cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • would you recommend that book for learning regular expressions as a non CS guy?

    Absolutely, it’s an excellent book which I highly recommend.

    The latest edition (3rd) is almost 20 years old, but I don’t think regex has actually changed substantially since then so it should still be very useful. (I read the 2nd edition cover-to-cover and enjoyed it enough that I bought the 3rd when it was released 😀)

    If you’re going to buy a physical copy from amazon you should use the author’s link here to give him slightly more money for it. But if you just want a PDF I see one is available here.



  • This headline and article are focused on antidepressants, but the line which mentions them in the executive order which this reporting is based on is actually broader.

    It also seems to attribute the authorship of the executive order to Kennedy, linking to it while saying that he “issued a statement”, despite it not actually mentioning his name and it being phrased in the first person from the president (beginning with “By the authority vested in me as President” as is usual for an executive order).

    The article says (emphasis mine):

    The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”

    While the executive order says:

    (iii) assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs;



  • Great article, BTW

    I disagree, the headline is clickbaity and implies that there is some ongoing conflict. The fact that the Fedora flatpak package maintainer pushed an update marking it EOL, with “The Fedora Flatpak build of obs-studio may have limited functionality compared to other sources. Please do not report bugs to the OBS Studio project about this build.” in the end-of-life metadata field the day before this article was written is not mentioned until the second-to-last sentence of it. (And the OBS maintainer has since saidFor the moment, the EOL notice is sufficient enough to distance ourselves from the package that a full rebrand is not necessary at this time, as we would rather you focus efforts on the long-term goal and understand what that is.”)

    The article also doesn’t answer lots of questions such as:

    • Why is the official OBS flatpak using an EOL’d runtime?
    • Why did Fedora bother to maintain both their own flatpak and an RPM package of OBS?
    • What (and why) are the problems (or missing functionality) in the Fedora Flatpak, anyway? (there is some discussion of that here… but it’s still not clear to me)
    • What is the expected user experience going to be for users who have the Fedora flatpak installed, now that it is marked EOL? Will it be obvious to them that they can/should use the flathub version, or will the EOL’d package in the Fedora flatpak repo continue to “outweigh” it?

    Note again that OBS’s official flathub flatpak is also marked EOL currently, due to depending on an EOL runtime. Also, from the discussion here it is clear that simply removing the package (as the OBS dev actually requested) instead of marking it EOL (as they did) would leave current users continuing to use it and unwittingly missing all future updates. (I think that may also be the outcome of marking it EOL too? it seems like flatpak maybe needs to get some way to signal to users that they should uninstall an EOL package at update time, and/or inform them of a different package which replaces one they have installed.)

    TLDR: this is all a mess, but, contrary to what the article might lead people to believe, the OBS devs and Fedora devs appear to be working together in good faith to do the best thing for their users. The legal threat (which was just in an issue comment, not sent formally by lawyers) was only made because Fedora was initially non-responsive, but they became responsive prior to this article being written.




  • Yeah, see, that’s cheating. Finland was effectively occupied territory at the time.

    I think it is clear that the meaning of “invaded X” here is “invaded some place which today is part of X”.

    As an amateur history nerd, it just makes me wish I could click on it and find the details of said invasions

    Again, you can find the whole book on LibGen :)

    Here is the section about Finland, which actually covers more than just the war of 1807-1812

    We saw action in Finnish waters in our war against Russia of 1807–12, one of those wars set amid the chaos of Napoleonic Europe, in which we were temporarily at war with people who at other times were instead fighting the French alongside us.

    There were assorted naval actions. For instance, on 25 July 1809, Princess Caroline, Minotaur, Cerberus and Prometheus, not in this case the cast of some mythological movie, but a British naval squadron, fought a battle with four Russian gunboats and a brig near Hamina. After nineteen Britons and twenty-eight Russians were killed, the Russian boats were captured by the princess and her mythological friends.

    The Russians, not surprisingly, moved fairly fast to end the war when Napoleon invaded them in 1812.

    With the arrival of the Crimean War in the 1850s, we were invading Finnish waters again. We spent quite a lot of time bombarding Russian fortifications from the sea, but in the most dramatic of the incidents we landed and took hundreds of Finnish prisoners (Finnish prisoners from the Russian army, since the Russians controlled the area at the time). This was the Battle of Bomarsund, or rather two Battles of Bomarsund. The first battle was more of a bombardment of the Russian fortress at Bomarsund and notable because Charles Davis Lucas threw a live shell off the ship, performing the earliest act of bravery to be rewarded with a Victoria Cross.

    The Second Battle of Bomarsund was a more dramatic affair. On 13 August 1854, a British fleet landed thousands of French troops and then shelled the fortress until it surrendered. After the surrender, British and French forces made the fortress unusable. About 300 mainly Finnish grenadiers, with Russian officers, were taken to Britain and held prisoner in Lewes, where you can now see the so-called Russian Memorial commemorating twenty-eight Finnish soldiers who died here. The story of their incarceration also makes an interesting aside, with the officers going out riding and shooting, and the soldiers becoming a tourist attraction for some Brits, while other Brits complained that the prisoners were being too well treated.

    Then, bizarrely when you consider that we had been fighting Russians in what is now Finland, about the only time we have attacked Finland, we attacked it in what was then Finland but is now Russia. Confusing eh? On 30 July 1941, to show Churchill’s sudden enthusiasm for Stalin, once the German invasion of Russia had brought him into the war on our side, we managed to get two aircraft carriers into Arctic waters north of Finland and tried to bomb Kirkenes in Norway and Petsamo in Finland (now in Russia). It was a bit of a disaster all round for us, with many Fleet Air Arm planes shot down and not much damage done to the ports.

    We could redo this map with “Countries the British have invaded since WW2 ended”

    I don’t have that map handy but,

    here are the countries which had the British monarch as their 'sovereign', post-1952

    wikipedia's world map titled "The realms, territories, and protectorates of Elizabeth II from 1952 to 2022"

    caption showing color code for the four categories in the previous map: Realms as of her death, Former realms, Territories and dependencies as of her death, and Former territories, dependencies and protectorates

    (via)

    Though I also worry that in the modern era, with imperialism suddenly in vogue again, that this is priming people for whataboutism

    fyi the the pejorative “whataboutism” was actually coined by an apologist for British imperialism 😂




  • You can find an epub of the book on Library Genesis.

    Here is the section on Poland

    Poland is a country that has seen so much war that when you consider everywhere else we have invaded, you feel vaguely confident that British forces must have seen a lot of action on Polish land or sea. Poland has had endless foreign military units moving through it, but very few of them have been ours, although we have had some conducting operations here.

    We fought and lost a war against the Hanseatic League in 1470–74 with the Hanseatic port of Danzig (now in present-day Poland) taking a leading role in actions against us.

    During the Thirty Years War assorted British troops fighting for foreign rulers roamed parts of what is today Poland. Many of these reached high positions, with the Scot, Major General Sir David Drummond, being made governor of Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland).

    During the Napoleonic Wars, we took part in several operations linked to Danzig, then Prussian. In 1807, we sent ships to assist in the defence of Danzig against the French. The British sloop Falcon tried to help reinforcements get into the besieged city and the eighteen-gun Dauntless, dauntlessly tried to get 150 barrels of gunpowder into it, only, rather unfortunately, to run aground, and even more unfortunately, to do so next to an enemy battery, which not surprisingly shelled the ship until French grenadiers could capture her. Then in 1812, with Danzig occupied by the French, we tried something even more ambitious. Admiral Martin loaded a bunch of soldiers onto British and Russian ships and landed them near Danzig, behind French lines, in a daring manoeuvre.

    After the end of the First World War, the Royal Navy was back in Danzig again, while the British Army got involved in its only major operations on Polish soil. Along with units from other Allied nations, our soldiers had the unenviable task of policing assorted plebiscites organised to decide the post-war frontier between Germany and Poland – unenviable because these were regions with mixed German and Polish populations where emotions could run extremely high about which side of the border people would finally be on.

    The two major areas where we were involved were Upper Silesia and East Prussia. In East Prussia two British officers found themselves, under an atmosphere of pressure from both sides, in command of the local police. A battalion from the Royal Irish Regiment was also sent to help. When the plebiscite took place on 11 July 1920, most voters opted to be Prussian and the majority of the disputed territory went to Germany.

    In Upper Silesia, the situation was even more tense. After a Polish uprising in the area against German control in 1919, an Allied commission including British representatives was sent to the area and a plebiscite took place on 20 March 1920. But the results were mixed and there was disagreement in the Allied camp over how to proceed. In the chaos and confusion, a second Polish uprising took place in August 1920 and a third in 1921. British troops were among the units struggling to bring peace and order to the area, which they eventually achieved. The Allies, however, could still not agree on how to divide the territory, but eventually agreed to hand the decision over to the League of Nations, which decided to hand the majority of Upper Silesia’s industrial heartland to Poland.

    It’s one of the ironies of history that everybody could have saved themselves the effort since the disputed areas were generally going to end up as Polish or Soviet territory after the Second World War anyway.

    In the Second World War, the SOE conducted assorted operations in Poland and the RAF flew heroic missions to drop supplies to the fighters of the Warsaw Uprising before the city was crushed by the Germans.


  • A uprising in the Roman empire does not count as Britain invading Croatia and Slovenia just because an army originating in the Roman province of Britannia landed in the region which, 16 centuries later, is controlled by these two countries.

    You can find an epub of the book on Library Genesis. It is organized by current nation states but is (obviously) referring to historical invasions of their present-day territory.

    For Croatia, it does mention events in the fourth century, but also the 19th (when they built a base on the island of Vis) and 20th (when they reoccupied it). Slovenia it admits they “have come perilously close to not invading at all” but points out that (in addition to that fourth-century Roman campaign) the UK did occupy an area including the present-day Slovenian town of Sežana from 1945 to 1947.














  • Something that people need to understand is that AI companies (let’s talk about them instead of “AIs” that have no agency) are on a race to use less energy and less water per request for a very simple and selfish reason: it costs money.

    I agree here; left to their own devices, money is generally what matters to for-profit companies. Which is why they are mostly continuing to build datacenters (including those that are primarily for “AI”) where they do, which is almost entirely in places where they are competing with others for scarce water: because the alternatives are even more expensive.

    Underwater experiments in 2020

    That’s a neat idea, and maybe will be widespread one day.

    However that particular experimental project from Microsoft was conceived of in 2013, deployed in 2018, and concluded in 2020. Microsoft is not currently operating or planning to operate any more underwater datacenters: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-confirms-project-natick-underwater-data-center-is-no-more/

    Among things they’re doing instead (specifically for AI) is restarting a decommissioned nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, a state with (like most states) a long history of conflict related to water scarcity and privatization.

    Real world deployement in 2021

    This appears to be the only currently-operating (though the most recent news about it I can find is from 2023) underwater datacenter project, and it is in a certain country where it is somewhat easier for long-term environmental concerns to supersede capitalism’s profit motive. It would be great if they can make it an economically viable model which becomes commonplace, but until they do… datacenters today are still extremely thirsty.




  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPtoAI@lemmy.mlAI Needs Your Help!
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    5 days ago

    Did you even read the second part of my comment before getting mad?

    yeah, i did. you wrote:

    So it should be easy enough to build them in locations that have easy access to cheap energy and large amounts of water

    if you think it should be easy enough, what is your explanation for why datacenters are continuing to be built in locations where they’re competing with agriculture, other industries, and/or residential demand for scarce water resources (as you can read about in the links in my previous comment)?