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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Either:

    • They’re in denial that this happens (arguably, it didn’t happen, as eventually Tesco lost, and they wouldn’t know about it in the three years Tesco was winning because The Telegraph/Mail etc. wouldn’t report on that).
    • They think worse things would always happen under other systems (e.g. everyone would be a slave of the state and go to gulag if they complained about anything).
    • They don’t see it as an inherent problem with capitalism (e.g. simply make doing this illegal, and refuse to let business lobby to reverse the decision, and everything’s fine).
    • They think this is a good thing (e.g. the fired workers will be incentivised to work harder, then earn a payrise, and use the extra 10p an hour to start a competing multibillion pound supermarket chain).

  • It’s easy to get pressured into thinking it’s your responsibility. There’s also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it’s what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.




  • Personally, I can ignore the effects of artificial sweeteners on insulin levels as they, like everything else, have no effect, and my insulin levels are only affected by when I inject it. I’m type 1 diabetic. When people make incorrect claims based on effects that aren’t reproducible or weren’t statistically significant in the first place about the safety of sweeteners, it causes direct problems for me. I’ve had bartenders mess up my blood sugar levels by lying about serving diet drinks because they think they’re dangerous. Plus, if the people who push for artificial sweeteners to be banned had their way, there are plenty of things I couldn’t ever eat or drink again.





  • You can’t trust users to make informed decisions about cybersecurity as most users don’t have the necessary background knowledge, so won’t think beyond this popup is annoying me and has a button to make it go away and I am smart and therefore immune to malware. Microsoft don’t want Windows to have the reputation for being infested with malware like it used to have, and users don’t want their bank details stolen. If something’s potentially going to be a bad idea, it’s better to only give the decision to people capable of making it an informed decision. That’s why we don’t let children opt into surgery or decide whether to have ice cream for dinner, and have their parents decide instead.

    The comment you’re quoting was replying to someone suggesting a warning popup, and saying it would be a bad idea, rather than suggesting the secure boot UEFI option should be taken away. You need at least a little bit more awareness of the problem to know to toggle that setting.






  • When the internet was becoming a world-changing technology, there weren’t thirty years of websites to keep working and malware to protect from, web standards were far simpler, and a much higher proportion of users were enthusiasts who were excited by anything they could get and didn’t mind if things were rough around the edges. Similarly, two brothers could make the world’s first aircraft that flew under its own power, and yet with the combined might of everyone working for Boeing, people are worried about airliner doors falling off and an eight-day space trip has become an eight-month one. Mature technologies need a lot more effort to build and maintain than emerging ones.



  • Innocent until proven guilty is a mantra used when determining if the state can deploy violence and curtail your liberties, e.g. by physically confining you in a prison. It’s not a universally applicable rule, and isn’t what’s used in civil court, where judgements are made on balance of probabilities (i.e. if they think the evidence suggests it’s more likely that you’ve done something than that you haven’t) and isn’t what’s used in contexts other than the legal system, like when a duty of care exists - generally it wouldn’t be enough to say someone was safe to work with children if they were only probably not a paedophile.

    It’s my understanding that there isn’t enough knowledge available to the public to exhonorate Snoop Dogg, and without that, he’s left looking sketchier than he was before. One dropped allegation could be nothing, or the start of a pattern, and that’s different to there being no allegations at all.