Notices by MarjorieR (marjolica@social.linux.pizza)

@jbenjamint the same thing happens down here is Devon but it's usually due to an accident or road works on an adjacent dual carriageway and GPS such as Android Auto, that monitors the congestion, then suggest a stupid alternative route that naive holidaymakers then attempt to follow, en masse.

@Wen @simon_brooke @jbenjamint probably most of those stuck motorists were planning to walk, just a walk always seems to involve a long car journey first..

@simon_brooke @Wen @jbenjamint sometimes the solution seems to be put parking at the bounds of the wilderness area and run minibuses in. Obviously you still have to provide access for those who live and work there.

@simon_brooke @Wen @jbenjamint true, but these days it has been mostly abandoned to sheep, grouse and hill walkers.
The same is also true of all the abandoned 'wildernesses' of the UK and around the world, they were originally nothing like they are today having been changed by human occupation, sometimes in different way at different times.
The Lake District was once heavily wooded with natural species such as oak, until they were cut down to make wooden ships and charcoal to smelt ore, so for a while a hive of industry.
The Amazon watershed was likewise extensively populated before Europeans brought their diseases.

@JugglingWithEggs and if you can avoid doing it don't go to the USA, full stop.

But remember the (US hosted) Cloud is over here too and we have still not banned use of it it even though it doesn't meet UK or EU data privacy requirements (that in the UK Starmer is now trying to rescind).

So get off Meta, don't use X, don't use MS Office or Google products. Look for Cloud free or if you must store onine switch to European alternatives.

@tealeg @GreenSkyOverMe given LLMs are inherently inaccurate it's very likely that there no net gain whatsoever when you included the cost of their mistakes (whether remediated or not).

Even the seeming demand for their product is largely artificial as they are still pushing this non-solution at below cost price, even with out factoring in their uncosted externalities: hammering websites worldwide, stealing intellectual property, pumping out CO2.

@zleap well As a fellow South Devonian I hope your training is going to be indoors. Even so getting there could be an issue (heavy rain, 40, gusting 71 mph winds).

@selea just so we all get a present from Santa tomorrow?

"A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones"

Well us Brits have always been amazed at how white and pearly American teeth are but dentistry is the US has clearly gone down the same oligopolistic and #enshittification rabbithole that the rest of American medicine has - as already documented by #pluralistic.

"Many dental clinics that offer implants have consolidated into chains owned by private equity firms that have bought out much of implant dentistry. In health care, private equity investment is sometimes criticized for overtreatment and prioritizing short-term profit over patients."

In the UK dentistry is increasingly privatised and our new Health Minister has been well bribed by the (often American) health companies to move even more of our health care to private sector contractors who will obviously take their cut. This will not end well.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/11/more-dentists-are-pulling-healthy-teeth-to-sell-pricy-implants-experts-warn/#gsc.tab=0

@jwildeboer no doubt they are mostly spam however as a small family email server I'm not seeing any emails from either TLD. so for me not worth screening out.

At the moment I'm rejecting about 16% (737) and including 4.7.1 try again later of the 3861 message received over a 4 week period. Only about 2% (25) ended up in my users spam folders.
What is more annoying is the 9396 smtpd warnings (authentication failures or DNS fails through fail2ban blocks). Seems lots of spammers are trying to guess my user passwords and get a relay.

@Helenisenough @ChrisMayLA6 seems there is a database:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details

I understand that the slave owners got their blood money at the time, the 2015 date is when the loans to finance it were eventually fully repaid. Money was also made by numerous individuals and institutions on the loans:

https://historyguild.org/slavery-reparations-who-got-paid/

@goatsarah are you actually going to spend £2000 on a new phone?
I'm a bit chary of upgrading my 2 year old £400 Android phone as camera wise the newer versions have gone from 3 to 2 lenses and probably added even more AI trickery to the imaging.
They have also added a more powerful processor which simply means the battery would be dead more quickly: this one is fast enough for my needs and currently runs for up to 5 days. And it has both phone socket and SD drawer.
And phones have now become phablets - they no longer fit it anyone's pockets or handbags so people end up hanging them round their necks.
As it is my previous, now 7 year old, phone, which I keep in a drawer, does still work but the OS no longer gets updates and it wont 'see' 5G towers.

@neo @Ozwel @GossiTheDog what are the computer resource implications of this?
A screenshot every 5 minutes, even with OCR might not be too terrible, but does it have to re-run AI learning on it, and everything previous, every time it gets that 5 minutes update?
ChatGPT was well known for not knowing about anything recent because it was so expensive to run.

@urlyman I read Limits to Growth when I was studying at University. As a BA Technological Economist I found it's feedback model approach pretty persuasive. It predicted that with exponential growth we would start to run out of (economically extractable) resources within my lifetime. It's big ommision was fossil fuelled CO2 emissions and the consequent feedback cycle screwing with climate. Needless to say I was being sponsored at Uni by BP and then joined the NCB when I graduated. Slow learner.

@urlyman in mitigation I did spend my last 6 years (2009-15) working at DECC trying to improve the UK's response to climate change: I was modelling the UK's energy and emissions and how these could be reduced by policy. Needless to say soon after I retired and with the 2015 Tory election victory the department was abolished and a lot of the good policies initiatives (home insulation, Zero carbon new homes) were then also minimised or postponed.

@gerrymcgovern A new water-wasting data centre design where?
In this Uruguay?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/15/drought-leaves-millions-in-uruguay-without-tap-water-fit-for-drinking

@inanimatecarbongod @hildabast there are another set of standards for this - the EL Reg units.
However for celestial bodies the largest volume unit the 'Olympic swimming pool' is still a bit small so I expect we would need to invoke k, m, g and t multipliers as well.
They also have walnuts, grapefruit, chicken's eggs and footballs.
The weight measures are a bit more exotic: badgers, great white sharks, skateboarding rhinos, Australian trams and LINQ hotel recycling.

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

@techghoul @mekkaokereke great that she'e got tenure. Just wish it wasn't so difficult for black women to get parity.

Can you tell us more about how it came about she had such a bad landing in the #fediverse?

What needs to be done to ensure it never happens again?

@goatsarah @helenczerski @tinaquilts flying within the UK can seem cheaper and faster: if you ignore the cost and time of getting to the nearest airport and the time to check-in, load and take-off.
Al least most train stations are in the centres of town and cities.

@goatsarah @helenczerski @tinaquilts
talking about the perceived rationale for building HS2.

10 years or so ago I was trying (for another government department, DECC) to get DfT and HS2 to tell me how much carbon they expected HS2 to save by displacing other means of transport such as road and air. They didn't know.
So presumably their CBA didn't account for the potential fuel savings.