This is lovely! well done.
Readit News2wrist commented on A WebGL game where you deliver messages on a tiny planet messenger.abeto.co/... · Posted by u/thecupisblue
2wrist commented on Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers reuters.com/world/uk/brit... · Posted by u/alex77456
A secure, optional digital ID could be useful. But not in today’s UK. Why? Because the state has already shown it can’t be trusted with our data.
- Snoopers’ Charter (Investigatory Powers Act 2016): ISPs must keep a year’s worth of records of which websites you visit. More than 40 agencies—from MI5 to the Welsh Ambulance Service—can request it. MI5 has already broken the rules and kept data it shouldn’t have.
- Encryption backdoors: Ministers can issue “Technical Capability Notices” to force tech firms to weaken or bypass end-to-end encryption.
- Online Safety Act: Expands content-scanning powers that experts warn could undermine privacy for everyone.
- Palantir deals: The government has given £1.5 billion+ in contracts to a US surveillance firm that builds predictive-policing tools and runs the NHS’s new Federated Data Platform. Many of those deals are secret.
- Wall-to-wall cameras: Millions of CCTV cameras already make the UK one of the most surveilled countries in the world.
A universal digital ID would plug straight into this ecosystem, creating an always-on, uniquely identified record of where you go and what you do. Even if paper or card options exist on paper, smartphone-based systems will dominate in practice, leaving those without phones excluded or coerced.
I’m not against digital identity in principle. But until the UK government proves it can protect basic privacy—by rolling back mass data retention, ending encryption backdoor demands, and enforcing genuine oversight—any national digital ID is a surveillance power-grab waiting to happen.
I'm certain it's worked well in other countries, but I have zero trust in the UK government to handle this responsibility.
Hard agree.
Also, is the data secure? Who else has access to that data? Will I be protected if I am in this system?
If they were open about the system, it would be one thing, but they never are. It is funny how this has cropped up gain after the recent pow wow with the yanks and the tech companies.
2wrist commented on Lisp from Nothing, Second Edition t3x.org/lfn/index.html... · Posted by u/nils-m-holm
The entire website of the author is worth exploring: https://t3x.org/index.html
I love it so much, and seeing your bibliography makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. The confluence of Asian philosophy and computing is delightful.
To put you in the correct headspace this Saturday morning: https://t3x.org/whoami.html
That is a joy! Thank you.
2wrist commented on How much energy does it take to think? quantamagazine.org/how-mu... · Posted by u/nsoonhui
At the risk of asking a dumb question, what really is mental fatigue and do all people experience it the same way?
On one hand, I understand -- and feel very directly -- physical fatigue, and the metabolic limitations if I try to say run slowly versus push hard up to my lactate threshold. I am currently training for a marathon, and know to train by following progressively heavier loads of long distance runs, interval training, stretches and rest periods to develop my speed and endurance.
But mental fatigue really just isn't a phenomenon that I personally relate to. I know some people say they can perhaps work 4-6 focused hours in a work day, and that's it. Whereas my brain seems to be able to work at essentially the same intensity for as long as I want it to, up to 18 hours a day, and then I need a bit of sleep to recover. So I don't quite comprehend mental fatigue, or what a cure for it would be. I don't even know how I would increase my ability to avoid mental fatigue other than minimising distractions (like HN!) and just keep thinking more for longer.
How do other people here experience mental fatigue (or not)?
Mental fatigue is something that can manifest in different ways.
To keep it short, for me, It is like I can think down a path, but slowly, it is like I have this plodding speed, if I try to think 'quicker' (or more reactive/agile) it feels like a lot of effort, like I have to focus and push myself. The more effort I apply the more energy I use. The more energy I use the longer this state lasts for. The longer this state lasts for the more chance I develop physical issues. When I am in this state, I can't mentally fit pieces together. It is like I am wearing oven mits and trying to build lego. It just doesn't fit together. oh and I get really clumsy, my movement becomes really uncoordinated.
So it is like I have a smaller pool of energy, and I can spend it slowly over a longer period. Or faster over a shorter period. When I go over my limits, then see above.
The only cure, is rest, and that is usually about 3 days of not pushing myself mentally too hard, to get back to a reasonable baseline. It is improving, if we had had this conversation three years ago...
I have seen this in other devs, a friend of mine has MS and she needs to meter her energy levels like this. My neighbour came out of hospital after a serious illness and she has some of these symptoms. It is more common than you would think.
2wrist commented on Kotlin, Swift, and Ruby losing popularity infoworld.com/article/395... · Posted by u/GTP
I just had this same thought this morning. I sure do with OCaml was far more popular. Right now, if you're planning a startup, you want something that you can just snap together a bunch of well-tested libraries. You want DB libraries, S3, message queue stuff, Kafka stream stuff. OCaml does have a lot of these things but they just aren't well known. If they exist, they're just poorly documented. This is why people opt for Java/Typescript/Ruby/Python. It's easy to hire devs, and the tools they'll use are fairly well understodd.
OCaml suffers greatly from a lack of unified practice. There's a YouTube playlist, a Udemy course... an Apress book and those two other ones with camels on the cover. That's about it for stock OCaml. If you want to learn Jane Street flavored OCaml, there's Real World OCaml.
I agree with you. Just have a clear structure and onramp for building stuff. Go and Rust seem to have a lot of the attention, there is room for Ocaml also, especially if it was as clearly and simply defined. (I have a sneaky suspicion it fits in that 'cloud native' space quite well) I am sure that the maintainers and architects see that also, they have made great strides the past few years and I hope they bring it together.
2wrist commented on Kotlin, Swift, and Ruby losing popularity infoworld.com/article/395... · Posted by u/GTP
Come on Ocaml.. I believe in you!
I read too much scifi, and almost none of it has updated on the current state of AI. For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency.
If scifi authors aren't keeping up it's hard to expect the rest of us to. But the macro and micro economic changes implied by this technology are huge. Very little of our daily lives will be undisrupted when it propagates and saturates the culture, even with no further fundamental advances.
Can anyone recommend scifi that makes plausible projections around this tech?
A bit of a jump but have a look at Pantheon the tv series, it is on Netflix at the moment. Based on a book by Ken Liu, the end of the series, blew my mind.
The author of this website also wrote a fantastic book on functional application architectures. I think everyone can benefit from reading it, even if you're not using a functional programming language.
https://pragprog.com/titles/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-func...
Its a fantastic book, one of my favourites!
2wrist commented on Show HN: Bayleaf – Building a low-profile wireless split keyboard graz.io/articles/bayleaf-... · Posted by u/sgraz
This is gorgeous! well done.
pip freeze > requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements.txt
Way before "official" lockfile existed.
Your requirements.txt becomes a lockfile, as long as you accept to not use ranges.
Having this in a single tool etc why not, but I don't understand this hype, when it was basically already there.