I see your point, I hadn’t thought about it this way. I think what you’re suggesting is this:

           |                        |
           |          rest of LAN <-/

Reasonably difficult, I think. I’m basing my answer off of the vibes I get from open source firmware projects for routers, which are far more common. I haven’t heard of similar for printers, which suggests that there is less of a foundation to work on. I think Brother, in particular, was a brand that has typically been decent up until now.

I also get the sense that programming firmware is different enough to programming software that a software developer trying to contribute would find it really difficult(?. Someone correct me if I’m wrong — I’m not a software developer, but a scientist who writes code, so I’m speaking outside of my main expertise). But this loops back in with the lack of existing projects making it harder to get to grips with how to do stuff — part of why I like open source programs is because I can look through a project and try to understand what the code is doing.

In many, if not all of the cases outlined, the police officers only had the opportunity to get to know their victims because they were undercover in their community (and often using the relationships as a means to bolster their cover). If this isn’t rape by deception, I don’t know what is.

2010 was also exceptional because this was the most seats that the Lib Dems had won in a long time (possibly ever?), which, at the time, people speculated could be the end to the UK’s defacto 2-party system (not counting the Scottish National Party (SNP)). Then the lib-dems squandered that good will and took 14 years to regain their footing. Fun fun fun.

What the fuuuuck

You know, I’m actually not surprised. I wish I was, but I’m not.

I’m reminded of something I saw recently where a guy had a mini old screen for typing, but an e-ink main screen. It was a DIY cyberdeck, and weird enough that I don’t think it’s useful for you or OP, but I figured you’d find it interesting to hear that your suggestion seems to be on the right track

(n.b. I am neither a rust, nor C developer so I am writing outside my own direct experience)

One of the arguments brought up on the kernel.org thread was that if there were changes to the C side of the API, how would this avoid breaking all the rust bindings? The reply to this was that like with any big change in the Linux kernel that affects multiple systems with multiple different teams involved, that it would require a coordinated and collaborative approach — i.e. it’s not like the rust side of things would only start working on responding to a breaking change once that change has broken the rust bindings. This response (and many of the responses to it) seemed reasonable to me.

However, in order for that collaboration to work, there are going to have to be C developers speaking to rust developers, because the rust developers who need to repair the bindings will need to understand some of what’s being proposed, and thus they’ll need to understand some level of C, and vice versa. So in practice, it seems nigh on impossible for the long term, ongoing maintenance of this code to be entirely a task for the rust devs (but I think this is taking an abnormally flexible reading of “maintenance” — communicating with other people is just part and parcel of working on such a huge project, imo)

Some people have an ideological opposition to there being two different programming languages in the Linux kernel full stop. This is part of why the main thing that rust has been used for so far are drivers, which are fairly self enclosed. Christoph Hellwig even used the word “cancer” to describe a slow creep towards a codebase of two languages. I get the sense that in his view, this change that’s being proposed could be the beginning of the end if it leads to continued prevalence of rust in Linux.

I haven’t written enough production code to have much of an opinion, but my impression is that people who are concerned are valid (because I do have more than enough experience with messy, fragmented codebases), but that their opposition is too strong. A framework that comes to mind is how risk assessments (like are done for scientific research) outline risks that often cannot be fully eliminated but can be reduced and mitigated via discussing them in the context of a risk assessment. Using rust in Linux at all hasn’t been a decision taken lightly, and further use of it would need ongoing participation from multiple relevant parties, but that’s just the price of progress sometimes.

I’ve been meaning to check out Addy.io for a while now, because you’re not the first person I’ve seen mentioning it in threads like this. Your comment was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I’ve finally gone and checked it out. Thanks for including a link in your comment; it helped reduce the activation energy of setting it up

So the thing is with Oxbridge is that they are tremendously overhyped, in that much of their prestige comes from the fact that they’re self perpetuating prestige machines at this point — they have their pick of the best and the brightest, from all over the world, and their name holds a heckton of power in the research world too, resulting in somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy

Regarding lecture recording, I know that this wasn’t commonplace before COVID; disabled students who needed this for access reasons had to wade through a lot of nonsense to get that, even after it was officially a part of their support plan. Something I found very silly was that there would often be people(non students) who were hired by the disability service to attend the lectures and record the lectures for students with health problems that prevented their attendance, on a per student basis. It was an administrative nightmare, especially for the disabled students. They apparently pulled their shit together and did a proper rollout of lecture recording during COVID, for obvious reasons. People I knew were salty that it took a global pandemic to lead to change, but hey, progress!

Generally lecture materials such as PowerPoint slides would be available on the virtual learning environment (which I assume is the case for recordings too), but I think a big reason why you can’t find stuff online about this is that lectures are fairly “meh” quality, especially compared to other universities’ (now that I’ve seen the quality of undergraduate teaching from multiple angles). I speculate that the lack of availability of study materials from Oxbridge is because anyone who graduates has an incentive to continue to perpetuate the prestige that they’re now benefitting from, so it would be a bad look to be sharing lecture materials. I genuinely mean it when I say that if you could have complete access to the English literature section of the online materials, you’d be disappointed. No doubt you’d find the syllabi and materials useful, but I wager you’d be surprised to see how mediocre some of it is

Unfortunately, the real meat of the teaching at Oxford or Cambridge is something that’s far harder to record or share, and that’s the tutorials system. This involves a small group (2-4) of students discussing problems or essays with a tutor, usually in college. The tutors are often academics who are renowned in their field, so it’s really cool to get such in depth teaching from them. Tutorials would be weekly, give or take, and they would typically involve writing a multiple page essay for each one (and also do other work that was typically less frequent and more centralised). The pace of it was insane, and whilst I think the pressure can be good for output, I always hated how I never had time to go back and review or rewrite old work based on tutor’s feedback — the pace was just too frantic.

I fucking loved the tutorials though, partly because the tutor for my subject at my college was one of my favourite people I’ve ever met. I always came out of a tute feeling like I’d done a workout, but for my brain. I never really felt like I understood the material until I’d done the tutorial on it (ideally the tutorials are meant to be after the lecture content on them, but sometimes it didn’t work out that way, and you had to scrap by). The discussion aspect of the tutorials were especially key in the humanities, because it forces students to argue their viewpoint.

That brings us back to you, and the question of how one could emulate the effects of a tutorial (which would be tricky even if you had all the material). Even if you had a list of tutorial essay questions that you could work through, they’re not the kind of thing that are marked with a rubric. Even the official grade boundary guidance for exams are frustratingly vague, because they rely a lot on the experience of the tutors. Without someone like a tutor to mark your work and push your understanding in the tutorial after, it’s much harder to do that kind of in-depth learning. That being said, a key thing is producing something, I think. It was a hellish rhythm, but weekly tutorials were great at making me produce something. It was super uncomfortable at first, because I didn’t back myself enough to really try to put my own opinions through in my essays, but by being forced to argue my side, I improved. Even if you don’t have someone to mark work/discuss with you, when you read a piece of literature, try to formulate your own ideas and write them down. If you need some prompt style questions to get you going, then search for resources for particular texts online.

The discussion aspect of tutorials can also be replicated somewhat just with a reading group of motivated and intense nerds. Being able to access or create something like that may not be easy for many, but the format isn’t the big part — having external viewpoints to challenge your own is.

I can ask a couple of people who I know about if they have any old downloaded resources, even if it’s just exam question papers (because I realise that it’s useful for calibration purposes if nothing else). So I can ask the right people, what’s your current age or education level, and are there any particular areas of English literature that you’re interested in?

If you ever have a partner, friend or family member who does sewing/knitting/similar, you should tag along with them on a fabric/yarn shopping trip; I bet you’d have a lot of fun. Some people are just more tactile, and leaning into that isn’t harmful and can help a lot of fun

“I was lowkey hopping a commenter might suggest avoidance”

I’m proud of you for having the self-awareness to recognise your avoidant instincts and taking steps to counter that (i.e. by asking for advice from people). That might not feel like a victory, given that you were hoping people would give you “permission” to lean into the avoidance, but I’m familiar with the kind of hope you describe: it’s a shameful kind of hope, because deep down, you know that people aren’t going to advise you to ghost her, and that indulging your avoidant instincts probably aren’t productive — the shame comes from the tension between knowing what you should do, and your wish to instead take the avoidant path, which I imagine has served you well over the years as a go-to coping strategy, albeit a maladaptive one.

The tension between who we feel capable of being vs. who we’d like to be is quite uncomfortable, but it certainly shouldn’t be shameful. Building up healthier skills and habits is a marathon, and it does not require perfection. I hope that you are able to find the strength to take the approach that you understand to be the best, even though that will mean defying your instincts. It will feel clunky, and uncomfortable, but that’s just the discomfort of growth.

I hope you’re able to recognise that asking for advice here isn’t a sign of failure, but a show of your strong resolve to improve — I’ve found that asking for advice when we already low-key know the correct approach is a way of holding ourselves accountable: you want to communicate clearly and healthily; you also want to curl up so small that you can hide from this girl rather than talking to her. This conflict exists because for whatever reason, you’ve recognised that your people pleasing tendencies don’t serve you or the people in your life very well. Regardless of how you proceed from here, I’m proud of the steps you’ve already taken to improve yourself. I say this as someone else who had to learn these skills as an adult due to messy family stuff. It’s bloody awkward, and stressful, and it takes a long time; that’s why recognising the small steps forward is good

I appreciate you calling out this kind of stuff. It seems like in this instance, OP was just joking, but I’m deeply nervous at how many people are genuinely believing and propagating eco-fascist rhetoric nowadays.

I had poutine at random place in Edinburgh which a Canadian friend said was the best poutine he’d had outside of Quebec. “Still shit though”, in comparison to in Quebec

My trick to coping with that has been to seek out rooms or contexts in which I’m the stupid one, relatively speaking. I sometimes struggle with insecurity when doing this (especially as a bright kid who was “a big fish in a small pond”), but I never feel happier than when I’m learning from someone knowledgeable and enthusiastic about their little weird slice of the world.

I don’t think duplicate link protection is what I mean, unless I’m misunderstanding how that feature works. I.e. if I had bookmarks “example.com/a” , “example.com/b”, these are duplicates even though they’re at the same site. But if I visit the page “example.com/c” and I went to go bookmark it, I would like to be able to see a thing that says '"from this site, you have also bookmarked: “example.com/a” , “example.com/b”.

I don’t imagine this is possible. I was probably going to make something to give me that functionality at some point, because I haven’t seen anyone having the same problem as me.

I have a question which may turn out to be a feature request

The question: How easy would it be to use Linkwarden to check whether I have already bookmarked something from the site I’m currently on? To clarify why I’m asking this, I have been generally trying to be more mindful in what media I consume, which means the things I enjoy reading are fragmented pieces that I may stumble upon through word of mouth.

For example, I read post ‘a’ on blog ‘A’ and I enjoy it so much that I bookmark it (‘Aa’) so I can find it for later sharing. Many months later, I am linked to post ‘b’ on site ‘A’, but I don’t remember whether I have been to this site before, and knowing that I had previously enjoyed post Aa may prompt me to actually read post Ab (or properly set aside for later)

Native Firefox bookmarks don’t do this, I know that much. It’s something I’ve been meaning to figure out how to solve, because one of the delightful, if somewhat overwhelming parts about floating on the ‘small web’, is the trust that builds up gradually after seeing sometime put out consistently good coverage

Probably smart, because I’m already pretty smart and the prospect of giving up what I already have seems scary.

Plus, I’ve lived most of my life thinking I was repulsively ugly; part of overcoming that anxiety involved understanding that “you can be the juiciest, ripest peach in the world, but some people just don’t like peaches”. If there’s anything I’ve learned from that, it’s understanding that attractiveness is even harder to “objectively” quantify than intelligence

What’s something that you’re excited or hopeful to get to do in 2025?

That’s exactly my point, it’s a ridiculous question to ask. Like, there are so many bad outcomes to asking it.

I agree with your characterisation of the UK, but I also think that any country denouncing another’s actions has power — it may affect how other countries actions towards Russia if nothing else.