bens_dad

Facebook to drop independent fact checking. And worse: As part of these changes, we will be moving the trust and safety teams that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other US locations.

I noticed that this building with a blocked circular window under the eves
A stone building with sloping gutters

has gutters that slope towards the middle. This might just be age and poor repair, but this is Kendal, a town known for rain.

If you look closely at this google street maps picture of the other side of the building, you can just see a typical Kendalian feature: the slates at the bottom of the roof are larger than the ones at the top - fewer gaps where there is most running water which might leak through.

I suspect that the gutters slope to speed the water into the downpipes.

I still think of Royal Mail as synonymous with the post office, so this sight Two posters on a wall inside a Post Office. One advertises Amazon, the other DPD and Evri

Two posters on a wall inside a Post Office. One advertises Amazon, the other DPD and Evri

brought me up short.

Scroll down https://www.postoffice.co.uk/ a page or two and you will see Our online carriers followed by equal-sized logos for Royal Mail, EVRi and DPD.

The £1 minimum charge for non-Royal Mail carriers is no longer a barrier.

I've been playing https://globle-capitals.com/game where you guess a capital city and it tells you how far away you are.

My latest guess is 0km from the right answer. Can you tell me the two capitals ?

I’d advise you to avoid that at all costs. She’s Scottish, not Irish.”

“I’m not sure I understand the difference.”

“Briefly, Irishmen, drink whiskey and sing ballads. Scottish men wear
skirts, and play darts with telephone poles. They aren’t the same.”

Darts is scored for accuracy, the Caber Toss is scored for style, but they are both measured on a clock-like face.

Six months after her report into gender care for children, BBC Women's Hour interviewed Hilary Cass
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0023q2z
What I hear in this interview is not what I expected after reading much of what I read about the report.

She appears to believe that gender questioning children should get care for all their needs, including puberty blockers where appropriate. One of her reasons for saying that they may not be appropriate is that currently the average age to *start* them is fifteen, which is too late for these to be useful to many of them. She says it might be better for people that age to go straight to gendered hormones !

The Conservative government wanted to spy on all of our bank accounts on the premise of dealing with welfare fraud and error. We objected and they were defeated.

Now Starmer wants to bring this back:

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-the-government-from-spying-on-all-of-our-bank-accounts

They already have the power to check suspicious bank accounts for benefit fraud.
They do not need the banks to snoop when there is no suspicion.

I hoped that a change of government would get rid the the authoritarians.*

* Yes, I did think it was unlikely, but I did hope so.

Is someone using an LLM to write on-topic forum replies:

Thread subject Question about the new return a reference check?

Certainly! When considering the new return on a reference check, it’s essential to assess how the insights align with the candidate’s experience. For instance, if a reference highlights the candidate’s work on outdoor projects, including their management of a balcony turf installation, it could provide valuable context about their practical skills and suitability for the role. Understanding these details helps ensure a more informed hiring decision.
?

Only thing is, this is a programming forum and the discussion is not about checking a job reference.

Of course, a human could also make this mistake.

I saw a lady in a burka (or a niqab) yesterday.
She was walking down the street hand-in-hand with a man.

I told my wife I'd never seen a woman in a burka with a man before.
She pointed out that it was unlikely that I'd seen a woman in a burka without a man !

I realized this was the first time I'd ever seen a woman in a burka in real life *and* the first time I'd seen a woman in a burka with a man, even including in pictures or on TV etc.

I had a couple of letters to post this week:

Two letters; the stamps showing an old King Charles and a young Queen Elizabeth.

Labour’s solicitor general has dropped the Tory campaign to prosecute a retired social worker after she held a placard outside a court.

I guess that an Aurora may be visible at dawn or dusk, but I had an alert:

11th August 2024 3:00pm
Aurora is likely to be visible from Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland

Right now it is very sunny: my light meter app says 300-400 thousand Lux
- that is a thousand times as bright as it is indoors.

Actually, if I read the aurora alert site's FAQ they do explain why they issue alerts in the daytime.

I've received an email from my energy supplier which says:

Finally, Ofgem has proposed allowing energy companies to hide, or even bar, their best deals from loyal customers.

To ensure that I am polite, I will say no more here, but attempt to communicate politely with the regulator.

We have leap-years and leap-seconds, but which month(s) might have a leap-day ?

Is it February in a leap year, or June and December, the only months that can have a leap-second at their end ?

cppcheck is a program which looks for problems with C and C++ code (it does what is known as a static analysis). One of its addons looks for routines that are unsafe when used in multi-thread programs (which do two or more things at once).

This threadsafety addon has a list of such routines, but of course different systems have different unsafe routines, and as systems are updated a routine may be made "MT-safe"; eg man strerror says Before glibc 2.32, strerror() is not MT-Safe. Therefore cppcheck source includes a tool which can rebuild the list by reading the man pages of the system.

Some systems are obsoleted every six months, while others are designed to be supported for a decade or longer. Ideally programs should be written to run safely on both sorts of systems.

I am coming to the conclusion that the cppcheck threadsafety addon should be released in two variants: one that only warns about problems on current systems and one that warns about problems on systems with long-term support.

Comments ? Either here or at https://sourceforge.net/p/cppcheck/discussion/general/thread/209919289c/

Output from older but still supported operating systems would be interesting. Script at:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danmar/cppcheck/main/tools/MT-Unsafe.py

A typical run would be something like:

python MT-Unsafe.py /usr/share/man/man3

The output will depend slightly upon which man pages are installed on your machine.

The script should run on a Mac, (/usr/share/man/man3 will probably need changing) but I am curious to know whether it can find the information in the Mac man pages, or it is in a different format.

While Windows will have many of the same routines, I know nothing about how Microsoft documents them.

“For years, the Mail has campaigned against the insidious undermining of the sovereignty of parliament by the remote, unaccountable ECHR” - Daily Mail, June 1922.

But now they are refusing to comply with a data subject access request from Jo Maugham, claiming it “would be wholly disproportionate and an unwarranted interference with its Article 10 rights”.

ITVX have found a loop-hole which means that they can show political ads on TV:

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/itv-no-political-ads-on-our-tvs

One. This is likely to reduce the watching experience (I don't remember every having watched ITV-X, so this is supposition)

Two. Political advertising is bad for politics.

As part of Radio Four's Boys Week, Thursday's "Woman's Hour" https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001yqyk was about boys.

From 18:30 to 23:15 a mother tells about her gender-questioning son who two years later appears not to be going to transition. Does anyone have any idea how many children do have a gender-questioning period and then decide that their birth assignment was right for every one who concludes they were wrongly assigned at birth?

All but one of Cumbria's MPs are tories and we have always had a Tory Crime Commisioner, so I am amazed to find that Cumbria now has a Labour Crime Commisioner.

Especially as I have seen absolutely no publicity about him, except what I have searched for online.
Neither my mum nor my wife voted for him since they knew nothing about him.

He was a local copper before moving to Interpol and heading the UK's International Crime Unit, so he should know his way around senior police circles.

From:
https://goodlawproject.org/high-court-slaps-down-fanciful-prosecution-of-trudi-warner/

The High Court has slapped down the solicitor general’s “fanciful” attempt to prosecute Trudi Warner for contempt of court, declaring that the minister had “significantly mischaracterise[d] the evidence”.
...
But the judge was clear that if the solicitor general wants to address this concern, he should do it in parliament, “not by way of contempt proceedings”.

I hope that the Solicitor General does not see the latter as an invitation.

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Recent Entries

Facebook to drop independent fact checking

Sloping Gutters

Post Office != Royal Mail

Guess the capital city

Amusing comparison

Interview: Hilary Cass 6 months on

Stop this government spying on our banks accounts

Is someone using an LLM to write on-topic forum replies ?

I saw a lady in a burka yesterday.

Is Charles older than Elizabeth ?

Trudi Warner's ordeal finally comes to an end

Sunny Aurora ?

Energy Watchdog attacks loyal customers

Leap-day ?

cppcheck threadsafety addon

Does the Daily Mail support the European Commission on Human Rights after all ?

No political ads on TV please

Gender Identity

Crime Commisioner

Yes ... "Jurors: you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience."