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2·6 months agoOnly the king has more power than this gas executive in a Russian emergency.
I’m pretty confident that the prime minister has a larger role than the king in a “shit hits the fan with Russia” scenario.
Based on current polling the conservatives would be lucky to get third place. Reform on track to get second or third place depending on the pole, Labour and the lib Dems are fighting for the top spot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
This graph has the Liberal Democrats at ~14%, the Conservatives at ~16%, Labour at ~20%, and Reform at ~32%.
A Liberal Democrat-Labour coalition might just edge out Reform, but Reform’s also rising, and Labour’s been getting hammered.
EDIT: Though, of course, this is just showing proportions of popular support, and first-past-the-post may cause that to not directly translate to seats.
Organisers are reportedly blaming the mistake on a “printing error” and have since removed the chocolate from the bags
Wait a minute. So the organizers dick it up and get rewarded with a bunch of chocolate? This doesn’t seem like proper incentivization.
EDIT: Also, based on recent polling, isn’t Reform the largest opponent, not Labour?
An estimated 1.4 million adults in Britain have a gambling problem
Put more optimistically, that’s 67.8 million Britons who don’t have a gambling problem.
An original consultation took place during 2018 as part of the previous government’s Child Obesity action, and legislation was finally passed in Parliament in December 2021.
The rules only came into force on Wednesday (1 October 2025).
The legislation was actually passed under the Johnson government:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Johnson_ministry
I suppose that Labour could have passed a law canceling implementation, though.
If you put sugar in granulated or powdered solid form into soda, it’ll create a lot of convection points and the soda will rapidly foam up and lose a lot of its carbon dioxide.
You could use a sweet syrup instead.
The notice reads: “Want Coca-Cola Classic? It’s one glass only.
“Based on new government laws, we’ve had to limit Coca-Cola Classic to one glass per customer.
“Still thirsty? Help yourself to any of our low-sugar fizzy Bottomless Soft Drinks.”
Under the new rules, any soft drinks that are low in sugar, for example ‘Zero’ alternative versions of most popular soft drink brands, can be drunk to one’s heart’s content.
I imagine that manufacturers of artificial sweeteners are in for a good time.
2·6 months agoNot what you’re asking, but I can probably do better.
I’d give decent odds that the issue you’re hitting is the thing that many Fediverse instances are hitting. There have been a lot of badly-written and very aggressive scraper-bots hammering servers all over (the Web, not just the Threadiverse) to try to find text to train AI models. If you’ve seen discussion on Anubis recently, that was aimed at trying to mitigate the load from that.
Many instances dealt with this by disallowing anonymous access. This sucks, because it’d be nice to let people use an instance without logging in, but it did apparently drastically reduce the bot load.
You can probably just pick an instance that doesn’t provide for anonymous access.
3·6 months agoHmm.
So for some software, you can just increase the price.
But…I wonder what that will do to the cost of video games. Typically, those are closer to one-off releases, not packages where new releases exist and are regularly purchased or subscriptions are in place.
I’d expect this to increase the cost of maintenance, if there are legal obligations on publishers to monitor, notify, and deploy security fixes for their software and upstream. You’d think that it might encourage vendors to EOL software sooner; pull it off Steam or the like, mark as no longer supported.
Maybe there are some exemptions somewhere that affect those.
Just 1 in 4 Brits think the UK is viewed positively on the world stage, with most wanting their country to play a large role in international affairs, exclusive poll shows
I — American — view the UK positively in international affairs, but frankly, if you’re comparing the UK to its recent history:
The UK itself has grown, but a lot of international influence came from the UK being, globally, at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. That’s a discovery-of-fire level event, a pretty rare situation in human history.
That was a major part of the Great Divergence; the UK was highly developed, and pulled wildly more than its weight in per capita terms.
If the bar that a Briton is setting is relative to the UK’s international role over the past couple centuries, that’s a high bar to set, because the UK had extraordinary influence in the world in that period. That’s not because the UK’s economy has become weaker, but because the world has been economically converging; less-developed countries have been catching up. I’d say that the UK definitely punches well above its weight in population terms internationally today, and is probably relatively-engaged. Could it do more? Well, I’m sure it could. But I don’t really think of the UK as especially isolationist. Name another country of 70 million that independently has as large an impact internationally.
Datacentres also rely on water, to help cool the humming banks of hardware. In the UK the Environment Agency, which was already warning about a future water shortfall for homes and farming, recently conceded the rapid expansion of AI had made it impossible to forecast future demand.
Research carried out by Google found that fulfilling a typical prompt entered into its AI assistant Gemini consumed the equivalent of five drops of water – as well as energy equivalent to watching nine seconds of TV.
I mean, the UK could say “we won’t do parallel-processing datacenters”. If truly and honestly, there are hard caps on water or energy specific to the UK that cannot be dealt with, that might make sense.
But I strongly suspect that virtually all applications can be done at a greater distance. Something like an LLM chatbot is comparatively latency-tolerant for most uses — it doesn’t matter whether it’s some milliseconds away — and does not have high bandwidth requirements to the user. If the datacenters aren’t placed in the UK, my assumption is that they’ll be placed somewhere else. Mainland Europe, maybe.
Also, my guess is that water is probably not an issue, at least if one considers the UK as a whole. I had a comment a bit back pointing out that the River Tay — Scotland as a whole, in fact — doesn’t have a ton of datacenters near it the way London does, and has a smaller population around it than does the Thames. If it became necessary, even if it costs more to deal with, it should be possible to dissipate waste heat by evaporating seawater rather than freshwater; as as an archipeligo, nearly all portions of the UK are not far from an effectively-unlimited supply of seawater.
And while the infrastructure for it doesn’t widely exist today, it’s possible to make constructive use of heat, too, like via district heat driven off waste heat; if you already have a city that is a radiator (undesirably) bleeding heat into the environment, having a source of heat to insert into it can be useful.:
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-centre-heating/
Data centres, the essential backbone of our increasingly generative AI world, consume vast amounts of electricity and produce significant amounts of heat.
Countries, especially in Europe, are pioneering the reuse of this waste heat to power homes and businesses in the local area.
As the chart above shows, the United States has by far the most data centres in the world. So many, in fact, the US Energy Information Administration recently announced that these facilities will push the country’s electricity consumption to record highs this year and next. The US is not, however, at the forefront of waste heat adoption. Europe, and particularly the Nordic countries, are instead blazing a trail.
That may be a more-useful strategy in Europe, where a greater proportion of energy is — presently, as I don’t know what will be the case in a warming world — expended on heating than on air conditioning, unlike in the United States. That being said, one also requires sufficient residential population density to make effective use of district heating. And in the UK, there are probably few places that would make use of year-round heating, so only part of the waste heat is utilized.
looks further
The page I linked to mentions that this is something that London — which has many datacenters — is apparently already doing:
And in the UK, the Mayor of London recently announced plans for a new district heat network in the west of the city, expected to heat over 9,000 homes via local data centres.
The charge read: “On February 5 2023 you possessed an extreme pornographic image, which portrayed, in an explicit and realistic way, a person performing an act of intercourse with an animal, namely a fish, which was grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character, and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that such a person or animal was real.”
^ Disgusting garbage of no cultural merit
Wikipedia: The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife
The work influenced later artists such as Félicien Rops, Auguste Rodin, Louis Aucoc, Fernand Khnopff and Pablo Picasso.[15] Picasso drew his own private version in 1903, which was displayed in a 2009 Museu Picasso exhibit titled Secret Images, alongside 26 other drawings and engravings by Picasso, displayed next to Hokusai’s original and 16 other Japanese prints, portraying the influence of 19th century Japanese art on Picasso’s work.[16] Picasso also later fully painted works that were directly influenced by the woodblock print, such as 1932’s Reclining Nude, where the woman in pleasure is also the octopus, capable of pleasuring herself.[17][18]
^ Influential classic work
Slate Star Codex has an article from back when, “I Can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup”.
It’s talking about a variety of things, but one point at the core of it, a point that I think is pretty interesting, is that people tend to have social groups that are extraordinarily politically-clustered and highly non-representative of their countries as a whole…and often don’t realize it.
There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.
This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.
I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.
And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.
People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.
I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.
To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.
Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.
It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.
There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”
In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”
But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.
On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.
But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?
When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.
It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.
I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.
(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)
For me, the “holy shit, I live in a bubble” moment was the first time I started looking up polls on ghosts. Like, if you asked me what percentage of Americans believed in ghosts, I’d have probably guessed…I don’t know, somewhere south of one percent, maybe? I mean, just extrapolating from my social circle and my own experiences. Sure, if we were talking medieval times, people maybe believed in ghosts and witches and stuff, but in 2025? Nah. We know, more-or-less, how the universe works now, and the supernatural is just something fun to joke around about, right?
But that’s not what polling finds at all. Depending upon how you ask the question in your poll, you’ll get different levels, but it’s a lot, north of a third of society.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4400922-americans-ghosts-aliens-devil-survey/
Nearly half of U.S. adults, 48%, believe in psychic or spiritual healing. Slightly fewer, 39%, express a belief in ghosts, while between 24% and 29% say they believe in six other supernatural phenomena, including telepathy, communication with the dead, clairvoyance, astrology, reincarnation and witches.
looks at MEGA hat in image
I distinctly remember, back with early Trump, when the MAGA thing was being done, joking about how people could do it in Europe and call it MEGA. I did not expect it to actually happen.
I’m not sure if it’s what was used here, but a lot of areas have some kind of generic “nuisance” law, which basically serves as a general purpose “someone is doing something obnoxious that affects us and we want to provide law enforcement with a way to make them stop” tool.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance
Under the common law, persons in possession of real property (land owners, lease holders etc.) are entitled to the quiet enjoyment of their lands. However this doesn’t include visitors or those who aren’t considered to have an interest in the land. If a neighbour interferes with that quiet enjoyment, either by creating smells, sounds, pollution or any other hazard that extends past the boundaries of the property, the affected party may make a claim in nuisance.
Legally, the term nuisance is traditionally used in three ways:
- to describe an activity or condition that is harmful or annoying to others (e.g., indecent conduct, a rubbish heap or a smoking chimney)
- to describe the harm caused by the before-mentioned activity or condition (e.g., loud noises or objectionable odors)
- to describe a legal liability that arises from the combination of the two.[2] However, the “interference” was not the result of a neighbor stealing land or trespassing on the land. Instead, it arose from activities taking place on another person’s land that affected the enjoyment of that land.[3]
The law of nuisance was created to stop such bothersome activities or conduct when they unreasonably interfered either with the rights of other private landowners (i.e., private nuisance) or with the rights of the general public (i.e., public nuisance)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance_in_English_law#Public_nuisance
EDIT: Okay, found a news article that mentions what they’re being investigated for:
Thames Valley Police said in a statement Tuesday night that they arrested four adults “on suspicion of malicious communications following a public stunt in Windsor.” The police added they will conduct an investigation into the incident, and that all four people arrested remain in custody.
Probably this law, though it doesn’t sound to me, on the face of it, like it’d qualify:
Malicious Communications Act 1988
It addresses communications “in electronic form”, but I don’t think that in the everyday sense of the word, a projection would count.
EDIT2: I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they don’t wind up with this actually going anywhere, and just wanted some sort of legal rationale to make them stop it for the moment.
0·7 months agoHave Trump act like Biden did.
George W. Bush was a Republican president and didn’t get anything like the flak that Trump does. He also didn’t behave like Trump does.
I’m not totally sure I follow.
If you’re playing to whatever sound device you want, but it’s not coming out the output you want (e.g. headphones and/or speakers and you want the other), the mixer program you use probably has an option to select the output. I haven’t used
plasma-pa, but withpavucontrol, it’s in the “Output Devices” tab. For each device, there’s a “Port” drop down.
Looks fine to me. I don’t use KDE, but searching, it looks like KDE Plasma’s audio mixer is “plasma-pa”. The “pa” there will stand for “PulseAudio”, so at least at one point, it’ll have been based on PulseAudio. I dunno if it talks natively to Pipewire now.
kagis
https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/v8hbyb/something_like_plasmapa_for_pipewire/
If you have the pipewire-pulse compatibility layer installed (which you really should), plasma-pa will work without any problems. Right now there is no pure PipeWire equivalent of it.
That was three years ago, so might be out of date, but at least then, it still used the PulseAudio API, so it may need pipewire-pulse to be active. In any event, I don’t think that it’d hurt to have pipewire-pulse.
I’d check and make sure that pipewire-pulse is active too, and if so, try using
plasma-pato have PipeWire set the volume to whatever it is that you want set to. I assume that once you’ve set a volume with PipeWire, PipeWire will handle restoring it next time you log in. It does on my system.
Sounds like there’s potential for even more political gains from even more political theater, then?