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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Abortion is legal up to 24 weeks. After 24 weeks abortion is no longer legal (unless for medical reasons) as the foetus is regarded as viable - as in the foetus may survive birth with medical intervention. Premature babies born at 24 weeks can survive thanks to neonatal medicine.

    The police are tasked with enforcing that law.

    It remains highly controversial as on one hand there are arguments about women’s rights Vs foetus rights (which are more nuanced as the foetus can survive at that age) and on the other when the law in enforced, how it is done is difficult and legal cases are highly controversial.

    It’s not like there are many women going around trying to abort at 24 weeks+; often they are cases of tragically chaotic lives, mental illness and so on. But the police are obliged to enforce the law, and we have a conservative government directing them to do so. And also ultimately the law is the law - the limit exists for a very good reason. A foetus born and dying without medical care due to an illegal late abortion is horrific to even think about, and adds a complex layer of emotion on to the whole topic.


  • I thinky you’re right and this also applies to the single market. The tech sector is fragmented not just because of language/culture but because of different regulatory regimes in each country. The EU tries to solve that for member states but even that is stymied by so many competing national interests. The EU can’t seem to agree between it being a club of nations or a single state and so we end up with a mix instead - it fails to be the best of either option as a result.

    Also it doesn’t help that the UK has left the EU nor the attitude in Europe generally allowing international companies to buy up tech companies. Look at ARM - UK based chip manufacturer but bought out by a Japanese company and now being floated on the US stock market.

    For me the failure of a European tech giant to emerge is in part due to a failure of the EU. It needs to decide what it wants to be and push in that direction. The half way house to try and keep everyone happy is not working and it is one of the reasons the UK left (it was a close referendum and many factors played into the vote but it’s been easier for people to simplify that story to black/white and entirely the UKs fault and based out of narrow issues, so there has been no real look at the many factors that drove that decision and no effort in the EU to look at what it could and should be doing to be better).



  • This doesn’t make sense. It’s more likely we’ll pack more into a high end device then say goodbye to them in tasks like gaming.

    Computing power has been constantly improving for decades and miniaturisation is part of that. I have desktop PCs at work in small form factors that are more powerful than the gaming PC I used to have 10 years ago. It’s impressive how far things have come.

    However at the top end bleeding edge in CPUs,.GPUs and APUs high powered kit needs more space for very good reasons. One is cooling - if you want to push any chip to its limits then you’ll get heat, so you need space to cool it. The vast majority of the space in my desktop is for fans and airflow. Even the vast majority of the bulk of my graphics card is actually space for cooling.

    The second is scale - in a small form factor device you cram as much as you can get in, and these days you can get a lot in a small space. But in my desktop gaming tower I’m not constrained such limits. So I have space for a high quality power supply unit, a spacious motherboard with a wealth of options for expansions, a large graphics card so I can have a cutting edge chip and keep it cool, space for multiple storage devices, and also lots and lots of fans, a cooling system for the CPU.

    Yes, in 5 years a smaller device will be more capable for today’s games. But the cutting edge will also have moved on and you’ll still need a cutting edge large form factor device for the really bleeding edge stuff. Just as now - a gaming laptop or a games console is powerful but they have hard upper limits. A large form factor device is where you go for high end experiences such as the highest end graphics and now increasingly high fidelity VR.

    The exceptions to that are certain computing tasks don’t need anything like high end any more (like office software, web browsing, 4k movies), other tasks largely don’t (like video editing) so big desktops are becoming more niche in the sense that high end gaming is their main use for many homes users. That’s been a long running trend, and not related to APUs.

    The other exception is cloud streaming of gaming and offloading processing into the cloud. In my opinion that is what will really bring an end to needing large form factor devices. We’re not quite there but I suspec that will that really pushes form factors down, rather than APUs etc.


  • People use mainstream software because they’re used to it or it came bundled with their hardware. We are used to Microsoft bundling it’s software in with most PCs because it aggressively built those relationships with manufacturers and that’s how it got massive market share.

    The point about Linux is that is not a commercial piece of software designed to maintain Microsoft’s grip on your life and now your data and sell you to advertiser’s. Linux is just software that does the job and does it well without any compromises to keep a big corporation in control

    The point for the average user is not that Linux is better in itself - it is that Linux is just as good but without all the compromises we’ve taken for granted in terms of poor data security, privacy, being sold as a product to advertiser’s or having features locked away or restricted for the benefit of the company rather than consumers. Linux lets you do what you want with your hardware, choose any software you want, and do whatever you like on your device.

    We’re so no used to the compromises forced on us by big monopolies like Microsoft with Windows that most people don’t even realise the value Linux gives in restoring those basic consumer rights ans freedoms.

    Linux does what Windows does, it just doesn’t ask you to give up your rights, your privacy or your data to do it. For the average user the benefits are hidden which is why they don’t see the point in it.