In the UK if you sell or rent out a house it has to have an energy certificate with a rating (specified by a letter). I'm pretty sure that you aren't allowed to rent out properties with less than a certain rating and that rating which is higher than you might expect.
Readit Newsjvvw commented on Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study binghamton.edu/news/story... · Posted by u/hhs
jvvw commented on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost nbcnews.com/politics/poli... · Posted by u/jnord
> People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools
I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
The entire existence of this field has been dependent on those non job-training liberal arts degrees.
Perhaps the people teaching thec purses don't feel qualified to talk about the history?
I taught university-level computer science and I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination. I know something about the history and might mention things in passing but I don't think I could legitimately teach it to other people!
jvvw commented on A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition generativehistory.substac... · Posted by u/scrlk
I have been researching local history and Google's AI is a godsend at reading old handwriting so I can quickly get an idea if a document will be relevant or not.
jvvw commented on Shell Grotto: England's mysterious underground seashell chamber boingboing.net/2025/09/05... · Posted by u/the-mitr
There are actually quite a lot of these in the UK - I remember many years ago meeting a lady who had visited them all and written a book about them!
I'm curious as to how social media gets defined for these bans.
I presume text messaging doesn't count whereas Discord/WhatsApp do? What about Minecraft and other games? What about school platforms which they can post comments/messages on? Is watching YouTube included? When I've filled in surveys about our children's social media use, they have included YouTube, which makes it look like every child is on social media.
I live in the apparent dystopia that is the UK and I've never had my fingerprint or DNA taken. Seems a bit of an overreach.
I'm in my 50s and British and I've only had it done once: by the police when the house I was living in got burgled and they wanted to rule out our finger prints. It was 30 years ago and I imagine I could have refused. I didn't really think about it at the time.
jvvw commented on A secret to never forgetting numbers ninjasandrobots.com/the-n... · Posted by u/nate
On a side note, the NATO alphabet is quite normalised in the Netherlands - most telephone operators will default to it when providing you information and likewise there is an expectation on you to use it when providing spelling sensitive information such as emails.
Same in UK - I usually use it when giving my postcode to people.
A concern I have for modern day mapping systems is that digital maps, like Google Maps and OpenStreetMap (OSM), typically operate on the assumption of a static, rigid Earth. I don’t know much about it, but from what I understand, they use coordinate systems like WGS84, which are a snapshot in time. These would be great for local precision but less so for tectonic precision, due to tectonic plate activity (continental drift), post-glacial rebound (areas still rising after ice sheets melted), and sudden seismic events (earthquakes).
And then there’s GPS coordinate shift. From what I read, ITRF, ETRS89, and coordinates associated with epoch dates attempt to deal with this.
So, even though it may not matter as much for FlightAware maps, autonomous and GPS-based systems are a little worrying. Being overly dependent on them may have some be risk over time.
For a while I worked on a project related to mapping the ancient world (so you could e.g. click on a ancient city and then see items from museums from that city, references in ancient texts etc) and one of the interesting problems was not just that cities changed over time but that things like coastlines also did.
I believe you underestimate the average age.