Looks like the story of the night is going to be not that Labour gained lots of votes but that Reform has split the Conservative vote and collapsed their vote as a result and its gifted Labour a lot of wins. Lots of tactical voting has led to the Lib Dems gaining a lot of seats too.

Reform has gained enormously, the Greens and Lib Dems less so.

People need to stop doing inversions. At some point you are going to spill it and now we have good valve based options its not even necessary to stop the tiny amount of dripping that occurs. Even before we had the several valve solutions the amount that actually dripped through was tiny and had no impact on the flavour of the cup of coffee since you could put the plunger in and create a slight negative pressure that kept the liquid in.

James Hoffman taste tested this and couldn’t tell the difference, he has a fantastic video on what is actually worth doing and what isn’t with the Aeropress and inversion isn’t.

I don’t think so. There are so many fronts on the war on bigotry and little progress has been made in 100 years. This feels like an innate property of human beings and humans will always be easy to manipulate to make them hate those that look a little different. About the only practical thing that might help is we criminalise bigotry that might damp it down a lot but people will still behave in bigoted ways they can get away with.

I feel like all this effort in a variety of countries will only delay the far right for a short period. The far right will be in charge of a large number of western governments and ultimately be the new world order within a few years and I don’t now see any way to stop that. The French might hold it back this election but unless how they handle the far right changes it will continue to grow and win the next one and no amount of manipulation will change it.

It really depends on the project. Some of them take breaking changes seriously and don’t do them and auto migrate and others will throw them out on “minor” number releases and there might be a lot of breaking changes but you only run into one that impacts you occasionally. I typically don’t want containers that are going to be a lot of work to keep up to date so I jettison projects that have unreliable releases for whatever reason and if they put out a breaking change its a good time to re evaluate whether I want that container at all and look at alternatives.

So no its not safe, but depending on the project it actually can be.

This is having big real world consequences. In Long Covid research there has been a tonne of near duplication of work and its apparent none of the work is really building on prior work as the sheer volume of papers is impossible to keep up with. Most of its unremarkable in the sense it hasn’t moved further than findings on ME/CFS from decades prior, so much of the work is too shallow to be of use.

Then the other side of this is the psychology side of things which has been publishing some grade A nonsense and none of the findings hold up to any scrutiny once a replication is attempted.

There there is all the widespread fraud where medical images have been fabricated in various ways, the data often shows clear signs of fabrication as well.

Its a real mess and its harming real people who need this research to inform proper treatments.

There is nothing seasonal about Covid, we get a wave every time it mutates sufficiently. Initially that was about five waves a year in 2022 but the past year it’s been two to three. The lulls however still have substantial constant infection usually in the region of 1 in 50 to 1 in 100 while the peaks of waves can be 1 in 10. Now the gaps between waves have more people infected than the peaks of infections in 2020 and 2021.

The risk of Long Covid hasn’t changed much, there are still substantial deaths every year. It’s all bad news really, no treatments on the horizon to solve it just declining life expectancy and health the more we catch and spread it.

Linux was in use on some university machines although I lot of them were still running Sun hardware OS. The main distribution I used at the time was Slackware.

Season 3 was fantastic as were the previous 2 seasons. Half the season was just “filler” episodes of backstory and tying it into the season arc and it was really good.

All of the western democracies are telling their people the reason their quality of life is declining is due to immigrants and the disabled and poor. A lot of people seem to believe them. I agree its about inequality and bringing the far right in will only accelerate the process.

When I look at how much Nigel Farage has been platformed in the UK the press helped manufacture the consent for Brexit and the big far right swing that is coming with it. What were quite isolated social media views have become very mainstream and on the TV all the time. Society is now quite open about a lot of far right talking points. Social media is a part of the media landscape but it didn’t make the far right figures popular that was all the traditional presses doing.

Even now they cover and platform Nigel Farage about 100x as much as they do any Green candidate, and yet the Greens hold more MP and council seats. Same with the Lib Dems who are bigger than Reform and yet the press is constantly platforming Reform. Its hard to look at traditional media and see anything but a big swing to the right in the last decade and they have led every step of the way.

This is why wages are failing to keep up with inflation now for decades. Breaking up the labour unions has been an enormous accelerator for the capitol owning classes.

A bunch of research into Covid and how it propagates in the air has found that higher CO2 concentrations allow viruses to survive longer. This is a part of why we are seeing increased risk of infections.

They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a “factory”. This still doesn’t scale well.

I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn’t require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can’t help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.

I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.

You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn’t last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.