A career in politics was my dream, but the pressures were too great. Quitting was best for me and for those I was there to serve, says author Kimberly McIntosh
What a good article I did 10 years of public service as a Councillor while trying to work and be a good dad and husband and it took its toil on me. We need to make the role into something working people can afford to do.
@Zoë O'Connell In an ideal world the party would be a valuable resource and support mechanism for helping campaigners and councillors deal with the load. In practice it can be the source of a lot of the pressure. Perhaps unthinkingly, perhaps because the sort of people drawn to public service are the sort of people who find it hard to say no to just one more thing.
So if you’ve ever picked out paint, you know that every infinitesimally
different shade of blue, beige, and gray has its own descriptive, attractive
name.
I did actually ask ChatGPT this and it did indeed do this. Here's the prompt: "Provide a third-person narrative of someone watching a chef making a Béchamel sauce."
What I got back indicates ChatGPT has been reading too many Mills & Boon novels.
A soft sigh escaped Evelyn’s lips as she inhaled the subtle, comforting aroma of butter and flour blending with the richness of the milk....
Evelyn’s gaze lingered on the chef’s hands as they worked with practiced ease, never hurried, always deliberate. He tasted the sauce, nodded in quiet satisfaction, and Evelyn knew—without a word being spoken—that the Béchamel had been brought to perfection.
Ya know what? I'm gonna toot my own horn today On Here Specifically.
I have already received at least a dozen thankful comments/replies for letting people know they can slow down door closers. A lot of people have been living with irritating bangs in apartment buildings and whatnot.
And thanks to watching a YouTube video, their life is now better. I didn't sell anything to them, I just decided to share some knowledge in my own (hopefully entertaining) way.
this post has been sitting in my head for a while because, like,, fuck yeah!! knowing that someone out there found your work useful and being able to truly enjoy that and be unabashedly proud of yourself for that is based!! being able to unironically, truly take pride in your work is great, actually!! :>
you are doing great videos, and I am glad you are here. You are also absolutely right that you shouldn't have to endure the hate you get on here. I have no idea what's wrong with some people.
I have learned many things I didn't know about 99% invisible technology by watching your videos, and anyone that wants to be a dink about you making them knows where they can cram it.
And especially when it comes to "things that people can do themself that they haven't realized they can do themself," a video does a much better job of showing that you can, in fact, do it yourself.
Things have a way of always sounding a little more technical when they are written down.
Reasons to have the Swing Speed fast: It's the front door to my house and I don't want to have to wait to lock the door. Yes it's a fire door. It's the GOD of fire doors that is also automatically secured by bolts at 6 positions. I loved that door. I don't live there anymore.
have you considered doing one about washing machines, and how to do washing? There is a lot of mixed information out there about things like separating colours from whites, whether and how to do delicates, what happens with elasticated clothing in these machines, and so on, and an authoritative video a la your dishwasher one would be highly appreciated…
This is one of those things that annoys me about the world. Things could be a lot better if someone had just put in a little thought and effort, rather than just slapping the closer on and knocking off for lunch.
Putin, after 10 days of Kursk catastrophe, summons Stalin’s ghost: Stalin: “What’s happened?” Putin: “Nazis are at Kursk! My army is beaten! What should I do?” Stalin: “Do like me 1943. Send best Ukrainian troops to the front, and ask the US for arms!”
So in a root cause analysis sense, I'm having trouble deciding if the root cause is (a) invading Ukraine or (b) consulting Necromantic Stalin for advice.
There's a delightful variant of the double team where two or more reviewers review *consecutive* PRs to the same code, each with a different opinion on what the correct style is, so each one insists on changing things that were added at a previous reviewer's behest. I've experienced this when I've been the only contributor to a module, so I'm forced to beg different teams to do my code reviews.
@tuftyindigo both this and my version of the Double Team put me in mind of two people who are in a sulk and Not Talking to each other, conducting their argument via an unwilling third party!
'I'm blocking this and all your other MRs because I feel some sort of animosity to you, I don't want you working on my project and anyway all my solutions are the pinnacle of beauty and elegance and as such unimprovable'
@wolf480pl I think in that situation the senior dev's responsibility is to use a light touch. Certainly teaching is one of the purposes of a code review in that case, but don't try to teach too much in one go, and don't insist on iterating until the patch is every bit as good as your own would be - only good *enough*. The junior dev will reach your skill level when they have all your experience; trying to rush it won't improve things.
ooo cool! I've been wanting to take one of my little homemade raspberry pi weather stations to measure the air quality and CO2 on my commute into London. Need to get a USB battery for it 😀 I imagine the CO2 levels on the underground are elevated.
@Charlotte I got an Aranet 4 since a number of people have had good experiences with them. Battery life is supposed to be pretty good as the display is eink.
My ideal would be a wearable thing that did the measuring and sending to a phone, possibly a pendant that changed colour according to the reading? Challenge is probably power miniaturisation
Ooh, I was going to ask what you were using since I've been thinking I should get one, and a humidity sensor would be nice domestically since both the one on my weather station base and remote unit have been stuck at 20% since moving here (or I've got a very dry house)
@sparrowsion I think any NDIR CO₂ meter inherently has to measure temperature/humidity/pressure as part of making sense of the IR measurement; but yes I've found the Aranet4's logging of non-CO₂ handy. (Without the phone app; there's good-enough open source code to get at the log.)
My books Dreadnought (amazon.com/Dreadnought-Nemesis…) and Sovereign (amazon.com/gp/product/B087YR8X…) are both $1.99 on Amazon today. If you've been waiting to see what the fuss is about, now is a great time to pick them both up. The third book is coming soon!
Named winds, like the Mistral, or the Nortada, or the Sirocco... We don't really have them in the UK, do we? Although according to the Met Office we have one, the Helm Wind. metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn…
Final* update on my Visualising the #Hugos thing: now has a proper web page at zoeimogen.github.io/hugo-sanke… which includes all the nomination graphs as well as final round voting.
@prograft Yes, I've already done the pre-passdown data for 2nd through 4th place (See github.com/zoeimogen/hugo-sank… for example) but the resulting graph (github.com/zoeimogen/hugo-sank…) is (in my opinion) misleading without the first round transfers so didn't put it on the main web page.
Reading the Hugo-Winning "A City on Mars", which refers to a provision in the Colombian constitution declaring Colombian sovereignty over a piece of geostationary orbit. Here's that provision. constituteproject.org/constitu…
In meeting reviewing bugs from our backend testing system.
<Me> This is the class of bugs I was talking about last week. This whole codepath is dead and not used by anyone. We're testing functionality we don't care about. NUKE THE SITE FROM ORBIT.
<coworkers> So.... that's you volunteering to delete this?
<me> (Realizing my hype level) Yeah! Got that Red Diff Energy, baby!
One of my favorite release notes was from Open TTD 14.0: "It took us 2,000 commits to get from 13.4 to 14.0, we touched 140,000 lines of code and removed 74,000 of them. This was all done by over 60 contributors." openttd.org/news/2024/04/13/op…
An open source simulator based on the classic game Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It attempts to mimic the original game as closely as possible while extending it with new features.
Blatant nerdsniping bid. Given any two railway stations, you can compute p, the cheapest price of a return ticket between the two, and d, the Levenshtein edit distance between the names of the stations. Find two stations which maximise p/d. And no, "Queen's Park" and "Charing Cross" do not get to omit their "(Glasgow)" and "(London)" disambiguators.
A super off-peak return between Nottingham and Mottingham is ninety quid, but we can surely do better than that?
some nyc subway stations share a name despite being distinct station complexes. so $2.75/0 for 86 St to 86 St (you can choose any two of the four 86 St stations)
i know this is a fun little math puzzle but it did not occur to me that it optimizes for phrases like "perth to porth" which for some reason i find quite funny
OK, here we go: Visualising the #Worldcon #Hugo2024 voting results.
Alternative Title: Why ranked voting matters.
As a quick explanation, the last placed candidate in each round is eliminated and their votes transferred to the next candidate on each ballot.
This is the first place ballot only, the second place is calculated by treating the winner as eliminated and rerunning the election. I have not included the final round runoff against "No Award" as this year that's all uninteresting.
Visualising the #Worldcon #Hugo voting - still working on this, but first pass for the Best Fancast voting.
Coode Street Podcast transfers won it for Octothorpe, after a late surge for Worldbuilding for Maschocists fuelled by Publishing Rodeo transfers #Glasgow2024
@ajlanes I'll credit you in the final version. 😀 (Avoided tagging people int his one to avoid tag spam - will in the final version, e.g. Nicholas Whyte for an excellent, rapidly relased and most transparent set of reports)
Hello, we won a Hugo Award, thank you all for nominating, voting, and most importantly listening. We are so glad to be part of this community and we love you all! #HugoAwards #Worldcon #Glasgow2024
A song by James Baillie, about small creatures growing up. Dedicated to Beatrice Catchpole-Simmons.Chords and lyrics: https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?t...
The western democracies have never taken fascism seriously. The story that Britain and America tell themselves is that they led a great crusade against it in World War II. This is bollocks. They were dragged into WWII through the way military alliances fell and not out of any kind of principled opposition to what Germany, Japan and Italy were doing politically. That's just a story they tell themselves to soothe national egos.
Indeed, afterwards they did almost nothing to prevent it taking root in their own societies, beyond trying to construct welfare states. As carrot and stick approaches go, this was the carrot. There was no stick, and fascism needs a stick to keep it down.
The welfare state model held it at bay for a few decades, until the kids of the people who built it grew up and realised they could vote in the people who would dismantle it for cash and hand enough of it over to them to drive a Faustian bargain that fucked their own children.
There was never any systemic attempt to build political resilience against fascism in those societies because, frank
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The western democracies have never taken fascism seriously. The story that Britain and America tell themselves is that they led a great crusade against it in World War II. This is bollocks. They were dragged into WWII through the way military alliances fell and not out of any kind of principled opposition to what Germany, Japan and Italy were doing politically. That's just a story they tell themselves to soothe national egos.
Indeed, afterwards they did almost nothing to prevent it taking root in their own societies, beyond trying to construct welfare states. As carrot and stick approaches go, this was the carrot. There was no stick, and fascism needs a stick to keep it down.
The welfare state model held it at bay for a few decades, until the kids of the people who built it grew up and realised they could vote in the people who would dismantle it for cash and hand enough of it over to them to drive a Faustian bargain that fucked their own children.
There was never any systemic attempt to build political resilience against fascism in those societies because, frankly, fascist sympathies are too heavily embedded within the ruling classes and security services of those countries, and removing them would involve a level of pain and commitment to principle that those in a position to actually do so are not willing to entertain.
What should be, at a bare minimum, in place is a commitment to uncovering and removing fascism from all levels of public life, backed by robust and mandatory civics education.
Western democracies are utterly incapable of doing this, and instead think that they can accommodate their own fascist undercurrents without them becoming overwhelming.
But with the dismantling of their own welfare states, they have nothing to fall back on, and so when economic shocks hit, the shit they have been hiding rapidly bubbles to the surface.
We live in societies of rulers causally throwing lit matches at pools of petrol surrounding their ankles, and relying on the fact that there's enough breeze to blow them out before they land.
“We live in societies of rulers causally throwing lit matches at pools of petrol surrounding their ankles, and relying on the fact that there's enough breeze to blow them out before they land.
@Idealistic Pragmatist :mstdn: It's somewhat notable that while the allies DID remove some of the most egregious fascists from what was left of German civil society after the war, I'm not sure how much the Soviet Union did, and the support for AfD is strongest by far in former East Germany.
It really blows my mind when a country explicit forbids fascist organizations in their constitution and then the constitutional court keeps approving the existence of multiple fascist parties, one of them very successful.
@Llwynog It has to be a continuous process, because if there's one thing that these bastards can do, it's play the long game.
But first, they need to root them out of their own parties.
Second, they need to fucking condemn shit which is currently being normalised or presented as "legitimate concerns".
Third, they need to divert significant resources into proper civics education to create a populace that is politically literate and able to spot and critically analyse their rhetoric and dog whistles.
And fourthly, there needs to be an understanding that it is an utterly illegitimate political stance, that is not to be tolerated in a society that values human rights. There need to be laws that proscribe fascist organisations. They need to be enforced, and the courts overseeing them need to kept free of the sort of creeping political influence that has caused institutional capture in the US.
the "western democracies" haven't taken fascism seriously because they were instrumental in its creation. they didn't try to lessen the influence of fascism after the second world war because they created it in the first place. they won't try to reduce it because fascism is essential to "western democracy".
John A. MacDonald, the first prime minister of canada, inspired Hitler with his white supremacist screeds about "Aryan race".
the nation states who pretend to be a bolster against fascism did absolutely nothing to stop it when they had the chance. canada and USA gave no official support to the revolutionaries of the Spanish civil war. the Stalinists in Spain worked to prevent revolution, which fed dead antifascist bodies to Franco, who had Hitler's military support. the Mackenzie-Papineau Brigade, which came from canada, an anti-fascist volunteer brigade which went to Spain to fight Franco, received no support. most of them didn't come back.
canada turned away thousands of Jewish refugees trying to escape Germany. canada had also put thousands of Japanese immigrants into concentration camps. nevermind the "residential schools" and what the reserve system for Indigenous people used to be. (guess who Hitler learned to use concentration camps from
the "welfare state" has always been a fascist idea. it was social democrats, read: reformers of capitalism, not socialists, who created things like welfare and universal healthcare which, while they seem like good ideas on their face, just look at what's happening now when the capitalists decide to dismantle these systems, which was bound to happen.
if you want to learn a quick history of "social democracy", find out who the Bolsheviks really were, and who had no problem with letting the NSDAP march in Germany.
it's not an accident that the ruling class is fascist. they invented this shit. it serves no purpose other than to uphold a white supremacist ruling status quo.
if you hate fascism, ask your doctor if tyrranicide is right for you!!
You need a tachograph if you are driving under UK/AETR working hours rules UNLESS you are collecting sea coal. You still need to keep to the time rules, but don't need the tachograph.
There are similar exemptions if you're going to repair a lighthouse, or are transporting a circus, or carrying live fish to an entrepreneurial activity within 100km(*), or returning milk containers to a farm...
But strangely, while all those exemptions are given in a schedule to the act, but sea coal is included in the main statute, ie roughly, "if in the schedule (lighthouses, circuses, entrepreneurial fish, etc) OR sea coal".
As far as I can tell (it's complicated; I'm not sure), a lighthouse repair person or their friend taking fish to an AGM doesn't have to *follow* the rules.
The unique thing about sea coal hauliers is that they (and only they) *do* have to follow the rules, but don't have to prove it.
But why? Delving into it further ... 🧵
(*) I assume these are entrepreneurial fisherfolk, not entrepreneurial fish.
As far as I can tell this is because sea coal transport, uniquely, was included in exemptions to "Community Recording Equipment Regulation" (EU 3821/85) but not in exemptions to "Community Drivers' Hours Regulation" (EU 4820/85).
Sadly, I've been unable to navigate these regulations but, as I currently have no proximal intent to transport sea coal, I will leave it here, unless inspiration strikes.
My mental image of sea coalers is a romantic one, of rugged men with horse and carts in the waves. Now I mention it, I've never seen a horse with a tachograph.
The attached (~2min) video includes not only Hartlepool sea-coalers, but some fencing in St Moritz, and a man from Sunderland who survives bricks being smashed on his head.
Titles read: "Caught By The Camera".Various locations of events.Various shots of a fencing demonstration in a nightclub in St Moritz. The diners in the club...
Another name for hydrochloric acid is muriatic acid. My Latin ears immediately pricked and wondered if this was squished down mice (mus, muris) or something to do with destroying a wall (murus, muri). But no, it's derived from the Latin muriaticus meaning "pickled", from muria "brine". Thus neatly connecting it to another name for hydrochoric acid: spirit of salt.
@wynke I have just looked up "offal" to see if this CW was in fact labelled strictly correctly, and I'm facepalming at not realising hitherto that it's cognate with _afval_ (and _Abfall_).
@pseudomonas That one was pretty obvious to me, but then I'm Dutch so I learned 'afval' first. (And my brain really likes to find these connections between languages, although I miss many too.)
A good word in the lingo of the Olympics is "repechage" which is a sort of second chance to get through to the next stage of a competition. I assume it's from the French and means something like "fishing again"
If Kamala Harris picks Josh Shapiro to be her VP pick, understand that this is who will be on the ticket with her:
"Palestinians will not coexist peacefully. They do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.” - Josh Shapiro.
TERFs having a normal one, destroying women’s sports because some of the cis competitors maybe remind them a bit of trans woman, none of whom ever qualify for anything anyway, even when allowed to compete.
@KateKarnage I always forget who said "my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit", but it seems really applicable here. (I know it from Flavia Dzodan but IIRC she's quoting someone else).
I know much of the commentary around the Olympic a boxing thing is well meaning, but please avoid using or boosting the term “biological woman”.
“Cis woman” is more accurate. “Biological woman” is meaningless. Which bit of someone’s biology do you mean? Hormones, primary sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes? (Bear in mind most people don’t know what their chromosomes are)
The term comes from transphobic efforts to other trans women and has no other value.
My submission for Slanted - Experimental Type 3.0:
Unicode Spaces There are invisible characters in the UTF-8 unicode character encoding standard. This experiment measures the width of each invisible character with p5.js to dynamically manipulate the kerning of single characters. By analysing the brightness of pixels of an image and inserting white spaces at the corresponding lines and characters, image patterns are emerging in the text through white space.
James Baker
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