“MetaAlphabetAmazon once again refuses calls for universal basic income: ‘if people wanted handouts they should have stolen the world’s IP like we did’”

My wife and I have four kids. I’m speaking with a thousand yard stare here.

First of all, having kids is BY FAR the best thing that ever happened to me.

But it didn’t feel that way in the beginning.

I won’t use “you”, but “I”. I can’t guarantee that my experience will be mirrored by you. But I can say that the fathers I know well enough to have open conversations with on this topic broadly agree with this.

It’s great you’re asking these questions. You’ll no doubt get lots of good answers. So I won’t pile on.

But I wish to tell you something I completely didn’t understand.

The first year of the first kid is HARD. It’s hard for mummy; even harder if she’s breastfeeding.

But it will be super hard for you too. Because everyone will just expect you to be “supportive daddy” and buck up. Meanwhile you’ll be going through your own journey. Your journey isn’t visible. Your stomach isn’t contracting. Your weight isn’t shifting (well, only by reaching for easy meal options at least) and (if mummy is breastfeeding) you’re not the one with sore nipples or mastitis.

There were times when I quietly, in the dark, trying to lull baby to sleep, asked myself “what have I done?” … “is this my life now?!”

I felt I completely disappeared. My end credits had rolled. I was a supporting actor in somebody else’s film.

And the crucial experience I missed was this: It doesn’t last long.

But man it felt endless. I felt utterly worn out and with no “tour of duty” end date ahead.

It’s over before it even begins. Each day today is the hardest day you’ll do on this. Tomorrow will be easier. Next week easier than that. In a month even easier.

And gradually, slowly, I returned. “I” became an entity again. I had time do something for me.

What I wished someone had told me was this very thing: It won’t be long. It’s hard but it’ll be much easier soon.

Enjoy it! Kids are just the very best thing you’ll ever do. (But only after a while).

Man, I luckily upgraded to 64GB (when MSFS 2024 said “that’s preferred”) before all this.

Google Sheets is competing with Excel. Proton Sheets is competing with Google Sheets. So Proton Sheets is competing with Excel.

I used Word as a comparative example to say that parts of the office/docs suite are easy to compete with (there’s only so may things a word processor can do), while others (like Google Sheets or Excel, whichever order you prefer) is incredibly difficult to compete with; a formatting error on import of a Word doc is acceptable. An unsupported formula ruins the entire thing.

Does if have FILTER, array formulas, spill zones, MAP, data tables, query engines, SQL engine etc etc?

To compete with Word: Easy. To compete with Excel: Very, very difficult (pretty much only Google Sheets have managed).

Fortunately I live in a country where the government can (broadly) be trusted.

I thin Zig actually stands out pretty well from the pack. You sound maybe a little jealous or something?

The build system was basically a black box until 0.14.

I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?

If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.

With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.

And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.

If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.

The system required isn’t that complex.

A social media

• a social media company is opening a new account.
• it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
• the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
• the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
• the account is opened.

In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.

Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.

Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.

We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.

This goes way back. Intel has a proud tradition of writing shitty NPU Linux drivers and hoping to sneak it in. My lshw has only the Intel NPU as not having loaded a module successfully.

Where I live, well off (seen in global scale), white, westerner is the average. Would you prefer me to represent an opinion that doesn’t reflect what I observe in my surroundings?

The Nordics.

I live in Denmark at the minute.

Not at the minute no.

Or I live in a country with better cops than you?

In terms of delivering the highest proven outcomes for the broadest amount of people I’ve not seen evidence that anything beats a well regulated market. If new evidence is presented I shall gladly revise my opinion.

I’m a pleasant human but find myself often downvoted for what I consider an average social democratic view; taking the viewpoint that, in my country, cops are generally trustworthy, the market works when regulated by a well functioning democracy and it’s ok to be wealthy, but expect to be properly taxed.

I would have said exactly the same, but about PhotoPrism. Funny how perspectives differ.

You’re already spending about £1200/year (per taxpayer) on social housing.

£293,000 per meter. You could extend HS2 by 6 km. It wouldn’t even get another stop.

£25 per person. Not that much could be achieved for that, tbh. Everything sounds like a lot on a national scale.