Don Thompson @guardeddon@qoto.org

Why the House of Lords can and should delay the Rwanda Bill

Using the Parliament Acts, peers can force the House of Commons to think again

This is an argument why they should do so in this case

By me, at Prospect

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/64673/why-the-house-of-lords-can-and-should-delay-the-rwanda-bill

24 seconds to view the product images on Amazon’s website

Earlier this month I finally retired my Motorola G4 that served me well for testing web performance for over half a decade. The new device that I got is the Nokia C02 (view specs). In terms of CPU and RAM, it’s the lowest-end Android smartphone I could find that was released by a mainstream brand in 2023. According to Speedometer, it’s about 25% slower than the 2016 Motorola G4. Yes, slower.

Did I go too low? I…

https://šime.eu/2

"Matt, tracking on the web, it's just how it is. If we get rid of it so many companies will die off."

There were companies before tracking tech. There was advertising before tracking tech.

Tracking tech is just how they can pay the least, to get the most. It's not a right. It's not a given. It's not required.

How did it work before? You made good products and the stuff that was most popular rose to the top.

Ban tracking tech. Hamstring predatory and scammy products that survive on targeting.

Douglas Allchin, Jonathan Osborne, and I have a new paper out about teaching science in this age of online misinformation.

The idea is simple: we tell people to trust the science, but we rarely teach students about the social processes that make it trustworthy.

https://carlbergstrom.com/publications/pdfs/2024JCST.pdf

We’re excited to announce that we’re supporting #ActivityPub Test Suite and investing in the establishment of developer tools to ensure compatibility among ActivityPub implementations. This #interoperability also benefits users and will lead to individuals having more control over their data.

https://sovereigntechfund.de/tech/activitypub-test-suite/

How frequently do you use an RSS reader?

Please boost for more representative data.

Pleased to see @fesshole reach 1k on Mastodon - it's tricky for us to build up followers here as we don't know anyone. If you can help by spreading us around that would be fab - and you'll enjoy it more too as Fesshole is best when replies are lively. Also follow @anon_opin for rotten opinions that are occasionally ok.

@guardeddon checkout the interactive map, they cross link the data with how much each country is extracting gas.

I loathe airports. I particularly loathe the security theatre at airports. And what I particularly loathe about it, is just how utterly useless it is. Why do I waste my time dealing with any of it when, apparently, you can just walk on to a plane. Absolutely useless.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68118500

Whistleblowers flagged 300 scientific papers for retraction. Many journals ghosted them
Saga highlights how slow, opaque action by publishers threatens the integrity of the research literature

https://www.science.org/content/article/whistleblowers-flagged-300-scientific-papers-for-retraction-many-journals-ghosted-them

Afraid of content jobs being taken over by AI? Then write for humans.

Stop padding, stop vamping, stop over-explaining the background, stop putting the answer to the question below the fold, stop click-farming, stop writing for machine indexing, and stop putting a single word anywhere in the piece for any reason other than to make it a better piece of WRITING for HUMANS to read.

If you write for machines, you deserve to be replaced by an #LLM.

#SEO #enshittification

@ricmac Congrats to the migration off Substack and to Eleventy/Buttondown. In the same spirit I would also consider migrating away from Google Analytics to something more privacy focused. I am a big fan of @plausible.

Cool to see #DuckDB and #MovingPandas on Action to analyze flight data #ADSB
https://tech.marksblogg.com/global-flight-tracking-adsb.html#generalising-routes

@swearyanthony

I used to work at Very Large Multinational Company and the Legal department was quite clear in "don't email us. always call".

@idealaw

Did my bit at the anti-AfD demo in Berlin today

After having lost my EU citizenship rights through Brexit, then regained them by becoming German, I don’t want my adopted country going the right wing populist route the one of my birth did!

@neil I see it as another way in which the delivery options available to small businesses will fall further behind the likes of Amazon. Those in major urban areas I believe can get at least a subset of items the same day or even with 1 hour delivery. I get next day delivery with pretty good order tracking on the edge of the Highlands. Our postie is great and generally finds a way to avoid us needing to collect a parcel, however is massively let down by the rest of the system.

RIP the man who was the absolute incarnation of XKCD's "one random dude holding up the entire internet". You may never have heard of David Mills, but your entire goddamn world depends on what he did.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Mills