tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on UK's third-largest steelworks collapses into government control 7 hours ago:
Well, could be.
I think that it’s fair to say that the UK probably wants to maintain reliable access to steel.
But there are multiple routes for that, hedging against any risk costs something, and it’s not possible to hedge against everything. Have to pick what risks to deal with.
Another possibility is that the UK “friendshores” – like, okay, say that the UK decides that, I don’t know, some set of specific countries having capacity is sufficient, that any scenario where they’re trying to cut the UK off (or someone else is able to cut transport to them off a la the Battle of the Atlantic) probably has larger problems for the UK than just steel access. I suspect that if you go looking, you could find all kinds of supply chains that aren’t purely British domestic that would be important — hard to do everything domestically. Could even sign some sort of treaty obligating the UK to have some guaranteed amount of access with said countries (though that might also entail some sort of commitments on the British side to provide things themselves).
Or it could be possible to maintain a strategic reserve of steel long enough to last out a period of shortage, until other counters could be employed.
Or it could be that the UK does want domestic capacity, but feels that the existing British capacity outside of this facility is adequate for national security.
Or it could be that the UK feels that in an emergency, they or someone else could adequately ramp up production.
Or it could be that the UK would like to provide some form of protectionism, but doesn’t want to use tariffs (e.g. they use government procurement to ensure a certain amount of sustained domestic demand).
Or it could be that the UK feels that they can deter parties from cutting them off. Like, okay, maybe one could imagine a scenario where steel to the UK were cut off, or at least reduced…but then that party would suffer consequences of their own, lose access to things that the UK provides or can otherwise deny, that might also be critical to that other party.
kagis
I have no familiarity with the situation, so I can’t comment on it, but this document from last month by the current government seems to detail a variety of measures regarding support for the British steel industry:
- Comment on UK's third-largest steelworks collapses into government control 12 hours ago:
China’s been producing a very great deal of it in past years.
en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro…
The biggest steel producing country is currently China, which accounted for 54% of world steel production in 2023.
Historically, the UK had access to coal and was an early starter on a lot of industrialization stuff. Today, other countries have industrialized too.
From the Wikipedia page:
Entity 2024 million metric tons production 1967 million metric tons production World 1,881.4 497.2 China 1,005.1 14.0 UK 4.0 24.3 - Comment on Angela Rayner hit with legal challenge over datacentre on green belt land 23 hours ago:
Other locals complained datacentres were…noisy
Unless they’re walking inside the datacenter, I wouldn’t expect much by the way of noise.
In March, the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, attacked the “archaic planning processes” holding up the construction of technology infrastructure and complained that “the datacentres we need to power our digital economy get blocked because they ruin the view from the M25”.
While I agree that planning has been too much of a roadblock to development in many places, not just in the UK, I don’t think that it’s specific to building out tech infrastructure. I’d say that it’s an even more-substantial barrier in limiting housing construction.
www.centreforcities.org/housing/
The UK’s chronic housing shortage is one of the biggest economic and social challenges the country faces. The Government is aiming to build 1.5 million homes over the Parliament in England, but barely 200,000 were built in 2023-24.
England’s housing crisis is so severe as the planning system is especially restrictive. While other countries have rules-based zoning systems, England has a discretionary planning system where every decision is made case-by case. In most zoning systems proposals that follow the rule are accepted, while under discretion even projects that have been approved by planners can be rejected by councils.
The housing crisis varies substantially across the UK, with the worst shortages in the most economically successful cities and towns where employment opportunities draw in large numbers of people. These are caused by how our planning system disconnects the local supply of housing from local demand.
- Comment on Is Meta's Superintelligence Overhaul a Sign Its AI Goals Are Struggling? 1 day ago:
From an organizational standpoint, it doesn’t sound unreasonable to me.
The group will be split into four smaller groups, according to a New York Times report. One group will focus on AI research, another one on infrastructure and hardware projects, one on AI products, and another one on building out AI superintelligence, a hypothetical AI system that could outperform human intelligence on any and all scales.
I mean, they have different skillsets, a fair bit of that is going to be on decoupled timelines, they have different levels of risk, and the technical expertise is going to differ. One succeeding or failing isn’t tightly coupled to another doing so. Sure, they all relate to one thing or another to something that has been called “AI”, but that’s a pretty broad group.
- Comment on Are there any volume fit calculators? 1 day ago:
Fair enough, sorry.
- Comment on Are there any volume fit calculators? 1 day ago:
It’s not the nudging that you referred to. You edited your comment after I responded to remove that part of your comment.
- Comment on Are there any volume fit calculators? 1 day ago:
The best methods we have (afaik) basically randomly position the object and then nudge it until it gives up after doing lots of tries
I’m skeptical. I can think of some problems that do work like that, like graphviz’s node-cluster-and-fit-to-a-plane layout stuff. But here, you should just need to be working with the convex hull. It should be possible to eliminate a lot of classes of potential solutions by reducing it to looking at edge cases, like some face of the convex hull is in-plane with the bounding box or something.
kagis
Yeah.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Minimum_bounding_box_algorithm…
In computational geometry, the smallest enclosing box problem is that of finding the oriented minimum bounding box enclosing a set of points. It is a type of bounding volume. “Smallest” may refer to volume, area, perimeter, etc. of the box.
It is sufficient to find the smallest enclosing box for the convex hull of the objects in question.
In 1985, Joseph O’Rourke published a cubic-time algorithm to find the minimum-volume enclosing box of a 3-dimensional point set.
- Comment on !privacy@programming.dev , for people concerned about their privacy 1 day ago:
Should we switch the default privacy community from !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com to !privacy@programming.dev ?
I use !privacy@lemmy.world.
- Comment on Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates 1 day ago:
Not directly related, but do you use an actual APL keyboard or use something with an APL input method, like emacs?
- Comment on YSK: Almost every single new logo you see is ai slop 3 days ago:
Frankly, if I were getting a new logo made for anything serious, I’d want it in vector format. We don’t presently have any models trained to create vector art that I’m aware of, just raster images of vector art, and vectorization of raster images isn’t really good enough today to use that as a path to vector output.
- Comment on Help diagnosing server freeze issue 3 days ago:
Leave the console visible on an attached monitor. I don’t recall if Debian out-of-box has Ctrl-Alt-F1 disabled, but if not, that’ll put you on the first console. If the kernel panics, it’ll display something there.
If you can’t do that — no spare monitor — you can set up a serial port console to another machine. I don’t know off the top of my head how to have the kernel emit errors there by default if it’s not the default, but I’m quite sure that it’s possible; I’ve debugged machines with kernel stack traces on serial port consoles. Sending a BREAK was equivalent to Magic Sysrq, as I recall.
- Comment on Techrights — GitHub Won't Last Much Longer 3 days ago:
I just pick AGPLv3 to maximize freedom and leverage. I’m more radical than Stallman in this area. Stallman believes in and relies on copyright. I don’t…My aversion to intellectual property is one of the reasons why.
I mean, the GPL fundamentally relies on copyright to function.
- Comment on This Website is Served from Nine Neovim Buffers on My Old ThinkPad 3 days ago:
Found the
eduser. - Comment on This Website is Served from Nine Neovim Buffers on My Old ThinkPad 3 days ago:
Still a limited selection of vim webservers though. Have to bump that library size up.
…wordpress.com/…/writing-web-apps-in-emacs-lisp/
There are several solutions for running a webserver in Emacs like Elnode from Nic Ferrier, httpd.el from Joe Schafer, simple-httpd from Christopher Wellons or Emacs Web Server from Eric Schulte.
And then there’s the browser side!
- Comment on This Website is Served from Nine Neovim Buffers on My Old ThinkPad 3 days ago:
That website is also pretty snappy for me as a user, but it could be that it’s because each webpage looks like it was hand-written rather than having content slog its way towards the user through a sea of Javascript frameworks.
- Comment on Has cancel culture gone too far? 4 days ago:
Cain was asked BY A GOD to kill (sacrifice) the thing he loved the most, he did it.
You’re trippin’. You’ve gotten every detail wrong. It would be hard to be more wrong. Killing ≠ sacrificing. It never specifically mentions being asked, much less for what they “loved most”. It’s not just “people down here blaming Cain”, Cain lied about murdering his brother and God cursed him. If God viewed Cain murdering Abel as a sacrifice, why would he curse him?
He’s probably thinking of Abraham trying to sacrifice his son on Yahweh’s orders, a couple chapters later.
Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”
Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”
“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.
“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.
When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
“Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”
- Comment on Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain' 5 days ago:
I don’t know if they do, but I’ve used a service before that provides similar functionality, a “temporary proxy credit card”, which also permits one to not even provide one’s real name and address to a vendor.
But it’s more work to set one up than it is to do a PayPal transaction. Like, I could do it if a vendor doesn’t permit for PayPal payments and I really really want what the vendor is selling, but PayPal does the big “the vendor doesn’t get your credentials” securiry fix and avoids creating extra hurdles for a purchaser to jump through.
- Comment on How can England possibly be running out of water? 5 days ago:
UK households use more water, mostly on showering and bathing, than other comparable European countries, at about 150 litres a day per capita. For France the average is 128, Germany 122 and Spain 120 (although in Italy its 243 litres a day).
Meh. I’m sure that we use more than that in the US.
kagis
www.epa.gov/…/understanding-your-water-bill
The average American uses around 82 gallons per day per person in the household.
So 310 liters, over double the British average.
www.arizonafuture.org/…/water-use/
It looks like people in Phoenix, Arizona average something like 150 gallons/day for residential stuff, almost twice that again, and they live in a desert.
- Comment on Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain' 5 days ago:
I mean, I don’t want to keep funds in PayPal, but they make a good proxy for a credit card.
Credit card POS systems permit for me to do (reasonably, lack a trusted display or input mechanism) secure transactions. But I can’t do that with my computer — I don’t have a way to use a smartcard reader and purchase things online. I have to send my actual credentials to a vendor and trust that they’re treating them securely.
But if you use PayPal to pay at a vendor and then send that payment to a credit card, you avoid the security problems inherent to direct personal use of credit cards.
I’m not comfortable sending credit card data to sketchy-looking sites. With PayPal, worst case they don’t send me whatever I paid for.
- Comment on Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain' 5 days ago:
Based on the screenshot someone else posted, they do have some kind of payment/currency system of their own, Steam Wallet.
I guess you could buy a physical Steam gift card in a store via any mechanism the store accepts, including cash, and then transfer it to that.
- Comment on Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain' 5 days ago:
“In early July 2025, PayPal notified Valve that their acquiring bank for payment transactions in certain currencies was immediately terminating the processing of any transactions related to Steam. This affects Steam purchases using PayPal in currencies other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD,” the message states.
"We hope to offer PayPal as an option for these currencies in the future but the timeline is uncertain.
There are currency conversion services all over the world that manage to do this. How hard can it possibly be to partner with an existing service to do the conversion as part of a transaction?
- Comment on We’re Suing Minecraft in a Class Action Lawsuit 5 days ago:
He could install Luanti and mod to his heart’s content.
- Comment on Nicolas Sturgeon book reignites trans row with JK Rowling 5 days ago:
The pair - arguably the most prominent public figures in Scotland - have long disagreed about politics…
“She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts,” adds the Edinburgh-based author.
Rowling describes that as Sturgeon’s “basket of deplorables” moment, a reference to Hillary Clinton’s disastrous dismissal of half of her rival Donald Trump’s supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic.
As an American, I principally interpret Scotland’s political environment via analogs to the American political environment, which is what I have the most familiarity with. It’s reassuring to see that apparently the most-prominent public figures in Scotland operate the same way. I can’t be too far off the mark!
- Comment on Data centres to be expanded across UK as concerns mount 1 week ago:
If they’re worried about water cooling, two options.
Looking at that datacenter map, there’s only one datacenter in Scotland, and it’s not on the River Tay.
Most users are probably in the south of England, but it looks like the River Tay is the largest river by rate of flow in the UK:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Major_rivers_of_the_United_Kin…
Another possibility is cooling with saltwater.
- Comment on Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates 1 week ago:
Maybe the manufacturer is in New Zealand and the French-Canadian people are the guys who package and sell it or something. Dunno, just did a quick skim of their site.
- Comment on Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates 1 week ago:
Maybe he wouldn’t have lost anything, but I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy his comment.
- Comment on Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates 1 week ago:
hydrogen probably… just need further development
You can get a hydrogen car today. Just that if you’re outside a few places like Japan and California, finding a fueling station might be a bit difficult.
- Comment on Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates 1 week ago:
I’d actually be willing to give it a try if it’s vaguely price-competitive, but their website is all glam shots of butter and people doing things with butter and not only doesn’t sell it but doesn’t tell you where you can get it.
Also, they did not do a good job of choosing that name. It looks like there’s a very-similarly-named New Zealand-based manufacturer of butter, Savör, which apparently isn’t too religious about using their umlaut.
- Comment on Final Fantasy X programmer doesn’t get why devs want to replicate low-poly PS1 era games. “We worked so hard to avoid warping, but now they say it’s charming” - AUTOMATON WEST 1 week ago:
“Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called ‘charming’ nowadays.”
I like the look of Carrier Command 2, and that doesn’t even have much by way of textures; it uses mostly untextured polygons, with some low-resolution nearest-neighbor-scaled textures for things like displays.
- Comment on Reddit will block the Internet Archive 1 week ago:
Unfortunately, it’ll be more than that, as that’ll be saving the plaintext files transferred internal to the TLS connection. The information that would need to be saved will normally just be thrown out, as it’ll be the TLS connection itself.
On second thought, though, I don’t think that it’d be viable, since the way that something like this normally works is to just use (slow) public key encryption to transfer a symmetric session key and to then use (fast) symmetric encryption on the bulk data, and once you have a copy of the session key, you could forge whatever you want with it. This would only work if you were using asymmetric encryption to encrypt the data in the connection.
kagis
www.cloudflare.com/…/what-is-a-session-key/
What is a session key? Session keys and TLS handshakes
The TLS (historically known as “SSL”) protocol uses both asymmetric/public key and symmetric cryptography, and new keys for symmetric encryption have to be generated for each communication session. Such keys are called “session keys.”
Yeah. Oh, well. It was a happy thought for a moment.