danielquinn
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Abolishing trial by jury: why is the government overlooking the obvious? 12 hours ago:
This is just an attempt to avoid jury nullification verdicts on cases like Palestine Action and JSO.
- Comment on Alternatives to Mattermost 1 week ago:
I keep seeing Zulip tossed around as an alternative, but I don’t know what’s up with their licencing. There’s also Framateam, but I think that might just be Mattermost as a service.
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x04 "Vox in Excelso" 1 week ago:
I really didn’t care for this one.
The premise of the debate was flawed from the start. The Federation has an obligation to offer help, but there’s no requirement anywhere that it must compel another race to accept that help. Indeed many, many episodes have gone out of their way to point this out. So the whole idea of a “debate” was pointless. Of course they should offer the help, but that’s the end of any moral or legal responsibility. Doing anything more would itself be unethical.
Interestingly as an aside, I found this whole prospect very American at its root. Not only should we accept that we must offer help, but of course we must compel these people to accept our idea of help. It stinks of regime change from without and I find the idea that the Federation would ever work this way ridiculous.
On top of that, we’re somehow supposed to pretend we didn’t all watch Esri Dax’s excellent critique of the Klingon Empire back on DS9 and instead accept that this lie of “conquest” is supposed to prop up the Klingon culture. Are we to believe that it’s been hundreds of years and the Empire is still built in lies they tell each other about honour and battle? Instead of showing any hint of evolution (and potentially stoking internal conflict at the idea of accepting charity from an enemy), we just had a 5 minute “battle” and it’s all ok now.
This wasn’t even a respectful battle. No blood was spilt by either side, no sacrifices made. Where is the honour in that? It was a mock battle to preserve a lie. Esri would not be amused.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 5 comments
- Comment on UK government targets VPNs in new online safety consultation as Lords vote for ban 2 weeks ago:
I will never get used to the comfort Britons appear to have with surveillance. I guess it’s time to set up a Wireguard instance of my own in the Netherlands to proxy everything through.
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x01 "Kids These Days" & 1x02 "Beta Test" 3 weeks ago:
Is anyone else concerned that they might making the same decision they did with Discovery and making the series into “Star Trek: Caleb Mir”? At this point, everyone else already feel like background singers to me.
- Comment on Israelis demonised as a ‘vehicle for hatred of Jews’, says UK terror laws watchdog 4 weeks ago:
I’d say it’s worse than that. If someone looks at a protest opposing genocide and they take from that that they’re antisemitic, then they’re essentially starting from a position of “Jews = genociders” which is pretty fucking antisemitic.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Toward the end of 2024, Adam Something posted a brilliant video called “Why Centrism Won’t Survive 2025” and he made a very convincing case. Toward the end, he lays into Starmer’s Labour specifically, though he doesn’t predict the rise of the Greens here.
- Comment on Offline TTS in 2026? 1 month ago:
Ooh! Has anyone managed to do this with Majel Barrett’s (the Enterprise computer) voice yet?
- Comment on Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog 1 month ago:
This has to be the standard response to these sorts of claims. I would love to see a Labour MP try to respond to this on Question Time for example.
- Comment on What are your opinions of using Pi-hole for DNS within a homelab environment? 1 month ago:
Basically the IP stops responding to any traffic. At one point I set up a constant ping, and every once in a while I got something like “destination host unreachable”. It doesn’t happen often enough for me to move the service onto a physical device though. That’s work and I’m tired like, a lot.
- Comment on What are your opinions of using Pi-hole for DNS within a homelab environment? 1 month ago:
I installed a Pi-Hole largely to serve as a local DNS, but enabled the ad-blocking 'cause it seemed silly not to. My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.
With that aside though, it seems to work quite well. Just make sure to (a) use a reasonably-powered device (my Pi Zero appears to be taxed by it) and you should probably use an Ethernet connection 'cause my Pi Zero regularly flakes out so DNS requests fail due to the IP being “unreachable” for a half second.
- Comment on Met police agree to pay £7,500 to woman arrested over Gaza protest placard 1 month ago:
“Israel: what a cuntry”
Witty. I like it.
- Comment on Polling lead by age group, November 2025 2 months ago:
Jesus, the discrepancy between the Green vote among the young and old is… horrifying.
- Comment on Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea 2 months ago:
Your math is waaaaay off. Let me help you.:
Let’s assume that you commute a rather conservative distance of just 25mi to work. That’s 50mi/day, 5 days/wk, plus let’s say half that over the weekend. Assuming an (again, generous) fuel efficiency for your truck at 25mpg, given a ballpark 300mi/week, that’s 12 gallons of fuel/week. The current average price of gas in the US is a remarkably low $3.071, and that adds up to $36.85/week.
Now consider the costs of maintenance. If you’ve really had zero problems in the last 20 years on a pickup truck (honestly this is far from average), you likely did an oil change every 3 months at the very least. These days it’ll run you about $100.
In terms of insurance, I asked this site for the average cost of insuring a Toyota pickup truck for one year: $1937. Let’s be grossly optimistic and pretend that those rates will never go up.
Initial cost: (Provided) = 11000.00 Fuel costs: (50 × 6 ÷ 25 × 3.071 × 52 × 20) = 38326.08 Oil changes: ($100 × 4 × 20) = 8000.00 Insurance: (1937 × 20) = 38740.00 Parking: = ? ------------------------------------------------------ Total 96066.08
Excluding the cost of parking, the purchase of your miracle never-needs-repair truck if purchased today would be roughly $100,000. Note also how very conservative these values are. It’s entirely possible that your real costs are well above what I’ve stated here.
The total cost of the rental was
$1000plus fuel costs, so using our above figures, that’s a grand total of$1042.99assuming you drove it roughly 50mi/day for all 7 days of the week. That’s assuming that you don’t opt for the much lower rates that appear to be available to you in the area of $250 - $350/week.So, if you didn’t own a car and instead only rented on when you needed to “move a couch”, you would save just over $95,000. In other words, your insistence that you absolutely must own your own vehicle has cost you the equivalent of a downpayment on a house.
- Comment on Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea 2 months ago:
Car rentals are exceptionally cheap compared to paying to own and drive a car capable of hauling a couch for that one time 4 years ago when you needed that.
- Comment on Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea 2 months ago:
As a big car-hater myself, I can agree with most of what you’re saying here (the “but it snows” argument is baseless though, see Denmark).
I think that if you’ve chosen to live in sparsely populated areas, then being car-dependent is your choice and you should be able to have that… but you don’t get to drive your car into the city.
Cars ruin cities. They’re loud, dangerous, dirty, and they kill millions. If you’re happy to live like that, then that’s on you, but you (I’m using the “motorist demographic” here rather then the personal “you”) can’t insist on having wide, multi-lane, high speed roads and plenty of free parking where most of the world’s population actually lives. You park at the periphery and take transit or a bike into town.
- Comment on Andrew will be banished from royal premises to King Charles' private and remote Sandringham estate 3 months ago:
“Oh no! Not Sandringham!” - Andrew, probably.
- Comment on Serverless Is An Architectural Handicap (And I'm Tired of Pretending it Isn't) 3 months ago:
If you build for a containerised environment, standing up your service in Kubernetes with HPA gives you all the scalability (and potentially cost) benefits of serverless without all the drawbacks.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
“Oh hi! Here’s some code. I didn’t write it and don’t understand it, but you should totally run it on your machine.”
- Comment on Green Party membership surges even higher as Labour loses a member every 10 minutes 3 months ago:
Welcome!
- Comment on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | Season 4 Clip | Paramount+ (NYCC 2025) 3 months ago:
Am I the only one who thinks this might be a Caretaker reference?
- Comment on Yet another note taking recommendation needed 4 months ago:
Plus the FF extension is really full-featured. I can clip in different formats or even take a screenshot if the webpage makes clipping hard.
I didn’t even know there was a Firefox extension! I might give it a look.
- Comment on Best Synology Replacement? 4 months ago:
What exactly is an external drive case? Are you just talking about a USB enclosure for a single drive or something that can somehow hold multiple drives and interface over something more stable than USB?
- Comment on Yet another note taking recommendation needed 4 months ago:
Joplin will do this for you. It comes ready to sync with all sorts of cloud options, as well as “local folder” which works well with Syncthing. It’s offline-first, cross-platform, and FOSS.
- Comment on Record breaker Starmer is the 'most unpopular PM since polling began' 4 months ago:
It’s the expectation.
Boris and Truss were abject morons and Sunak was an insulated, rich Tory. They were expected to be terrible and so we weren’t surprised.
Starmer won in a landslide victory for Labour and went about screwing the poor, arresting old ladies, and presiding over genocide. Conservatives hate him because he’s on the Red Team, and the Left hate him because he acts like a Tory.
If he’d run as a Tory, he’d be scoring higher than everyone since Cameron, but he was supposed to fix the mess, not make it worse.
- Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad? 4 months ago:
I agree 100% with this take and want to thank you for that excellent video! I’m not all the way through yet, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it.
- Comment on Polanski apologises over claim he can increase women’s breast sizes with his mind 4 months ago:
Hooray!
- Comment on Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards 4 months ago:
The opposition to id cards themeselves in this country is very strange to me. Most civilised countries have some sort of national identification number/card that can be used to access government services, and having worked inside the UK government, I can tell you what a total nightmare it is to develop services for Britons without such a unique id.
What kills me, is that inevitably the id card debate here seems to focus in on the existence of a card rather than what the government wants to attach include with it, like biometric data, or pairing it with an app with invasive permissions. You need an id number for me so that I can be identified when accessing government services, you don’t need to keep a record of every time I boarded a train or more surveillance nonsense.
This country is so used to government surveillance that they automatically assume that “id card means more tracking” rather than objecting to the tracking that already exists (have you seen Oxford Street?) and opposing an id that’d save the country mountains of cash and hassle if used properly.
- Comment on Zack Polanski urges UK to protect Gaza flotilla, as other countries risk war to resist Israeli impunity 4 months ago:
Fuck yes. More of this please.