under s.124O(8) of CA2003 - "the last element of its name is likely to cause users of the internet, or a class of such users, to believe that the domain and its sub-domains are connected with the United Kingdom"
Wondering how this applies to registries that provide / manage UK domains but are themselves outside the UK (or do they *have* to have a UK subsidiary to trade?). Those powers seem unlikely to work with say Microsoft or Amazon!
Just getting started on the OU Contract Law module. It's talked about some software terms and conditions being contractual. I wonder how EULAs work as contracts for software you bought in a box from a shop. How is there consideration? Is it "reused" from the purchase contract with the retailer somehow?
If you see this post... Quote post a bridge. (If you can be bothered emulating a quote post). This is the Bridge of Sighs in Oxford, presumably so called in despair at how much less good it is than Cambridge’s queer.party/@sparrowsion/11335…
Sounds similar nuisance to that suffered by residents around Whalley's quarry waste site in Staffordshire. Turns out the monitoring equipment wasn't working properly so the amount of nuisance was under estimated too.
The revolving door between regulators and regulated needs to be addressed. It is too easy for corporations to parachute loyal lobbyists into 'regulators' and reward them with promotion when they return to the fold.
U+FE80 is the unicode hex value of the character Arabic Letter Hamza Isolated Form. Char U+FE80, Encodings, HTML Entitys:ﺀ,ﺀ, UTF-8 (hex), UTF-16 (hex), UTF-32 (hex)
I'm really really really not that upset if Iran tried to assassinate Bibi tbh. Given that preserving his political career and saving his ass from jail has been a not-insignificant part of the horrors unfolding across palestine. And Isreal's own assassinations have involved leveling city blocks...
Israel's longest running paper, Haaretz, just confirmed that Netanyahu actively blocked every hostage deal since 10/7, Netanyahu meanwhile is openly planning to annex Gaza—& the conversation is still "why won't Hamas agree to a deal?"😐
Israel News - Israel News, Analysis and Opinion on Israeli Politics, Business, Culture and Travel. With In-depth Coverage of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem News and All the Latest News From the Israel-Palestinian Conflict and the Jewish World.
'Torpedo the Deal': Israel's Channel 12 News exclusive report features new documents and previously unheard conversations showing Netanyahu's efforts to sabotage any hostage deal
@Ben Evans This then means I have unlawfully consumed alcohol and still have an open container of alcohol. Granted the gin may make me care less at this point whether an empty open container of alcohol is still an open container of alcohol.
@kittylyst I am not a lawyer, but I'd assume that the defining feature of a container of alcohol is that it's got alcohol in it. If it was the printing on the label then it would be legal to drink your gin so long as you put it in a milk bottle or whatever first.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from Miradouro da Cordoama near Cape st Vincent, iPhone 16 pro, fusion camera, ProRaw, processed in Adobe Lightroom. 10 second exposure.
This is not surprising at all and I don't understand why anyone had to waste time and resources on demonstrating a self-evident fact that was known before the research even started.
@anderspuck As long as you can define "simple" as it applies to the LLM because some basic stuff it cannot do due to the lack of cognition. When I say that it cannot do these things I mean it needs to be able to do said tasks unaided (as in no further prompts or guiding prompts) with complete accuracy, if it can't do those things then it's not doing the task even if it's partially right.
@jwcph Let’s see how it develops. Ollama is working great for me, but it does require a fairly good computer. So yes, either taht processing power has to be local with the user or somewhere centralized.
@anderspuck Not to mention they are insanely expensive to operate. The cost-to-benefit ratio is not sustainable, even for most of the tasks they *can* do.
@anderspuck because they're expected to solve complex tasks, they're being sold as if they can solve complex tasks, and that they have a fail and error rate enough that they're not safe
They want these things to drive cars and make decisions that involve human lives.
@anderspuck No, it doesn't matter what kind of energy they're consuming, because energy always has a cost to produce, and again the cost-to-benefit ratio isn't there. LLMs are creating scarcity for relatively little actual positive benefit.
It's also not strictly about power; the same arguement applies to water consumption as well.
@anderspuck @dalias LLMs are NOT doing *speech to text* translation -- doing transcripts from audio (podcast). That's a different set of AI technologies.
The industry has been developing "AI" technologies since before I was born. Some are quite useful.
It's the "Generative AI" subset (which includes LLMs, chatbots) that is so misleading, mostly useless, and incredibly wasteful.
@JeffGrigg @dalias True. I kind of bundled ChatGTP and Whisper in that statement. I don’t find generative AI useless, though. There are many tasks for which it is very good, but probably not those flashy ones many people are thinking about. For example an LLM is much better at sentiment analysis than older methods.
The payroll calculation service I use for the pub company is closing down at the end of the tax year.
I'm looking for recommendations for a replacement. It needs to have a decent API that isn't gated behind "become a partner and put your app in our store" (so that rules out Xero).
Pricing that's transparent and would work for a company of ~50 people would also be nice! I'm currently paying about £55/month.
SO many companies in this space seem to be "call us for pricing"! Really puts me off...
I am using Freeagent, who are either free if you use Natwest or pretty decently priced with no fees for the API (which we don't use so I can't say if it works well).
paiyroll® is an automated cloud payroll software powered by artificial intelligence. Reducing payroll processing time by 75% and saving you 3 days a week.
fwiw I am using the Xero API without publishing my application - I do have to pay a £5/month custom connection fee but other than it works ok. This is not an endorsement of Xero though :-)
What I really like about the Greater Anglia trains that do the run from Cambridge North to Liverpool Street? The seat back trays have little grooves in for your phone or tablet (or here, Kindle).
, new regulations - The Internet Domain Registry (Prescribed Practices and Prescribed Requirements) Regulations 2024 - was published, to do exactly that.](https://thegoatery.dyndns.org/photo/preview/640/5742628 "On Tuesday, [following a consultation](https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/powers-in-relation-to-uk-related- domain-name-registries), new regulations - The Internet Domain Registry (Prescribed Practices and Prescribed Requirements) Regulations 2024 - was published, to do exactly that.")
Trans Rescue
Unknown parent • • •&2i
in reply to Trans Rescue • • •HP van Braam
in reply to Trans Rescue • • •The Netherlands and the US have a bilateral treaty called the DAFT (Dutch American Friendship Treaty) that will grant any American an automatic visa if you have investments in a Dutch business.
This can be your own business, so you can start a small business and just move. Talk to an immigration lawyer, but moving to The Netherlands should be comparatively easy for all Americans.
Take care of yourself and others.
Trans Rescue
in reply to HP van Braam • • •@hp You will need to deposit 5000 EUR in a Dutch bank account, set up a Dutch company (easy) and you will only be able to work for your company. And you must demonstrate you are 'highly skilled'. But it's an excellent alternative. The company can be a consultancy. We can assist folks with it. drop a line to
usa-campaign@transrescue.org
with a suggested time in NL+US friendly times for help
#trans #TransRights #usa
HP van Braam
in reply to Trans Rescue • • •You do not have to demonstrate you are "highly skilled" my partner is in The Netherlands right now on a DAFT visa.
That is not one of the requirements!
Trans Rescue
in reply to HP van Braam • • •Trans Rescue
in reply to Trans Rescue • • •HP van Braam
in reply to Trans Rescue • • •Trans Rescue
Unknown parent • • •@osowoofy1973
Act
Trans Rescue
Unknown parent • • •Sensitive content
We are located south of Ter Apel in Enschede. this isn't reflective of what we are seeing