Sailor, software engineer, musician, terminally online.
Englishman in Wales.
Yeah in parts of the UK (largely England) water is privatised, and that includes sewage. You can imagine that goes swimmingly for everyone involved, especially if you like swimming in untreated human shit when you visit a river, or the regulator doing nothing about these people hiking your bills to pay their senior management higher.
Private water monopolies all belong in hell, largely because there’s no aquatic environments there for them to poison.
I think there’ll be a limited reaction as time goes on, these days you see a fair few people getting fed up with the internet as it is now. I switched to an e-ink phone recently and loads of people on knowing they exist seem keen for one for example, people know Big Tech’s products are generally bad for them at the end of the day. People who are okay with the doom feed of algorithmic propaganda and slop will stick with it, but dissatisfaction has produced some pretty impressive efforts, this platform included.
The character is a reference to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a book set in 19th century Russia which as the title suggests concerns a family called Karamazov and deals with a lot of questions of religion and free will. A famous part of it consists of a story within the story called the Grand Inquisitor where a member of the Spanish Inquisition, encountering Jesus returned to Earth, arrests him and argues that humanity prefers the bread and miracles offered by the Church over the freedom Christ himself offered. The idea of a literal Inquisitor arresting the very man they ostensibly serve is very on the nose for the character Fyodor Karamazov from 40k! Also it’s a perfect mirror of 40k, if the Emperor got up off the throne the Inquisition (or at least the part of it represented by people like Karamazov) would be the first to declare him a heretic.
Also the father of the Karamazov family is also called Fyodor Karamazov and he’s just a wanton and callous bastard much like the 40k character. A real OG ‘this person is just the absolute worst’. He’s just a multidisciplinary piece of crap.
Honestly have to hand it to GW with that name, he’s clearly meant to be the infamous Grand Inquisitor who arrested Christ himself but he’s named for a guy who’s arguably as much of a dickhead as he is.
What I find interesting is that all of this was happening after a civil war more bloody per capita than the First World War, the trial and execution of a king, a period of rather repressive republican rule, a restoration of the monarchy, and yet another revolution/coup which established monarchs couldn’t rule without Parliament’s consent. Part of the reason Britain wasn’t revolutionary later on like France was because multiple revolutions had already happened in the 17th century. The Americans were by the point of the revolution arguing George III was an absolutist and a tyrant, but that form of monarchy had already had its back broken in an English and later British context by the time the American colonies were being settled in large numbers (with some exceptions). It was an accusation much more apt towards say the French king at the time who in fact supported the Americans, and we all know how that eventually went for the Ancien Regime.
The colonist’s grievance was actually more with Parliament for the most part, they actively wanted the king to intercede on their behalf. George III wasn’t willing to do that being a constitutional monarch, which ironically got him labelled a tyrant.
Sadly the UK is welded at the hip to Microslop, and America in general for that matter.
Reminds me of the story that goes around these parts (Wales) of a far-right type demanding a pair of Middle Eastern-looking women speak English when in Britain. They were in fact speaking Welsh, the oldest living language spoken in Britain.
Also the inspiration for a banging Iron Maiden track.
I’m not even a Christian and this is a genuinely rubbish take, go and look up William Wilberforce for example.
Edit: I feel that I really have to stress what I thought was obvious, the notion that every human being from behavioural modernity to the Enlightenment was mentally ill is so foolish on the face of it that it isn’t worth even entertaining even for the sake of argument.
It’s you! You’re the bugger who replaced all the mild amber streetlights with harsh blue-pumped mini-suns!
The US has troubles of its own, they don’t want our tainted lettuce!
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Yeah I do find the discussion about indoor or outdoor cats to be very Americentric much of the time. Cats have inhabited England for longer than the English have for example, so I feel unless you happen to be a Brythonic tribesman in the Roman period it’s a bit of a silly argument to have outside of ‘new world’ countries.
Also the British bird population has audibly crashed in my lifetime, cats didn’t do that (or it would have happened literal millennia ago) it’s much more to do with climate change and excessive industrial agriculture destroying the habitats and species the birds depend on, particularly insects.
Yeah it’s like that recent adage isn’t it: I want AI to automate all my drudgery so I can spend more time being creative, but Silicon Valley is automating all my creativity so I can spend more time doing drudgery.
I’m not sure it’s so black and white, LLMs (even frontier ones) are total spaghetti merchants if you let them anywhere near the architecture but I get zero fulfillment from manually solving merge conflicts, setting up someone’s fragile idea of a config, or other tedious stuff like that.
I do dislike how many people seem to want the profession to change into being the meatshield between Claude and prod though.
On one hand I agree, on the other hand try making that argument to management at the majority of software firms and see where it gets you. There’s little commercial incentive for ‘artisinal code’ outside of niche sectors in my view, and commercial incentives overrule all else at the end of the day. I don’t think this is morally right but this is the wider problem of which overreliance on AI is merely one expression I think
I agree, and I’d add it’s not even a specifically left wing impulse either. The Roman Republic of all institutions was deeply concerned with the idea that republics shouldn’t have private princes as well as kings. The fact the Roman Republic failed to contain its oligarchy to the point of fundamental destabilisation into arbitrary power is evidence people ought to pay attention to left wingers when they say the same thing about billionaires and the concentration of wealth.
Not really, you can add a prompt to commercial LLM products to alter the persona a bit but the actual system prompt the harness is using is opaque to you. Your Claudes, Kimis, Mistrals and what have you are a polished product on top of the model, they’re not the model itself. A lot of the actual day-to-day software engineering of these things is writing a harness that’s robust enough to deal with a cantankerous non-deterministic pile of linear algebra that doesn’t know the difference between ‘looks good’ and ‘is good’.
Having lived in their catchment, I cannot echo this sentiment more strongly. In a sane country their entire senior management cohort would be hauled before Parliament to explain the amount of human shit in the Thames, and why their bosses keep getting paid enormous bonuses despite this. Absolutely crooked industry, I’m fairly sure Thames Water could redirect the sewage they’re currently pumping into the river into Ofwat’s boardroom and they’d at worst get away with a slap on the wrist and ‘boys will be boys’. Absolutely pathetic, and the whole thing stinks of corruption as well as sewage.