stevecrox

The issue is end to end encryption.

The law change requires messaging applications to be able to provide messages between people using their service.

In the 00's, messaging applications would have a secure connection between themselves and person A and anouther secure connection between themselves and Person B.

Person A would encrypt the message, send it to the service, who would decrypt it, open a connection to Person B, encrypt the message and send to Person B.

So if the police got a warrent for communications of Person B (say the police think the person is involved in human trafficking), then the messaging service could provide all messages sent to Person B.

Message services have taken themselves out of the loop, Person A now encrypts the message and sends directly to Person B. So the police appear with a warrent and the message service shrugs its shoulders since it hasno means to get the data.

The law effectively requires messaging services to design the apps/service so they can comply with a warrent.

The issue is less encryption and more the balance between your right to privacy and states right to intrude.

This is why banks aren't upset, they aren't talking about back dooring encryption and bank encryption is between you and the bank so they don't have to do/say anything.

Because the Tories have upset everyone internationally, so it isn't really an option. If you've been paying attention the EU has been playing a bunch of jobsworth type games with the UK.

Notice how he will do this in 2025, when the current agreement is up for renewel rather than immediately.

You also have the fact rejoin isn't winding the clock back to 2016, firstly we would loose all of our opt outs, things like the rebate, the euro, etc.. I don't think the reality would actually be popular.

Secondly the UK blocked a number of things like the EU Army (personally I think its a terrible idea, countries that don't spend enough looking to combine to "save" money) so it isn't the same EU.

Lastly see above mentioned jobsworth behaviour, I would not be surprised if the EU demanded the UK to complete all the paperwork of a new joiner and drag the process out as long as possible (it takes ~10 years for most countries).

Far better to put the UK on a stable footing and then ask if EU membership is something the UK still wants. It took the 13 years to get to this point, so its unlikely everything will be fixed during the next government. So why bring something like rejoining up?

The GAO has performed an annual review of the Space Launch System every year since 2014 and switched to reviewing the Artemis program in 2019.

Each year the GAO points out Nasa isn't tracking any costs and Nasa argues with the GAO about the costs they assign. Then the GAO points out Nasa has no concrete plan to reduce costs, Nasa then goes nu'uh (see the articles cost reduction "objectives").

The last two reports have focused on the RS-25 engine, last time the GAO was unhappy because an engine cost Nasa $100 million and Nasa had just granted a development contract to reduce the cost of the engine.

However if you took the headline cost of the contract and split it over planned engines it was greater than the desired cost savings. Nasa response was development costs don't count.

Congress reviews GAO reports and decides to give SLS more money.

Similar to most navies.

Engineering's workload won't really change, they'll do certain types of maintenance.

Most navies don't have command staff on the bridge full time. There would be a watch officer who is fairly junior learning how to operate the ship so the down time is an opportunity for them to grow and learn.

Most navies seperate the captain and first officer, with the first officer involved in running the ship and the captain running the big picture.

So you would expect the first officer to spend the time checking on every department to ensure they are up to standard.

That would mean department heads would be running drills or bringing equipment down for maintenance so its ready.

The captain would likely be planning and thinking through the encounter.

For any free time senior officers have there is probably a mountain of reports (personnel, ship, intelligence, etc..) to read and keep tabs on.

The other person was just wrong.

Large scale Hydrogen generation isn't generated in a fossil free way, Hydrogen can be generated is a green way but the infrastructure isn't there to support SLS.

Hydrogen is high ISP (miles per gallon) by rubbish thrust (engine torque).

This means SLS only works with Solid Rocket Boosters, these are highly toxic and release green house contributing material into the upper atmosphere. I suspect you would find Falcon 9/Starship are less polluting as a result.

Lastly the person implies SLS could be fueled by space sources (e.g. the moon).

SLS is a 2.5 stage rocket, the boosters are ditched in Earths Atmosphere and the first stage ditched at the edge of space. The current second stage doesn't quite make low earth orbit.

So someone would have to mine materials on the moon and ship them back. This would be far more expensive than producing hydrogen on Earth.

Hydrogen on the moon makes sense if your in lunar orbit, not from Earth.

Both the US and UK define a biscuit as a small unleavened cake.

For some reason US folks call all but one type of small unleavened cakes "coookies" which is a specific type of biscuit.

It would be like calling all beer "stout".

Thats just national pride talking,

Personally I think Plymouth's Pasties are superior to all other pasties (Ron Dewney for the win) and love them. But a pasty can only be so good and I accept people wouldn't put it in a S tier for food.

Another example is Americans claiming Jack Daniels is the best whiskey.

Years ago there was no way to share IDE settings between developers.

You ended up with some developers choosing a tab width of 2 spaces, some choosing 4 spaces and as there was no linting enforcement some people using 2-4 spaces depending on their IDE settings.

This resulted in an unreadable mess as stuff was idented to all sorts of random levels.

It doesn't matter if you use tabs or spaces as long as only one type is consistently used within a project.

Spaces tends to win because inevitably there are times you need to use spaces and so its difficult to ensure a project only uses tabs for identation.

IDE's support converting tabs into spaces based on tab width and code formatting will ensure correct indentation. You can now have centralised IDE settings so everyone gets the same setup.

Honestly 99% of people don't care about formatting (they only care when consistency isn't enforced and code is hard to read), there is always one person who wants a 60 charracter line width or only tabs or double new lined parathensis. Who then sucks up huge amounts of the team time arguing their thing is a must while they code in emacs, unlike the rest of the team using an actual ide.

I am actually arguing for a stable ABI.

The few times I have had to compile out of tree drivers for the linux kernel its usually failed because the ABI has changed.

Each time I have looked into it, I found code churn, e.g. changing an enum to a char (or the other way) or messing with the parameter order.

If I was empire of the world, the linux kernel would be built using conan.io, with device trees pulling down drivers as dependencies.

The Linux ABI Headers would move out into their own seperately managed project. Which is released and managed at its own rate. Subsystem maintainers would have to raise pull requests to change the ABI and changing a parameter from enum to char because you prefer chars wouldn't be good enough.

Each subsystem would be its own "project" and with a logical repository structure (e.g. intel and amd gpu drivers don't share code so why would they be in the same repo?) And built against the appropriate ABI version with each repository released at its own rate.

Unsupported drivers would then be forked into their own repositories. This simplifies depreciation since its external to the supported drivers and doesn't need to be refactored or maintained. If distributions can build them and want to include the driver they can.

Linus job would be to maintain the core kernel, device trees and ABI projects and provide a bill of materials for a selection of linux kernel/abi/drivers version which are supported.

Lastly since every driver is a descrete buildable component, it would make it far easier for distributions to check if the driver is compatible (e.g. change a dependency version and build) with the kernel ABI they are using and provide new drivers with the build.

None of this will ever happen. C/C++ developers loath dependency management and people can ve stringly attached to mono repos for some reason.

The linux kernel is very old school in how it is run and originally a big part of the DevSecOps movement was removing a lot of manual overhead.

Moving on to something like Gitea (codeberg) would give you a better diff view and is quicker/easier than posting a patch to a mailing list.

The branching model of the kernel is something people write up on paper that looks great (much like Gitflow) but is really time consuming to manage. Moving to feature branch workflow and creating a release branches as part of the release process allows a ton of things to be automated and simplified.

Similarly file systems aren't really device specific, so you could build system tests for them for benchmarking and standard use cases.

Setting up a CI to perform smoke testing and linting, is fairly standard.

Its really easy to setup a CI to trigger when a new branch/pr is created/updated, this means review becomes reduced to checking business logic which makes reviews really quick and easy.

Similarly moving on to a decent issue tracker, Jira's support for Epic's/stories/tasks/capabilities and its linking ability is a huge simplifier for long term planning.

You can do things like define OKR's and then attach Epics to them and Stories/tasks to epics which lets you track progress to goals.

You can use issues the way the linux community currently uses mailing lists.

Combined with a Kanban board for tracking, progress of tickets. You remove a ton of pain.

Although open source issue trackers are missing the key productivity enablers of Jira, which makes these improvements hard to realise.

The issue is people, the linux kernel maintainers have been working one way for decades. Getting them to adopt new tools will be heavily resisted, same with changing how they work.

Its like everyone outside, knows a breaking the ABI definition from the sub system implementation would create a far more stable ABI which would solve a bunch of issues and allow change when needed, except no one in the kernel will entertain the idea.

During the pandemic I had some unoccupied python graduates I wanted to teach data engineering to.

Initially I had them implement REST wrappers around Apache OpenNLP and SpaCy and then compare the results of random data sets (project Gutenberg, sharepoint, etc..).

I ended up stealing a grad data scientist because we couldn't find a difference (while there was a difference in confidence, the actual matches were identical).

SpaCy required 1vCPU and 12GiB of RAM to produce the same result as OpenNLP that was running on 0.5 vCPU and 4.5 GiB of RAM.

2 grads were assigned a Spring Boot/Camel/OpenNLP stack and 2 a Spacy/Flask application. It took both groups 4 weeks to get a working result.

The team slowly acquired lockdown staff so I introduced Minio/RabbitMQ/Nifi/Hadoop/Express/React and then different file types (not raw UTF-8, but what about doc, pdf, etc..) for NLP pipelines. They built a fairly complex NLP processing system with a data exploration UI.

I figured I had a group to help me figure out Python best approach in the space, but Python limitations just lead to stuff like needing a Kubernetes volume to host data.

Conversely none of the data scientists we acquired were willing to code in anything but Python.

I tried arguing in my company of the time there was a huge unsolved bit of market there (e.g. MLOP's)

Alas unless you can show profit on the first customer no business would invest. Which is why I am trying to start a business.