It was the British Empire, not the English Empire. The union was formed partially because Scotland was flat broke from failing to colonise what’s now Panama and needed access to the English economy while England wanted to prevent a perennial French threat on its northern border.

Also Americans are in no position to speak about imperial decline at the moment! Iran has a nasty chance of becoming their Suez unless competent leadership is restored pretty sharpish in my view.

I read that as make Oasis pay for it, not a bad idea because after all, it’d be a wonderwall.

Is it that relevant in this day and age? I was taught you put £ (or whatever currency you’re using) first when you’re writing so Johnny Fraudster can’t turn your 100£ into 1100£.

That all feels a bit immaterial on the web.

I’ll be honest Americentrism annoys me too, but we can hardly complain when we’re on lemmy.world of all places.

America is the largest Anglophone country so you can’t really complain about them being numerous on an international English-speaking audience, not exactly their fault they did a lot of baby booming in the late '40s.

The whole point is that you’re paying them as a service rather than them using you as a feedstock for the ad industry. I don’t object to paying for search personally.

I think Kagi has a ‘small web’ feature.

Second this, of all the very worthy free software contributors out there these people are surely doing some of the most practical work for day-to-day software freedom for many users.

Which is why all the palm trees in that movie look dead as hell.

Should have waited a few decades, after this summer I’m sure Britain can support palm trees!

Not really, how many times have straightforward cock-ups happened with the government in your life? Large organisations fuck up constantly in mundane ways, history skews far more in favour of cock-ups than conspiracies.

Also if the moon landings were fake, the Soviets absolutely would have known and revealed it to the world.

I think being the only browser with a credible stance on ad blockers will help them in the long run.

Safe from people scraping it and proving how damn robotic a lot of their content is these days no less.

If you like anchovies, try Colatura di Alici if you can get hold of it. It’s a direct descendant of Roman garum and is like a magic button for improving a lot of dishes.

Yeah I was always a bit miffed as a pupil I couldn’t just start summer early after end of year exams, those few weeks were always a waste of everyone’s time.

Appropriate since a lot of LLMs sound like their training data had way too much marketing copy in it. It’s like a circular human centipede.

Mind you, white LEDs might be very different to incandescent light bulbs but they aren’t conceptually a million miles away from fluorescent lights; they exploit the same concept of efficiently generating a narrowband emission and using it to stimulate a phosphor which creates a broad band of lights, it’s just using a blue LED rather than a tube full of mercury plasma glowing in UV.

I’d go as far as saying a white LED is more or less a solid state fluorescent light, in a similar way to how some 1950s datasheets talk about transistors as ‘solid state triodes’.

In the world of sloppageddon, I actually don’t mind being bamboozled by a photoshop now and then.

God damn them all, I was told

We’d cruise the seas for crypto gold

Exploit no box, nor engineer

Now I’m an old black hat and in rent arrears

The last of Donald’s privateers

‘Redneck boomers’ isn’t quite the right stereotype, ‘gammons’ would be the rough British equivalent stereotype (ie they’re bright pink with Facebook-induced rage) but it’s not the same thing because it doesn’t really have anything to do with the rural/urban divide like rednecks in the US do, their grievances with the government are different too. A more apt comparison to the US would be the tourism version of small towns throughout the Rust Belt; ie the major industry everyone else depended on had its arse cave in due to superior foreign competition, everyone who could leave already got out years ago, and you’re left with what’s euphemistically called ‘managed decline’ but in reality is the state abandoning a place to its fate. Add in phenomena like cities dumping people with social needs they’re responsible for in cash-strapped seaside towns to save money, people with social issues themselves often looking to return there due to happy childhood memories, the general economic kick in the balls these places got from the 1960s continuing indefinitely, and you can see why there’s a lot of grievance there.

Believe it or not Clacton was once a fairly cool place to live, before dirt-cheap flights to Europe seaside towns tended to be pretty wealthy in the summer and Clacton in particular would have been a trendy place to be in the 1960s because of the mods and rockers, and to a lesser extent the pirate radio boom; you’d go there and listen to your transistor radios in the sun in sight of the ships with massive aerials very loudly undermining the government’s stuffy monopoly on radio. The problem was (until climate change made them insufferably hot and humid anyway) British summers are generally pretty grey and rainy on a lot of days. As soon as you could get on a plane for the same cost as a train ticket and go to Spain, Portugal, Greece and so many other places, Clacton starts to look about as appealing as the seagull kebabs everyone jokes about when they’re in a seaside town. I’m absolutely not defending Nigel Farage or the populist right in general, but there’s a reason they stick their flag in places like Clacton in particular and in my view the left needs to reflect on why that is and improve its specific offerings to seaside towns.

Yeah to be fair that’s a PR opportunity for Burnham. Like it or loathe it, a huge part of public favour in the UK is knowing when to engage with the bit.

It’s not just about how many examples of a language exist in the LLM’s distribution though, dynamic typing is a poor choice if you’re using LLMs for software in my view because it turns compile-time errors into runtime errors which will only be caught if the LLM writes a suitable test; an area that they still leave a fair bit to be desired in.

The whole virtue of dynamic typing is that it reduces cognitive load on the programmer, if you’re using LLMs there’s no reason to do that in my opinion, you’re offloading a bunch of cognitive load to begin with so expressiveness and constraint is more important than human ergonomics. Yes there’s loads of JS in an LLM corpus but a lot of it is going to be poor examples, because it’s generally quite easy to write JS badly. If you use typescript you’re at least forcing a few common hallucinations to produce compile-time errors which the model has immediate feedback for, and you’re giving the model more context on what it’s seeing.