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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s gotten a lot better in recent years tbf in terms of those kinds of resources. Beginner recommended languages like Python are still a pain because it’s super easy for a beginner to bork how they set it up, but on the whole there’s plenty of online code sandboxes and other ways to get started.

    Your point is definitely valid though. Why on earth would we want someone who’s just showing an interest in programming to write their own compiler??? Wtf? If someone wants to get into baking you don’t send them out into the fields for 6 months to grow some wheat.

    When I was a kid I mucked around with html and css to make some GeoCities sites. I decided I wanted to learn how to code so I got a book from the library called “how to code games for beginners” or something. The thing never told you how to set up an IDE or compile the game. So I was just frustratingly typing out the code examples into notepad without a clue as to what to do. I think this was during the dialup era so it wasn’t like there was a wealth of info online.

    I ended up abandoning programming for quite a few years. It just seemed like nonsense because writing graphics libs for C in notepad does feel like nonsense to a child. I wonder what life would be like if I had some better resources at that moment in time and decided you continue pursuing it.



  • Again that figure is the “total outstanding” amount and isn’t the yearly cost. If a mistake during childbirth causes permanent disabilities for that child over the course of their life then the compensation will be a decent sum paid out over a long time. There are other better targets for saving budget or raising tax revenues.

    We need to grow the economy from the bottom up. Trickle down has been proven to be bullshit. There’s plenty of scope to raise taxes on corporations and via asset/investment returns marginally to offset investment in growing the economy and helping the worst off. The report you linked says that the UK has a lower total tax burden than many other developed nations. We don’t need to go crazy, but at the moment the tax burden is too heavy on big workers and too light on capital.

    Rather than ask “how can we afford this?” try asking “how can we not?” The country is in a dire state. Cutting taxes on the wealthy and cutting services and benefits haven’t worked, trying it again is daft.


  • We found billions and billions for daft tax cuts and juicy contracts to Tory donors for dodgy services and contacts. No one asks “how can we afford this?” when it’s tax cuts for corporations or selling off profitable public owned assets. I think we can afford to spend a little more on helping people survive. The money spent on welfare also doesn’t just disappear, it goes straight back into the economy. The very poorest people can’t afford to have savings, it all gets spent on essentials.

    Growing the economy is very difficult when people don’t have any money to spend. It’s a giant weight around the economy’s neck. If the Tories hadn’t been burning the country down for the last 14 years we wouldn’t have as many people struggling in poverty and wouldn’t have to spend as much. Unfortunately they have so we do.

    How about we raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and reinvest that money into supporting the people of the nation and trying to grow the economy?

    It’s also not one third of the NHS budget. The total “cost of harm” to the NHS Inc legal costs was £6.6bn in 2022-2023, the total budget was £180bn. That’s around 3.5%. Just use some common sense and think about what one third of the budget would imply. Is one third of the NHS made up of lawyers? Do you know just as many NHS lawyers as you do nurses and doctors? Double check “facts” that sound unbelievable and via outrageous before spewing them out for others to be misled by.



  • HDR support is supposedly fixed on kde and should be getting fixed in most other distros soon supposedly.

    Unity worked for me on pop os after some fiddling and installing of dependencies, but it didn’t fully work. There was a bunch of tools (like animation keyframes) which just didn’t display correctly for me though. Checking out the source code of one the util did a check to see whether it was running on windows or Mac, then exited if it wasn’t either of those. Would be good to run it via proton if possible so we get full support without the Devs needing to write tons of code to support a small percentage of users. That experience is pretty common when running Linux as your main, but the other benefits make up for it.







  • Yeah the article content really doesn’t seem as bad as the momentum folks are making it out to be, and you raise the salient point that this messaging is speaking to the groups of voters who labour need to bring over to win.

    I personally would like to see a few more lefty policies over the next year, but grandstanding and promising the world means nothing if they lose the next election. I get why Starmer has been playing it safe this way, and I get why people are sometimes disappointed with it, but they are in it to win it and that’s a very good thing.

    The country is in a real mess and we simply need successive Labour governments to start the long road to recovery. We often talk about how damaging the polarization of politics has become, so reaching across the divide to try and bring voters over shouldn’t be demonised.



  • just install its 22.04 release and you should be good until April 2027

    I think this is a really great point. A lot of the Linux community really like distrohopping and running bleeding edge systems, but if you want to just use your machine to get stuff done you can’t go wrong with the LTS versions of stable distros.

    Pop 22.04 has been rock solid for me and I won’t be switching to cosmic until the issues are ironed out, my work laptop will be staying on Ubuntu 22.04 (with pop-shell) until the next LTS has been out for a while.

    Not having to worry about whether a rolling upgrade will bork your system is really nice. I think we should be suggesting LTS to all newbies as standard as it’s a much smoother experience.

    To OP: Pop is a great distro and the tiling window manager it comes with is absolutely fantastic. If you want a beginner friendly system which gets out of your way and let’s you actually use your computer it’s a fantastic choice. Getting used to the way gnome/pop-shell works and the workflows takes a little getting used to at first, but once it clicks it’s really hard to think of using anything else.

    Top tip: if you hit an issue with pop and googling for pop solutions isn’t working, 99% of the time just search for Ubuntu and you’ll find plenty of info about it.







  • I’ve seen videos of a firm doing interesting stuff with bigger “mothership” drones that hover much higher and then lower a much smaller drone like thing on a cable to place the parcel on the ground. They can hit pretty precise targets and can maneuver around more obstacles than bigger drones can.

    All that needs to happen is for the tech to advance to the point where it’s cheaper to do x% of their deliveries via automated drones than it would cost to have delivery drivers do it and they’ll start doing it. Saving millions(billions?) by say halving the number of human operated delivery trucks will make it a no brainer for them.