fairlysadpanda.bsky.social
Senior backend engineer, CCP Games London. VR games developer and artist. Sometimes do politics, mental health and north London permitting. Liberal Democrat, somewhat hawkish, very pro-Europe.
I use she/her pronouns, and I hope you have a lovely day.
717 posts
209 followers
39 following
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WHEN'S MAHVEL :biblethump:
"2026"
"...where's Capcom" :biblethump:
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In fact I'll chase this back to another of @stephenkb.bsky.social 's recent posts. This is the same thing as "Netflix is dominant because it's actually able to show you what you want". It's the same thing as TikTok.
Being able to show users what they want when they want it is what matters!
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This entire saga ends with Google broken up and innovation in web search killing SEO. It's fascinating how it's a Web 1.0 problem (how to find data and do human being-relevant things online) dressed up as a rot economy bro culture problem.
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I think "AI bro who eats paint as his Claude prompts spew out incomprehensible Javascript" is an easy target. Blame Google and go for destroying the ability to look information up without "site:wikipedia.org" and "site:reddit.com"
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Interesting difference between Scot/Welsh politics and English politics: Lab-LD has been a thing in both chambers, but it's almost completely impossible to imagine such a hookup in England. It'd destroy both parties.
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The difference is that the nationalists in Scotland are mostly centrist and the ones in England post about Minions and write "Tommy is right you know" on Facebook
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The latest report appears to be this 2024 one, with the DfE covering the 2023 data. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/675330...
Over 20% of the UK lives in poverty. www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2...
It's just something middle class and folks who escaped try to not think about. Very British.
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The crowd goes mild
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How long did it take for you to catch wind?
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There really feels like there's a pun here to exploit but I'm coming up blank
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England at least has an above-average score. 272 is about the reading age of a 9 year old.
These are hard problems to POVERTY solve and you have to POVERTY really read between the lines to POVERTY understand why this is still a problem in the POVERTY 21st century
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This assumes that a coalition in the UK would ever pass effective reform of Westminster, which I think is a brave assumption.
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He also made the decision to blow his own feet off during the _actual_ GE and probably cost a couple of perfectly good MPs their jobs, so you take the rough with the smooth. That's hindsight. Maybe Pack/Davey backing the party into an electoral cul-de-sac is viewed dimly in five years.
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Partially Farron but I don't think you get the LD revival without Pack and co. Plus the _extremely lucky break_ of the 2017 GE. The LDs limping into a 2019 or 2020 GE with those 8 MPs we had would have killed the party.
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We don't know what a Labour party that had real, proper time to work through its 2019 trauma looms like, and I think this Blair tribute act stuff is the natural result when a bunch of "started being active during late Blair" people end up in Number 10.
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I think it is very easy to forget that in the equivalent amount of time Labour had to recover from Corbyn before taking power, the LDs went through three leaders. Five years after the May 2015 rout they were being co-run by Mark Pack. Labour went from Corbyn to Number 10 in four and a half years.
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Brexit was unironically the best thing to happen to the LDs for this reason; there are deffo characters in the LDs now (Hobhouse for example) but considering I met Lembit Opik once...
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The golden rule, as ever, is that the good ones were often things like teachers and the really, really bad ones did stuff for the NUS
They should make that a screening test for MPs.
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Labour's "big tent" and historic relevancy across the country meant a larger pool of people, and more "jobs", even on a volunteer basis. Just different circumstances generating different modern parties...
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To mutilate an anecdote, the only real difference between a lifelong Lib Dem and a Labour member is which table they ran into first at the Freshers Fair; but is it really surprising LDs are a bit more focussed on private industry? Unless they get lucky most LD activists will never win an election
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ATM their politics has all the hallmarks of the coalition LD era - "oh no everything will work out for the next GE" -> "oh no we can't fix anything before the GE it's too close" -> "oh no"
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At the moment you can sit in a queue for an hour or three and your queue will go UP, you'll be at 120 and at hour three it's 125. _What is the point of the queue_. Just direct people off-app to go pay someone on Discord or some shit.
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Appreciate I'm screaming into the void here, who cares, nobody is going to read this, but JFC, man, there is no point to a queuing system when communities will set up priority access systems on top of it. _Queues do not move_ for busy events; the only people who get in are those on p. access.
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Comprende. For what it's worth, I think _almost no_ voter has an idea about how governance works in the UK; it's not quite as bad as the legal system (how many people even know what the difference between a barrister and a solicitor is, or that they can be a local magistrate?). It's shades of wrong.
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True! I think the friction is "doesn't understand", it can be taken as a negative or neutral statement ("some voters are dumb" vs "voters can be mistaken"). I've heard the negative view a lot and it can get into classist or otherwise dismissive logic.
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You can sub-categorize things a lot on those lines, but it gets messy. "Reform voter who knows full well that his council can't launch migrants from cannons decides to vote as if they can out of principle". "NIMBY who thinks spooking Westminster will get their council to stop planning permission".
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Well, powers or no powers, people will try and maximise the effectiveness of their vote. Some people _will_ be mistaken, or value a moral message over zero-sum pragmatism, or deliberately protest vote for candidates they know are bad, or whatever.
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In the end Labour and the Tories have conspired for a century to evade giving people (in England, and at UK elections) a more nuanced vote than this, and watching both parties now realize "oh, oh no, we've lost the mandate of heaven and now they are pulling the WRONG levers" is cathartic.
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A voter who says "I voted for the headbangers for my town council to launch migrants from cannons" and a voter that says "I voted for the Lib Dem to be my MP to stop that local housing development" are both trying to use their vote to move the train.
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FWIW I think this is still over-complicating things: all voters in our system are in a signal box and can pull a lever to move the tracks. Based on their knowledge and values they choose a lever.
A headbanger making the national local and a NIMBY making the local national are doing the same thing.
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It's like DEFCONs
5 - complaining without naming names on a feed
4 - complaining about a specific newsletter on a feed
3 - complaining in the author's replies to others
2 - @ing them directly
1 - writing a newsletter to 10,000 readers about it, projecting it onto the side of of a palace, etc
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At the moment Labour's gambit appears to be "what you gonna do, shoot me?" to LDs/Greens.
I suspect that the answer they are going to get from certain inner-city local parties is "yes"
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To be fair @stephenkb.bsky.social most Brits are going to think of "theme park" in the Rollercoaster Tycoon sense, not the Disneyland sense; we just don't have the equivalent of a heavily-themed dark ride-heavy park in this country.
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De Efteling is in a famously dry and tropical country
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Upside is that the Steam integration bit is a launcher/server browser app which only partially is responsible for downloading and serving GPL code, with its advertisement of servers directly tied into compliant game servers using specific known and unmodified versions of a GPL codebase - probably OK
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The worst kind of problem because no, nobody is going to blast the project down from Github, but it makes it impossible to actually contribute to as I don't know what terms my code is under.
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"You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply [...] to the whole of the work, and all its parts,[...] This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way"
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"The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7"