I think about this a lot. How much anxiety do most people feel from the millions of options that are available to them daily, or young adults that are told they can be anything they want, but clam up and choose to do nothing instead.
Most people don't have millions of options available to them daily, at least not in any meaningful sense. Anxiety and choice paralysis is very much a first world privilege.
It takes much less time to learn it at a playable level than tennis. In my opinion, learning tennis and being able to hit a powerful drive is much more rewarding, but nowadays people don’t want to “waste” time in improving technique.
Tbf I haven't actually played much tennis, but I've watched plenty of it, and been playing padel for a couple years now. I would agree that tennis has a steeper learning curve, and is definitely more physically demanding. Besides the learning curve though, I'm not sure padel can be said to be any less technical than tennis, at higher levels. Padel seems to me to have a much bigger variety of shot types all requiring specific technique. And positioning is also much more fluid and complex than in tennis. Same thing for leg work.
To be clear I realise you were mostly talking about learning curve specifically; this is not an attempt at refuting what you said, just adding to the discussion.
After reaching a playable level people start to compete in tournaments and in competitive games on Playtomic and then the technique starts to matter, maybe a bit less than in tennis. There are still plenty of basic padel shots you have to spend 10-100s of hours to master with a coach to be able to compete on a higher ranking.
I really think the standards for review have lowered, or, they're more spot check or based on whoever reviews them these days, with different layers of seniority in reviewers.
For example, we had an app that was fine for years, but one day it was rejected because it didn't have an offline-available privacy policy readable without logging in (or something to that effect). Another time it was suddenly rejected because we released an update to two whitelabel apps (mostly same app, different brands) simultaneously; we had to find higher-ups to vouch that they were in fact different brands and that it was OK and not some kind of copycat.
If this was true wouldn't there be a market for a ruggedized version that has the toughness of a case, from the factory as shipped? Its a little silly for Apply to shave every possible half-millimeter from the design and then have 99% of people add back the thickness plus a lot of extra by adding a case. Why not have a factory-ruggedized version which isn't as thick as adding that case but is just as rugged?
Considering the price and re-sale value of iphones I would add a case even if they ruggedized it.
My current (Android) phone is from 2020 and I have bought three cases for it because the previous ones got wear and tear. The phone inside still looks brand new.
But yeah, the trend of ultra-thin phones is silly.
That open a new business for them to sell $60 cases that are worth $2 of materials and have a great panel to match people’s taste which is even more appealing to buy
Ask workers of cell phone stores and you’ll find that figure is way off. Not everyone wants a case. Having a case significantly changes the feeling of the device in hand.
In the same vein one could argue that Therac-25 was not actually a software bug but a hardware problem. Interlocks, that could have prevented the accidents and that where present in earlier Therac models, were missing. The software was written with those interlocks in mind. Greedy management/hardware engineers skipped them for the -25 version.
It's almost never just software. It's almost never just one cause.
Both - and really MCAS was fine but the issue was the metering systems (Pitot tubes) and the handling of conflicting data. That part of the puzzle was definitely a bug in the logic/software.
It wasn't pitot tubes that had the hardware problem, it was the angle of attack sensor. The software was poorly designed to believe the input from just one fallible angle of attack sensor.
Remember the Airbus that crashed in the middle of the Atlantic because one of the pilots kept pulling on his yoke, and the computer decided to average his input with normal input from the other pilot?
Conflict resolution in redundant systems seems to be one of the weakest spots in modern aircraft software.
Inputs were averaged, but supposedly there’s at least a warning:
Confused, Bonin exclaimed, "I don't have control of the airplane any more now", and two seconds later, "I don't have control of the airplane at all!"[42] Robert responded to this by saying, "controls to the left", and took over control of the aircraft.[84][44] He pushed his side-stick forward to lower the nose and recover from the stall; however, Bonin was still pulling his side-stick back. The inputs cancelled each other out and triggered an audible "dual input" warning.
They deliberately designed it to only look at one of the Pitot tubes, because if they had designed it to look at both, then they would have had to implement a warning message for conflicting data.
And if they had implemented a warning message, they would have had to tell the pilots about the new system, and train them how to deal with it.
It wasn't a mistake in logic either. This design went through their internal safety certification, and passed.
As far as I'm aware, MCAS functioned exactly as designed, zero bugs. It's just that the design was very bad.
I would say plenty of both. They obviously had to inform the pilots, but the way the system didn't reset permanently after 2-3 (whatever) sessions of "oh, the pilot trimmed manually, after 10 seconds we keep doing the same thing" was a major major logic blunder. Failure all across the board, if only from the perspective of end-to-end / integration testing if nothing else.
Worryingly, e2e / full integration testing was also the main cause of other Boeing blunders, like the Starliner capsule.
The plane was perfectly airworthy without MCAS, that was never the issue. The issue was it handled differently enough at high angles of attack to the 737NG that pilots would've needed additional training or possibly a new type rating without MCAS changing the trim in this situation. The competition (Airbus NEO family) did not need this kind of new training for existing pilots, so airlines being required to do this for new Boeing but not Airbus planes would've been a huge commercial disadvantage.
[edit as I can't reply to the child comment]: The FAA and EASA both looked into the stall characteristics afterwards and concluded that the plane was stable enough to be certified without MCAS and while it did have more of a tenancy to pitch up at high angles of attack it was still an acceptable amount.
Banning in-store sales of VPN activation codes seems well within the ability of the British state to do, especially when they already banned bank/credit card payments.
Not on an age basis since we have decades of precedent for retail staff to judge age and not keep a copy of ID. It will have to be on a more blatantly 'we want to be more like the Chinese communist party' basis.
Well, it all depends if the politicians actually care if this works.
You see, this bill was passed in 2023, under a Conservative government; then a Labour government was elected in 2024, before the bill came into force.
A nice little time bomb, set by the outgoing government - impractical and illiberal, but labelled all over with 'children' and 'cyber-bullying' and 'violent pornography'
So if the Labour government keeps the legislation, they look like heavy-handed censors silencing LGBT voices and local hobby/community forums, yet if they repeal the legislation you can criticise them for wanting children to have access to violent porn.
A Labour politician who thought this was shitty legislation, but who didn't think going on record as a pro-pornography voice would help his or her re-election prospects, might be entirely happy for age checks to be easy to bypass.
Labour, if anything, mainly had issue with the Online Safety Act not being strict enough, and Labour has already gotten itself massively unpopular with a range of LGBT groups and do not seem to care.
I really hope you are right. I'm not UK resident now, but I lived enough there, have family there and know enough about local politics to understand that when it's comes to privacy and freedoms there is very little difference between Conservative and Labour.
The last Labour government (1997-2010) passed the counter terrorism act and had multiple public arguments about how long suspects could be detained without being charged or released in their future legislative attempts - see "prolonged detention" in this: https://www.jrrt.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Rules_of_.... They similarly passed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which amongst other things includes compelled key disclosure (or compelled decrypt). They also had the national identity register planned as part of ID cards.
For fairness/balance, the tory government passed multiple acts. Online Safety Act was one, but the Investigatory Powers Act another - this did some relatively mundane things like call security service hacking "equipment interference" and say they were legally allowed to do it, but it was the act used on Apple to mandate technical capability to access iCloud e2e (act written by Tories, but TCN probably by Labour home office I would guess based on timing).
They're already using the "online safety act" to silence people online.
They're super scared because a great many people have had enough. Crimes numbers, including rapes, are through the roof in the UK. And they want to silence anyone who wants to talk about criminality on the ultra rise.
The UK is on a very dark path. It's the country in the world with the most millionaires fleeing the country: mainstream media brainwash the people saying it's supposedly for tax reasons these millionaires are leaving.
But I live in a country where many millionaires and families have family offices and trusts and the tune is very different.
People are scared of what's going on. Both criminality and religious extremism are rising at a more than alarming rate. And not only is the government doing nothing about it, they're going after those denouncing the crimes.
People are now stabbed to death for their watch in London. A few days ago:
Leftists refuse to see it. They'll rationalize that that man was a capitalist oppressor for wearing a Rolex and that he provoked these people by wearing a $10 K watch. That he's the reason these killers were broke and forced to act evil. That they shouldn't get much jail time because now they'll surely be nice members of a high-trust society.
These people are precisely those who brought the Online Safety Act. But it's Orwellian and Orwellian talk: for what the Online Safety Act is really used for is to silence talk about crimes.
I'm in the EU: in a few years leftists shall probably have put a system in place where police shall come and knock on my door for my posts on HN.
Before anyone comments that the numbers are from 2020. I think the important point is the relative position of the UK to other countries (scroll down to the rankings table)
Crime is “generally down” in the past 10 years according to the ONS, so I wouldn’t expect the ranking to have changed much (in the subsequent 5 years).
Your source is only for all crime statistics. If you look at the detailed breakdown rape has increased[1]. More worrying is the fact that charge rates have fallen[2], which makes the claim that crime was "down" doubtful.
Now consider the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which shows that despite minor uptick in recent years, the rate of rapes are below past peaks even in the 2000's[1] (see e.g. figure 2), including for rapes. These are based on asking people, and so capture far more crime than police reports and are not affected by charging rates.
What you will see, however, is that the reports have dramatically increased. See figure 3. Combined with relatively static reported rates of rapes, this is good - it means a large proportion now do get reported.
But given the number of reports have drastically increased relative to the rate of crimes as reported in the crime survey, it is not surprising that charge rates have fallen, as it's at least plausible that a number of incidents that are now reported that wouldn't have been before are those incidents with insufficent evidence. (That doesn't mean it's not problematic that the charge rates have dropped, of course)
What is clear, is that there is no evidence for the contention in the comment I replied to. It's a common far-right talking point used to sow fear. I'm not suggesting that commenter who posted it are intentionally pushing far-right talking points - I know plenty of people on the left who have been tricked into repeating this as well. But they are unambiguously talking points that are being abused by the UK far-right to push a narrative of a collapsing society that does not match reality.
Just to be clear, the OP (@TacticalCoder) originally wrote this:
> “People are scared of what's going on. Both criminality and religious extremism are rising at a more than alarming rate.”
He then edited the comment once I called him out on its veiled racism and once he'd seen the thread following from that (the discussion around ONS statistics where I highlight that crime is generally down, just not sexual offences). He then changed his comment to:
> "They're super scared because a great many people have had enough. Crimes numbers, including rapes, are through the roof in the UK"
I realise that @vidarh replied to the updated text. But there are a couple of points:
1. If you go to the Office for National Statistics Crime in England and Wales report [1], you'll see the following comment:
"Trends in police recorded sexual offences should be interpreted with caution as improvements in recording practices and increased reporting by victims have contributed to increases in recent years. For further information, see Section 19: Data sources and quality."
So, an increase in the numbers doesn't necessarily mean actual an increase. It would also explain why the percentage of solved (sexual) crimes is decreasing.
2. Even if there was an actual increase, that doesn't change the fact that crime is down overall (which counters the original statement by @TacticalCoder)
3. It also doesn't invalidate @vidarh's link which shows crime in the UK is low compared to other nations. So, if some areas have increased, then the overall picture is still relatively good for the UK. It certainly doesn't fit what @TacticalCoder originally wrote: "criminality and religious extremism are rising at a more than alarming rate".
Editing the comment from the one that was called-out to a whole new statement, that maps onto the one crime stat that is actually going in the wrong direction (but might not be due to changes in how its measured), is extremely disingenuous.
This is far right fear-mongering rhetoric. It’s the standard hatred of ethnic minorities whipped up by bigots. The UK is not on a “dark path”, that’s absolute nonsense. Nor do people live in fear. I assume you don’t actually live in the UK. Because none of your description is the UK I live in.
> “People are scared of what's going on. Both criminality and religious extremism are rising at a more than alarming rate.”
Crime is down and has been going down for 10 years. For “religious extremism” I’ll just read “I don’t like brown people”, because extremism is only really growing due to white supremacy groups.
> “they're going after those denouncing the crimes.”
No, they are not, they are going after those fomenting violence (literal riots). In one case leading to white supremacists trying to burn down a hotel with refugees in it.
Crime happens. It doesn’t mean one crime is a symptom of a wider problem. And breaking news: crime is committed by white people too. RE: the Rolex watch crime — I walk through East London with a Patek Philippe on my arm and have zero concerns, I’m not scared, nor do I live in fear. Nobody I know in the UK is scared or living in fear — that’s just agenda driven rhetoric.
Maybe get off twitter and/or the far-right manosphere and try changing your news sources for something more balanced.
> RE: the Rolex watch crime — I walk through East London with a Patek Philippe on my arm and have zero concerns, I’m not scared, nor do I live in fear.
Which route do you take? Just asking for, er, a friend…
:D Dalston high-street mostly. It’s insured anyway, have it: I’d never argue/fight with a mugger! Which seems to be what happened to Rolex guy: no watch is worth fighting for, just hand it over.
> RE: the Rolex watch crime — I walk through East London with a Patek Philippe on my arm and have zero concerns, I’m not scared, nor do I live in fear.
If anything, having spent quite a bit of time walking through the only areas of East London recently that slightly unnerved me when I first moved to the UK in 2000, they're now mostly solidly gentrified...
I moved to London in 1996 and even Notting Hill wasn’t fully gentrified then! I used to walk home from nightclubs and have no issues (early morning, empty streets, dark alleys, etc). I actually did it recently (for old time’s sake), walked back from Fabric to Dalston. Again, no issues, no concerns, no hassle. If anything it seems safer now because of all the police cctv cameras.
In a city of 10 million people crime is bound to happen, but I’ve never felt unsafe in London. No more than any other major city I’ve been to. And the same with the UK as a whole.
I've never felt seriously unsafe either even back then, but there were parts that seemed creepier to me. I think in general people are really bad at assessing real risk, and which flawed risk indicators and stereotypes people build into their assessment will make it hard to convince them of what the risks actually are...
There’s a note: “Trends in police recorded violence with and without injury should be interpreted with caution, as improvements to recording practices have had a substantial impact on the recording of violent crime over the last 10 years. For further information, see Section 19: Data sources and quality”
So, if your stats are a mirror of the ONS then they’re not telling a complete story.
The ONS states: “Crime against individuals and households has generally decreased over the last 10 years with some notable exceptions, such as sexual assault”
But it also states: “Trends in police recorded sexual offences should be interpreted with caution as improvements in recording practices and increased reporting by victims have contributed to increases in recent years. For further information, see Section 19: Data sources and quality.”
There’s no way the OP’s original statement holds up: “Both criminality and religious extremism are rising at a more than alarming rate”
I notice he’s now edited to “criminality and rapes” — he has an agenda. It’s utterly tiresome hearing people outside the UK trying to tell us how scared we are, when it’s complete bullshit.
Fair enough, then this caveat should still apply: “Trends in police recorded violence with and without injury should be interpreted with caution, as improvements to recording practices have had a substantial impact on the recording of violent crime over the last 10 years. For further information, see Section 19: Data sources and quality”
The ONS states that crime is generally down. That’s all I claimed. The OP has been editing away to make his point seem less racist are more pertinent to these follow up replies, which is utterly tedious.
This whole forum seems to have had a lurch into extremism over the past year or so. Either that or these people have been lurking in threads I wasn’t looking at before. I find it crazy that people are downvoting my response which cited facts and pushed back against blatant misinformation and veiled racism. We live in a crazy world where people think this rhetoric is reasonable and ok.
We literally had riots in the UK last year due to white supremacists. It is writ large all over social media, especially because of Elon Musk, who I assume you lionise based on your handle. Its hateful rhetoric and actual violence is on show in the UK more than any other form of extremism.
What other forms of extremism do you believe is growing? Compared to, say, 2007? Where we had hate preachers at Finsbury Park mosque that led to 7/7 and the ‘shoe bomber’
Are you talking about the Southport mass stabbing that killed three children and wounded 10? The perpetrator was a second-generation African migrant found with an Al-Qaeda training manual and ricin, who had been repeatedly referred to Prevent. The UK government initially refused to release information about the perpetrator, which caused speculation and confusion about the attack.
It's a bit odd to focus on the anti-government protests and call them terrorists, when they were out protesting because the government failed to adequately protect them from an actual terrorist.
> The perpetrator was a second-generation African migrant
He isn't a migrant. He was born in Wales. He's British. 100%. This is exactly the kind of language that starts the wheel of hatred rolling.
Nobody knew anything about him when the riots were fomented by the white supremacist lunatics. They just made it up because it fit their narrative and allowed them to go after brown people. They invented a muslim sounding name and claimed he was an asylum seeker. None of which was true.
> The UK government initially refused to release information about the perpetrator
They didn't "refuse". It's normal practice for the police to not release the details of an alleged perpetrator.
> which caused speculation and confusion about the attack.
Speculation is not a good enough reason to try burning down a hotel with refugees in in. I'm sorry, but there is no defence for the violence and hatred that was stirred and fomented by the white supremacist lunatics (and by Musk et al).
What happened with those children is tragic. Truly. But that doesn't give a free hand to white supremacist lynch mobs.
> It's a bit odd to focus on the anti-government protests and call them terrorists, when they were out protesting because the government failed to adequately protect them from an actual terrorist.
That's a fucked up sentence. He committed a crime, not an act of terrorism. A horrific crime, yes, but what came after was not an "anti-government protest". It was a riot where people were actually trying to murder immigrants based on no information other than what they had made up themselves. I mean, a mosque was attacked the following day and the perpetrator is a Christian (or at least his family is). That's not a protest, that's pure extremist hatred.
I don't need to, the government already has widened the definition to include white supremacists and has a list of proscribed groups. This allows Prevent (the de-radicalisation programme that was originally set-up for Islamist terrorists and potential terrorists) to work on de-radicalising white supremacists too and for MI5 to focus some of its energy on preventing extremism and violence in the UK.
> However there are plenty of fundamentalist/extremist views within the UK which exist regardless of what the right wing does.
I am certainly not saying "right wing bad". I'm saying "far-right white supremacy bad". And probably "far-right bad" in general, just like I'd say "far-left bad". Extremism, in general, requires you to move away from compromise. Whether it's far-left or far-right, in my judgement it will always lead to conflict.
You greatly overestimate our legislators. Of course, they may react in the way you described, but I sincerely doubt we're witnessing some great master plan.
UK is literally the only country except for China that pushed to disable Apple E2E encryption country-wide. It doesn't matter how secure Avanced Data Protection is and how trustworthy is Apple. Just think on it.
Also UK had law for years that can land you in prison for not providing decryption keys for data that you supposedly encrypyted. It's not actively used, but it's there.
So nope, there plenty of UK politicians from both parties that will happily push something that will invade your privacy. And really no one who push against it.
> Also UK had law for years that can land you in prison for not providing decryption keys for data that you supposedly encrypted. It's not actively used, but it's there.
It is actively used, it's just most people fold and hand over the data [0][1][2].
I suspect it's more likely that there actually are a handful of politicians and influential people who do think and plan like that, who exploit the fact that most other politicians and influential people are quite ignorant and easy to lead around by their fear.
Indeed, the simplest explanation is that they are hearing from voting constituents that porn and other objectionable content is too easy for kids to get online, and want to be seen as "doing something about it."
Most parents don't want their kids looking at porn. While there are steps they can take to prevent it, they require some technical knowledge and are generally easy to get around. The easy availability of this content is what has changed. You used to have to go to a seedy bookstore, "adult" movie theatre, or video rental business to get it, and they wouldn't let kids in. Also you had to pay for it, and most kids don't have any money.
My experience is that each question I ask or point I make produces an answer that validates my thinking. After two or three iterations in a row in this style I end up distrusting everything.
This is a good point. Lately I have been experimenting with phrasing the question in a way that it makes it believe that I prefer what I am suggesting, while the truth is that I don't.
For example:
- I implement something.
- Then I ask it to review it and suggest alternatives. Where it will likely say my solution is the best.
- Then I say something like "Isn't the other approach better for __reason__ ?". Where the approach might not even be something it suggested.
And it seems that sometimes it gives me some valid points.
This is very true. Constant insecurity for me. One thing that helps a little is asking it to search for sources to back up what its saying. But claude has hallucinated those as well. Perplexity seems to be good at being true to sources, but idk how good it is at coding itself
Which is why I read books and articles instead. The information inside them is isolated from my experience. The LLM experience is like your reflection in a deformed mirror talking back to you.
yes, this. biggest problem and danger in my daily work with llms. my entire working method with them is shaped around this problem. instead of asking it to give me answers or solutions, i give it a line of thought or logical chain, and then ask it to continue down the path and force it to keep explaining the reasoning while i interject, continuing to introduce uncertainty. suspicion is one of the most valuable things i need to make any progress. in the end it's a lot of work and very much reading and reasoning.
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