BoxOfRain

5 ms·

1.
by BoxOfRain 9d ago
> The King of England isn't in charge of the UK though. The power largely rests in Andy Burnham. Yes and no... Firstly there's not been a King of England since 1707, he's king of the United Kingdom (and fourteen other plac
2.
by BoxOfRain 9d ago
Demonstrably false from this thread alone. How can you meaningfully participate in a democracy when the world is so globalised without at least a basic understanding of international affairs?
3.
by BoxOfRain 10d ago
To be fair TV detector vans actually did exist in the early days of TV, there were just barely any of them because they were expensive and they were just as effective as psychological tactic. The idea was that old televisions would radiate
4.
by BoxOfRain 11d ago
> It seems as if one ambiguates the other. Interestingly this mechanism contributed a lot to Brexit in my opinion, whenever there was legislation the politicians wanted to enact but knew would be unpopular with the voters they'd bla
5.
by BoxOfRain 12d ago
I can't speak for every country, but I feel the irresistible force of datacentre construction will eventually get mired in the the immovable objects of British NIMBYism and high electricity prices. I've seen more local opposition
6.
by BoxOfRain 15d ago
To be honest I have showdead on and while I see the things you see, I also see a lot of blatant AI slop getting killed off too. I'm sure most people on here are at least somewhat attuned to Claude's 'voice' by now.
7.
by BoxOfRain 17d ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49213660 I made this post and it died on its arse initially, didn't even get an upvote. The second chance pool meant that it turned into a useful discussion about a pretty niche ele
8.
by BoxOfRain 17d ago
The fossil fuel industry managed to invent this unhappy process long before machine learning was a thing.
9.
by BoxOfRain 17d ago
> the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line The US absolutely could coerce the rest of the West in the short term, but everything that's happened in the last decade calls the lon
10.
by BoxOfRain 18d ago
The cross-border system fed from the Elan Valley in the UK is like this, Wales is famously very rainy due to its hills and the Victorians exploited this by damming the Elan Valley and gravity-feeding the water from the Cambrian Mountains al
11.
by BoxOfRain 18d ago
This is a good institution, helped prompt a discussion which was very useful to me about designing for e-ink.
12.
by BoxOfRain 18d ago
I think it depends on the train journey personally. I'd never dream of striking up a conversation on the Tube or a busy commuter line; personally I'm the definition of 'not a morning person' so I've no social batter
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by BoxOfRain 23d ago
Saving this for later, I really love a handmade one-off guitar. I often wish I had the woodworking chops to build a guitar myself, I have a very specific idea of what I want from a guitar.
14.
by BoxOfRain 25d ago
That book title and my vague memory the same author had a hand in naming Eris makes me think they've encountered the Principia Discordia at one time or another.
15.
by BoxOfRain 25d ago
Admittedly it's been a long time since I watched it but isn't the introduction sequence straight-up apologia for the theories behind eugenics? The idea 'what if society got massively more stupid' isn't a bad one for
16.
by BoxOfRain 25d ago
I always felt that film was lazy in how it presents its premise. Maybe there's naunces I'm missing because I'm not American, but it made me feel a bit gross in the same way a lot of pop culture around 'chavs' in the
17.
by BoxOfRain 25d ago
Black and white TV left enough of a cultural impact that despite not living through that era, when I got a black and white e-ink smartphone recently I joked that if I were to watch the snooker on it I'd have to judge the green by its p
18.
by BoxOfRain 1mo ago
It's a decreasing pool as well I'd say, the dev machine I built last summer would make less financial sense to me now for example.
19.
by BoxOfRain 1mo ago
Yeah I think the most stressed I've ever been about punctuality was when I was dependent on a rural bus to get to work on time. I love rural Britain but if you can't drive for whatever reason, it's often not feasible to live
20.
by BoxOfRain 1mo ago
> What if there won’t be a critical mass of fediverse users for it to matter enough and centralised social media platforms are all that we’ll ever get? I know this might not be a popular view but I'd be fairly content with a fediver
21.
by BoxOfRain 1mo ago
To be fair, who actually has a mental model of what 20,779 square kilometres or 8,023 square miles (the area of Wales expressed as a number) actually looks like? Doesn't matter if you're using imperial or metric, it's not ver
22.
by BoxOfRain 1mo ago
This isn't a uniquely American thing to be fair, in the UK it's not unusual to discuss area in terms of football pitches or for very large areas, Wales.
23.
by BoxOfRain 1mo ago
Also events like Partygate in the UK really didn't help, people were already pretty done with the pandemic lifestyle after nearly two years of it on and off including fairly heavy-handed enforcement; the British government then lost al
24.
by BoxOfRain 1mo ago
My MSI monitor does it, I don't object to it in principle. What I do object to is a tool, that I own, demanding this is done on its own schedule rather than mine in a way I can't always dismiss. There's no reason it shouldn&#
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by BoxOfRain 1mo ago
I've come to realise that the only truly good recommendation engines for music are written in wetware; there's a lot to be said for DJ sets and independent radio.
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by BoxOfRain 2mo ago
Load bearing is a funny one because before LLMs the only time I heard it was in the phrase 'load-bearing bug'.
27.
by BoxOfRain 2mo ago
You can't have a very good discussion with someone about something they've made part of their identity in my view. I'm not an instinctive AI booster but nor am I going to bother engaging with people who believe a tool I use i
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by BoxOfRain 2mo ago
That's pretty much my one gripe with the general culture of the Fediverse, a lot of people have made opposition to AI in general part of their identities and it can be a little tedious to have discussions at times because of it.
29.
by BoxOfRain 2mo ago
Out of interest, would you have made this argument with respect to Big Tobacco back in the day? In my view surveillance-based behavioural recommendation engines belong very much in the same category.
30.
by BoxOfRain 2mo ago
I'm so glad I got myself off Instagram and Reddit, the longer I go without them the more I realise what massive cognitohazards both of them are if you spend too much time on them. Different mechanisms but both were much more of a net d

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