Fun fact... I'm fiddling about "with AI" a bit, and burned through my free credits on Gemini. To keep the party going, I downloaded a new model into my Ollama - qwen3.

I wasn't quite sure if everything had restarted and whatnot, so I asked the chat tool "what model are you". It said, and I quote:

> I am Claude, a large language model created by Anthropic. I'm designed to be helpful, harmless, and honest in my interactions. Is there something specific you'd like to know or discuss?

I'd literally selected 'qwen3-coder:30b' in the model selector thing in Ollama, and yet it told me it's Claude. I didn't even do any clever 'prompt hacking'.

So yeah, Qwen works - it works really well, and as it's running locally now, it's 'free' too.

Agree about Outlook - it's pretty terrible. I don\t agree about Thunderbird though (although I use it on a Mac, maybe it's different there?). It does my email well enough, although it seems to alert me about things it later decides are spam, but the calendar, alerts and such like aren't very good. Outlook isn't great at it either, so it doesn't seem a very high bar to reach, but I'm not sure it does.

I'd say it's a "good enough" replacement if you're prepared to rough it a bit, but if you're switching from Windows to Linux under some duress, it's just not going to 'wow' anyone.

Dare I say it... also Outlook. I don't like Outlook at all, but I know a lot of people do - and there's no obvious equivalent that actually does it all (properly) on Linux.

> because reasons

Can you honestly say that Google *hasn't* prioritised its own services over other people's in search results? Google search has been getting worse and worse over time in part *because* they've been forcing us to have youtube links instead of ordinary web sites, big companies over small ones, commercial sell-you-something results over commentary blogs and other not-really-for-profit content, AI results we didn't ask for, inevitable ads for stuff... and so on.

I couldn't tell you if pricerunner has a case here or not, but it seems like the court thinks they do. Given everything else, I'd imagine it's a fairly strong case, but we'll see what happens if Google appeals the decision.

I'd also say that these sorts of actions are generally good for all of us - that is, it tends to force a small 'course adjustment' which helps a lot more people than the plaintiff. We don't get a $5 pay out, but we get benefit in other ways. That's consumer protection at work, which I know some people don't agree with, but personally, I do rather like having strong protections over the very weak ones we see in other parts of the world.

Undercutting AWS or Google isn't that hard. Oracle (yes, Oracle, not known for 'cheap') *dramatically* under cuts both on things like egress charges - they're like 10% the price or something daft. They're also super cheap on things like load balancers and key value databases stores. But they're even more expensive on compute nodes - and you need their compute nodes for any sort of compute you want, be that a raw VM, kubernetes nodes, a managed database server - you name it.

Elsewhere, smaller providers do compute nodes at about 10% the price of AWS, and often don't charge for egress at all. You don't get all the other fluff like message queues and event buses, cloud based schedulers and weird access requirements though.

My point is, if price is the only thing you're thinking about, there are already a million other ways to host stuff besides AWS. I can't see Facebook differentiating themselves very well here at all. Hell, Microsoft only has a generic cloud business because they sort of force you to use their hosted apps and then using their cloud might make some sense. I seriously doubt anyone picks Azure for a greenfield project which doesn't use Office 365 and whatnot. If *they* can't do better, what the hell is FB gonna do? Come and virtually visit your servers with our perv-glasses?

> I don't know why people think banking is free.

Because you've been brain washed into thinking so - over decades. The US banking system is one of the worst there is - you pay fees for everything, everything is slow, requires unnecessary in-person or with-some-specific-artefact activity, and you get paid no interest on anything useful. Even opening an account is an exercise in self-harm. Things get even worse (by a significant amount) if you try and set up a business bank account.

Elsewhere in the world, we consumers pay *no fees* for anything (unless you go overdrawn). That is, no fees to deposit, withdraw, transfer etc. Banks *have* to provide ATM machines which don't charge to withdraw. We can pay money to another bank account for free, almost instantly. In some cases we get interest on our current accounts ("checking account"). We all get interest on savings accounts (so called because you can't make payments from them, although you can transfer in/out of a current account instantly for free). Oh, and cheques went the way of the dodo years ago - at worst, you might get one from the government or someone, but in all likelihood, you just need to photograph it with an app and then tear it up (still no fees involved). I'm not sure banks have issued cheque books for 10 years. Opening accounts is generally easy too - mostly you can do it online if you want, you have absolutely no need to ever set foot in an actual bank branch (and if you do, you'd be unlucky to be standing in a line waiting to get served).

Side note: my bank pays interest on my current account *and* they send me the odd bonus if they make lots of money. I got £100 a few weeks back.

Business banking is also pretty decent. Most banks don't charge fees for most activity, and you can mostly open them online too. Interest is a bit harder to come by, as are savings accounts, but they are around if you want them.

Related note: We also are not liable for fraud on our credit cards either (unless negligent, and maybe not even then). If your card gets skimmed or whatever, then all the spend on it is someone else's problem.

Stockholm syndrome is a real thing. It seems plenty of you have it.

If you're building your own home, or buying a house from a 'bespoke' builder, then sure, you can do it. But most homes aren't built like that - they're 'mass' constructed by someone, and then sold to the unsuspecting public. You can't tell those builders to do anything - they're going to sell you the house like they want it to be, and that's the end of it. They'll also put in the absolute bare minimum of insulation, or any other facilities too, so yes, you absolutely do need to government to tell them what to do because otherwise they're not going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts.

A place up the road from me was completed maybe 5 years ago. It's ~200 separate dwellings, ranging from houses to apartments. A friend rented on one for a while. One of his neighbours somehow managed to get an EV charger, probably as soon as the place opened. Someone else asked for one, and was told they couldn't be fitted because the supply couldn't cope "if they all wanted one". To this day, those apartments have underground parking, but cannot have an EV charger. Some of the houses have them, because the owner's put one in, but that's all - goodness knows what'll happen if all the houses get one and a whole lot of them happen to plug in on the same evening.

Likewise, every single one of those places has a gas boiler. They're insulated up to current standards, and not a penny more - and in fact, aren't necessarily built all that well, so probably wouldn't pass the air tightness tests and whatnot if you tried them (even though they're supposed to be built to those standards). Again, if the government doesn't mandate it, it doesn't happen. Frankly, even if the government DOES mandate it, it still doesn't mean it'll actually happen, but that's a different problem.

The Uk hasn't really built houses for any season very determinedly, at least not since the late 1800s. Since then, we've been fluffing about with various things, none of which are really good enough - they weren't good enough when spec'ed, and aren't good enough now either.

The UK is fast becoming a more summer country than winter, so your advice isn't crazy. However, people think insulation is good for the cold, and we need lots and lots of it - in very little tiny gap an orifice of every building we have.

As a bit of an example, we internally insulated a bit of our house, and since then, those rooms are warmer in winter and cooler in summer. Our neighbour went the whole hog and put 100mm of external insulation over most of his house and since then, he barely needs the heating in winter and if he keeps the blinds closed, is doing pretty good in summer too.

External blinds are probably going to be the Next Big Thing in the UK though. Right now it's actually hard to find anyone who will fit them - there are people of course, but not many. One day we'll do some external insulation on our place, and we'll 'bury' blinds in it.

As for heat pumps with cooling... that's a much harder problem. Getting some pipes around your house is one thing, but getting piped air is a whole other level of problematic. It's probably easier to fit ordinary air conditioning in a lot of cases than it is putting in "central air". FWIW, I looked at getting some infrared ceiling heating and cooling into our house - it's a royal pain to retro fit, and then has lots of complication to look after forever more. It seems there are no easy options for retrofit.

Whatever the case, you know it'll be decades before the government mandates any of this sort of thing on new builds. You barely get an EV charger - or even the ability to ever have an EV charger at any time in the future at the moment. Getting insulation and air con (of whatever type) seems like a long way off. The only way you're going to get all this sort of thing in place is if you self-build, or otherwise tear your house to pieces to put it all in.

Yeah, you've got to have some respect for a load of people who've made difficult, error prone changes across a load of code they probably didn't write and don't know super well - not to make anything any different, but just to avoid a possible problem in the future.

Maybe, but I wonder why the thing that's ostensibly there to boot my system even needs to know what users there are on it. Its job is to get you from nothing to login - what happens after that is, frankly, none of its bloody business.

Whilst this fork isn't it, I'm looking forward to someone making 'slimd' - which is a sensible version of systemd that just boots the system and leaves all the other jobs to other processes/projects.

We have a fair bit of this in the UK. Some aren't quite as 'militant' about it, but it's pretty much all headed that way.

For used cars, it makes sense. For used cars, there's practically a formula for working out the value of the car. You then apply some small margin, and that's your sale price. There's very little 'wiggle room' any more, so there's really no haggling space.

Back in the day, you could price a car based on how shiny it was. Someone that knew what they were talking about might haggle you down, but maybe you'd get lucky and sell to a no-nothing for a nice mark up. That just doesn't work any more. People won't even set foot in your lot if your prices are higher than someone elses - and there are plenty of bucket shops selling hundreds of used cars for tiny margins. You might still get a "bargain" at some little tiny one-man-band type lot down the street, but unless you know what you're doing (which most people don't), you could also end up with a lemon. You might pay a bit more at one of the big shops, but whatever you get will be pretty homogenised for whatever money you spent on it. That safety is pretty attractive to most people.

New cars... in the UK at least, a lot of them get bought via salary sacrifice and other schemes, so there's no direct driver-to-dealer conversation. It's all B2B, so there's some haggling, but it's at the fleet level, not the individual car level. For the relatively few people buying a brand new car themselves, there's not much haggling to be done - the dealer gets told what price to sell at, so all dealers are the same price. You might get some floor mats, and maybe a tank of fuel, but that's about all.

Personally, I'd give Tesco the benefit of a lot of doubt - they're super hot on their technology choices, so whatever they decided was for very good reasons. Whilst I'm sure they're mindful of their legacy, I'd also imagine they'd be very happy to clean it up in order to take advantage of something new, if such a move was justified.

Tesco works on tiny profit margins (relatively speaking). They also work at massive scale. Every penny in that place counts, so they definitely don't want to spend it somewhere that isn't giving them good value. That makes moving off VMware a likely choice, and whatever they've moved to a (probably) wise choice for them. Whatever they've decided probably isn't a blueprint for every little company in the UK, although of course a lot of people will think it is.

Where I work, I get a Cursor license (which gets used a fair bit). I'm not sure that'll continue for long after the sale, but we'll see (not sure how, erm, 'sensitive' they are ;-).

FWIW, it's actually quite good. It generally does some pretty decent stuff when I point it at some god awful mess and ask it to explain or tidy up. It's also quite good if you say "this code works with system1, make it also work with system2", it figures out permissions and other details quite well (at least as well as I probably would do, if I spent the time on it).

IMHO, it can't answer hypothetical questions though. If you ask "what steps do I need to perform to achieve XYZ?", it ferrets around your code base and says "you've done things like this before, so I'll recommend the same again" - which is not what I asked. By no means a deal breaker, but it throws me over to another AI to get those answers, which doesn't seem very smart if you're trying to 'capture' users (honest question: Does Cursor have a web chatbot you could use for this sort of thing?)

I'm also mindful that it's really very similar to VScode + a Gemini agent (or whatever). There's around zero value in the editor itself, but it does make installing the editor + agent pretty simple, I guess. Either way, if I do lose my Cursor license and get a Claude one instead, I really can't see much changing, other than I'll have to install VScode and put in the usual extensions yet again.

I think it's well accepted this isn't a One True Solution - the government's even acknowledged that people will find ways around it. However, it's the first step of many to rebalance the "settings" handed to society by some tech bros, which we've all just accepted as being "okay", even though there was no research or evidence presented to say that 13 years old was "okay" (and we've since found out that contrary evidence was withheld, and new evidence now exists to suggest there are lots of harms to young people).

I'm not in favour of banning things as a general rule, but wrestling some modicum of control off the silicon valley billionaires and putting it in the hands of the people who will be harmed or benefitted by their technology seems like absolutely the right thing to do. If there's some societal disaster from this change of age restrictions, then I'd imagine we'd have the opportunity to look at it again and find a solution. Our government is pretty slow and dysfunctional, but occasionally The People do get a say in what takes place.

As a parent, this just gives me an additional tool to help guide my kids through the difficulties of growing up in the modern world. Every year that slips by, they get a little more able to handle the onslaught of shitty social media, so by the time they get to 16 years old, with proper training and support from their parents, they'll do just fine. I'm sure we could have managed at 13 too - but 16 is easier. A lot easier.

Okay, so don't apply for jobs that say they need "AI skills".