h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

The homeless in our era are also almost entirely voiceless. Politicians compete in promises to disperse them, to make them more invisible. Much more like this is required.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a62875397/homelessness-in-america/

Extremely valuable plug-in.

RIL that LLVM (and thus Rust) is not safe on 32-bit x86 due to some weirdness with floating point that does not even require floating point arithmetic to trigger, just the use of any floating point at all.

Clearly dividing God's integers into fractional parts was a heresy.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/114479#issuecomment-2072052116

#rustlang

A few updates to the graph of Electoral Parties in the Republic of Ireland in advance of #GE2024 .

It looks like there are eight new party names that will appear on ballots since the last general election – six new parties and two name changes.

https://aonrud.github.io/Irish-Electoral-Parties/

#GE24 #Politics #Election

After every terrible election result we get 100s of pieces telling us exactly why this happened. But the supposed reasons are all different & conflicting. Below I argue we should take a leaf out of the UK's Home Intelligence WW2 project, where they fought propaganda & tracked "the vibes" to keep everyone on board with the war effort. We only have a few elections left to get to grips with populism, so we should stop the amateur hour sleuthing & figure things out:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/we-dont-know-why-people-are-voting-like-that/

I have a stupendous amount to do, find it hard to concentrate at the best of times, and I could really have done without Foursquare unexpectedly open sourcing their entire Places dataset today.

This is like an early Christmas. How am I supposed to think about anything else now.

https://location.foursquare.com/resources/blog/products/foursquare-open-source-places-a-new-foundational-dataset-for-the-geospatial-community/

Took me a bit but finished “The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear @brianstorms what an amazingly well researched and seemingly complete accounting of computing history that I had no knowledge of. Whether you have or have not ever heard of #PLATO I encourage you to read this one. Amazing to think where we might be today had it not been for the shortsightedness and mismanagement of Control Data Corporation.

Shortwave "Discone" Antenna, Former AT&T High Seas Radio Transmitter Site, Ocean Gate, NJ, 2009.

All the pixels, none of the per-minute toll charges, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/4141766569

#photography

A reminder of our latest post, in which Dr Philip Salmon explains who had the right to vote between 1832 and 1867. https://victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2024/11/07/who-could-vote-from-potwallopers-to-ten-pounders-post-1832-franchises-explained/ #19thcentury

UK just approved 5 (!) new undersea HVDC interconnectors to be finished by 2032, including two which will connect directly to other countries' offshore wind farms.

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/press-release/empowering-great-britain-clean-and-flexible-energy-future-next-generation-interconnectors

#energy

Remember when someone formed a company with an XSS attack in the name, back in 2020?

Turns out it made them so mad that company names "consisting of or including computer code" were made illegal in 2023 by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/56/section/10

RT by @CarolineLucas: the £3 billion annual cost of extending the 5p fuel duty cut is roughly equivalent to the annual fare take of every bus in England — £3.1 billion in 2023. so you could nearly make every bus free for the same cost https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/bus-statistics-data-tables#government-support-for-the-bus-industry-and-concessionary-travel-england-bus05

[2024-10-30 16:15 UTC]

At least she is a competent bureaucrat who doesn't make you think, "I preferred this in the original German"
– Helen Lewis on Harris vs Trump, Page 94 podcast

Tales of how regeneration didn't work in UK towns and cities back in the 50s and 60s (and sadly how we're not learning anything new)

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Boom Cities by Otto Saumarez Smith

http://www.mcqn.net/mcfilter/archives/books/blog_all_dogeared_pages_boom_cities_by_otto_saumarez_smith.html

SFC's DMCA exemptions granted in triennial Library of Congress hearing! Continuing exemptions for jailbreaking routers + smart TVs, FOSS license investigation, and medical devices. We are so proud to stand up for digital rights. To read more about our advocacy for digital freedom, read here: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2024/oct/31/success-in-2024-dmca-exemptions/

Reminder: Repeated fuel-duty freezes since 2011 have cost the govt at least £80bn and raised UK CO2 emissions by as much as 7%

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-fuel-duty-freezes-have-increased-uk-co2-emissions-by-up-to-7/