Long ago, the UK courts ordered all the major consumer ISPs to block The Pirate Bay along with various other popular services. Ever since, we've had to keep up to date on what the latest proxy address might be.

Of course, thanks to the new censorship laws introduced more recently, we're all on VPNs now, so as to avoid having to hand our ID to the wallet inspector for every last website we ever use. And once that was set up, it was nice to discover that the original is still in play!

The point was that "republic" simply means "not a monarchy". The state is a "public thing/matter", not a private concern.

The grid has been forced to change faster than the operator would have liked it to in many places, which is a good thing.

In the main, although the Spanish national blackout just over a year ago suggests that maybe it changed too fast. (Hard to use a stronger word than "maybe" because my understanding is that the report on the causes didn't really say anything).

We are a republic for this reason.

No, you are a republic because your founding fathers, probably ascribing James III more power than he really had as a post-Glorious Revolution monarch, decided that head of state should not be a hereditary position.

Whitespace is a HUMAN affordance for a HUMAN audience. If you think it looks kinda okay, that's all that's needed.

There's a bit more to it than that: consistent whitespace means that version control diffs contain relevant changes and you don't need to filter out the changes that just remove some spaces from the end of a line. This is also really a human affordance, but while there are humans in the loop either approving changes or needing to understand when something changed, it's a valuable one. And there's a general principle here which is directly relevant to LLM-generated code, which is that until LLMs have minimising the diffs as part of their goals they're going to produce diffs which take a lot of effort for humans to review.

The jokes about Darth Jar Jar were everywhere of course, but it could have worked. Star Wars lifted a few ideas from classic SF sources including Asimov's Foundation series - in which, we might recall, the terrifying, unstoppable galactic warlord known as The Mule was hiding in plain sight as a clown, who seemed to be merely a harmless entertainer at court. His military success was chiefly thanks to his psychic ability to manipulate others' minds to his liking - Darth Jar Jar could have done very well that way!

I saw three Star Wars movies when I was young. They were great. Mainly because I was a child and this stuff was new and fresh and exciting to me. Even the Ewoks.

I saw three more when I was not quite so young. They were... poor.

I saw a couple more when I was older. One was great, the other was okay but a retread of one of the old ones, and I never got round to seeing the rest. Didn't care enough.

Now they've got more, and apparently they're based on a TV series they did, which I didn't watch because I wasn't subscribed to that streaming platform at the time. So I'm not going to see those either. Same reason I've not seen a Marvel superhero film since the first Avengers one - just too much homework required with all the backstory. Every scene is a shout out or reference that I won't get. Every character seems to be getting ever louder and angrier and more and more of them have access to time machines. I just don't have it in me to care anymore.

I like the sound of these horror films, though. They're going to tell a complete story? In one film? With a beginning, middle and end, that don't ask me to be up to date on an entire Cinematic Universe? Sounds great, time to check where they're showing!

A modern version of GTA London would be the absolute dream. Been long enough now, you could set it in the nineties and have the same retro value to it!

... why unions aren't much more common among technology workers. Especially given what you hear about the videogame industry in particular, with that mad 'crunch time' culture in which workers are ruthlessly, well, crunched. I'd always ask, well, what does your union say about it? And what do you know, there isn't one, how about that.

Nice to hear of some progress being made, then. I suppose the risk with this for the rest of us is that GTA 6 might be late to release, but, uh, at this point I think we're over that

Serious question?

PS I'm neither a Bot nor AI

No, the law of large numbers says that if you take lots of samples then the sample average will be very close to the underlying expected value, but it doesn't say that the underlying expected value of a binary valued random variable must be 0.5. To take a simple, albeit obviously pessimising, example, if we take two truly random uniform bit generators then we can combine them with bitwise AND to get a truly random bit generator with expected value 0.25.

Truly random doesn't necessarily imply a uniform distribution.

There's plenty of corruption in Spanish politics, but it doesn't work by direct open donation. If a direct donation is made, it's in secret in a brown envelope. Alternatively, companies with a viewpoint to push might hire a company with connections to a politician to, say, produce and run their stand in an industry expo at a very generous rate.

Probably a Linux nerd (on /.? The hell you say) that carried the xST vs xDT timezone markers before the brain caught up that "Standard" and "Saving" are both "S"

> next will be Jedi training school full of pointless teen angst.

Wasn't that "The Acolyte"?