rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

@simon_brooke Not sure about that. If #Fujitsu represented to #PostOffice that its system was accurate (knowing that it was flawed) and it was aware that people were being prosecuted based on that representation (hard to believe they were not aware), then it seems like Fujitsu is also at least partly responsible for the prosecutions.

This is not funny ....

The last 10 years or so of tech:

2013: Blockchain! It's a like a database, but slower and worse!
2016: VR! It's like monitors, but slower and worse!
2021: NFTs! It's like pictures, but slower and worse!
2023: AI! It's like algorithms, but slower and worse!

British politics at the moment:

Conservatives: We’re going to do X!

Labour: We oppose doing X. It harms the most vulnerable in society, damages the economy and the environment, and violates our international treaty obligations.

Conservatives: We have a huge majority, so we’ve done X!

Journalists: Will Labour reverse X if it wins the next election?

Labour: No.

Can we please stop calling them "ecosystems" (which implies complexity and mutualism and competition between a diversity of living things)

How about "software prisons"

1000 richest people are approched. "The end of the world is here. Time to go to your doomsday bunker", they are told. The billionaires nodded. They knew this was coming. They were prepared.

So they gathered their loved ones and locked themselves in luxury bunkers. No contact to outside world.

10 years later they emerge. The world has healed. The air is breathable, people are happy. "What was the catastrophy?" they ask the first person they meet.

She screams: "THEY GOT OUT!!!"

#microfiction

making a Lisp, checking it twice
gonna find out who's (or naughty nice)

Elm’s been a hugely inspiring language to me, because it did such a great job of making Functional Programming a joy to use & to teach.

But front of the queue for Elm-related inspiration must be Richard Feldman, who’s currently taking the best of its philosophy into a Roc. Lots of rich, juicy design ideas in this week’s episode of Developer Voices.

📺 https://youtu.be/DzhIprQan68
🎧 https://pod.link/developer-voices/episode/12c96f4851e6c11c51eff8975a556f7b

Here's how the "Ship of Theseus" page looked in July 2003 when it was first created! Since then, the article has been edited 1792 times and 0% of the original phrases remain.

It's hard for people to visualize removing tons or billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂). I propose we talked about CO₂ removal (CDR) like a time machine (e.g., this machine will take us back 5 minutes). For example:

Q: How far back in time does planting 100 million trees take us?

A: If one mature tree takes up an average of 25 kg of CO₂ per year, then 100 million trees will take up 2.5 MtCO₂. That's a time machine that takes us back 33 minutes and 6 seconds in a year.

It's not a lot.

I have to say, Unison's documentation system is just next-level brilliant.

* All your libraries' docs are local.
* Everything's perfectly hyperlinked, even after refactoring.
* Markdown-ish with extensions that totally nail literate coding.

Seriously, if you're writing a language, look at Elm for the error messages and Unison for the docs.

(And Haskell for the monads, of course. 😅)

https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/documentation/

Just a thought

Fascinating charts about power generation by country (gift link).

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/20/climate/global-power-electricity-fossil-fuels-coal.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BU0.DsDB.wfepDJfyFvMY&smid=url-share

Look, this is silly. Yes, we would need unfeasible amounts of new wiring to recreate a modern high energy economy powered only by (green) electricity. But we would also need completely unfeasible amounts of lots of other things – most particularly metals. We are going to have to learn to live WELL in a much lower energy world – and, actually, it isn't hard to see how we achieve this.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/25/race-to-get-uk-electricity-grid-ready-for-net-zero