Now there is a privacy concern 24x7, and so I use a VPN 24x7. A bad law and risk-averse sites have made the web a complete PITA without one.

The number of e.g. news sites and other vanilla content that requires intrusive checks, photo-ID etc. is astonishing.

I wonder how many parents have had to ask their kids for help setting a VPN up?

Back in the mists of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I developed DataEase applications under MS-DOS there was a thing called "Pathminder" [1] which was a very useful tool. Moving to Linux and finding Midnight Commander felt like coming home...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PathMinder

I do end up knowing a little bit about lots of things, but in terms of "knowing enough", I only need to go into a scenario with enough knowledge to get some traction on the issue I'm working on. Once I've established a bridgehead, the rest follows naturally.

Finland was not cited as an exception. His point about Finland was that the fascists messed up - they tried to use violence before that point.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/cspace-generic-ua.html

...which complains about an "HTTP User-Agent header value that is too generic or otherwise excessively suspicious. Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that behave like this.", and I'm left thinking that the person behind this site does not care about client-side problems...

It's been good to see Bluesky up its video game in response to the TikTok nonsense. I'd like to think that the Fediverse could evolve to meet the expectations of people fleeing Facebook, Twitter & co, but it's not there yet. Those of us who are highly motivated (and I am, after recent events!) will make do, but I think it needs to be easier in order to get the critical mass required.

There is a lot of witless verbiage about the "town square", but precious little acknowledgement of the obvious fact that every town has its OWN square, and that's the point.

For the last decade my feeds have been polluted by "content" about Brexit and Trump, almost all of which has been noise/distraction/propaganda. I'm sick to the back teeth of it, and it's time to make it stop.

There may be some problems in UK society caused by upper class Harrow school boys (!), but the batch of those very same upper class Harrow school boys currently running the security services are obviously smart enough to recognise that getting the job done requires more diversity.

> people with complex problems, chaotic lives and a high and ongoing risk of reoffending.

Surely that applies to almost all prisoners?

I don't think that you have addressed my point though, which is that the people who have been given these sentences are not those supposedly targeted by the law.

I couldn't disagree with any of the points that you make, but I think we're talking past each other. There is a threshold at which these sentences might make sense, and we risk conflating discussion about those cases with the much larger number of problematic cases where the logic is - at least quantitatively - different.

The whole point about this situation is that the sentences were applied to people who do NOT fit that description (not my just view, also the view of the architect of this atrocity, David Blunkett), so in the majority of cases in question your reasoning does not apply.

I have a stable/secure Linux and an experimental Linux on my trusty old T430, but I need a Windows instance for testing.

I'll have a day doing the tasks using one sort of tech, and another doing something else - a python day, a sysadmin day, a writing day. I can't tell when a thing will get done, but by working this way as long as it's on a list I know I'll get to it. If I try to schedule it, my productivity plummets.

What is helping me is the "bidirectional links" plugin (so I'm linked to the the first version of the notes and don't forget it exists and keep starting again), and the "home note" plugin (so there is a hub for all those spokes).

It's a lot of work "curating" stuff, but I haven't found a better way for the way my mind works.

In a startup it may be "viable to test a hypothesis", in a running business it may be "viable to implement a new workflow". In either case the logic of the MVP approach holds - do the least you need to do to learn what to do next.

One could argue that "simple" in their SLC is analogous to "minimal", and "lovable" to "viable".