ambitiousslab
@ambitiousslab@feddit.uk
I used to be @ambitiousslab@feddit.uk. I also have the backup account @ambitiousslab@reddthat.com.
- Comment on MPs recommend BBC charter renewal is scrapped and licence fee is extended beyond TV 2 weeks ago:
Oooo that’s an idea, I’d also pay so much for subscriber-only RSS feeds like Nebula, if they were undelayed and had everything.
Hopefully Lisa Nandy is reading this thread 🤣
- Comment on MPs recommend BBC charter renewal is scrapped and licence fee is extended beyond TV 2 weeks ago:
Middle ground in the sense of paying monthly, or paying less for a limited subsection of the content?
I ask because I pay by monthly direct debit. When I was a student, I also paid while I was using it and then cancelled it when I was not, and got a refund for the time I didn’t use it.
- Comment on MPs recommend BBC charter renewal is scrapped and licence fee is extended beyond TV 2 weeks ago:
I feel quite similar. I love the idea of the BBC and I have fond memories of listening to comedy shows with my dad in the car as a kid. I think they do good investigative journalism, although I wish they were less timid. I consume the panel shows, podcasts, the news website. I really want to support it and help it succeed.
But, they really frustrate me when they try to lock things down. If podcasts go sounds-only, I’ll stop listening, because I don’t want two different ways of consuming podcasts, and supporting open standards is more important to me than supporting the BBC.
I understand that they lock things down to prevent people free-riding, but I wish the government would stick a progressive ring-fenced tax on, and then they could release everything openly to everyone. Every step away from that feels like a dilution of its role as a public service.
- Comment on MPs recommend BBC charter renewal is scrapped and licence fee is extended beyond TV 2 weeks ago:
Ah right, I was talking about domestically. But I think paywalling internationally is wrong too.
- Comment on MPs recommend BBC charter renewal is scrapped and licence fee is extended beyond TV 2 weeks ago:
I’m worried that “extended to services outside of TV” means the end of BBC podcasts outside of BBC Sounds. They’re already limited, for instance with a week’s delay in some cases, but I’d be really sad if I lost all of them. I’m not really sure what else they could extend it to, unless they also make news paywalled, which would go against the whole point of the organisation.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 14 comments
- Comment on Some BBC channels and radio stations 'may well' have to close, director general says 3 weeks ago:
I am upset seeing the BBC get salami-sliced into oblivion. I really hope the government commits to increasing funding of the BBC as part of the royal charter review, as its funding has been cut so much in real terms over the last 20 years. I want the government to be stepping in now with stop-gap funding to stem the flow in the meantime.
Like so much with the UK and austerity, I fear that we won’t know what we had until it’s gone.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 11 comments
- Comment on NHS bodies in England impose two-year minimum wait for ADHD and autism assessments 3 weeks ago:
I had to look at wikipedia to fully understand it. It’s do do with this right:
A patient not seen in the 18-week period without just cause has the legal right to go private at the NHS’s expense.
From the article:
“Minimum waits” after referral by a GP mean people in the areas affected cannot seek an assessment by a private sector provider. That is even though private clinics now undertake half of NHS-funded assessments of ADHD and a third of those for autism, because many patients exercise their legal right to choose non-NHS care, given the NHS’s own limited capacity to do the assessments.
Such curbs by the NHS are likely to force those who can afford it to pay a private provider for an assessment for themselves or their child, which can cost several thousand pounds. They are being implemented at a time when there are 960,000 people in England waiting for an ADHD assessment and another 295,000 awaiting one for autism.
So basically, it means that you can’t exercise your legal right to get treatment from a private provider, paid for by the NHS, if the NHS can’t see you within 18 weeks. Instead, that pushes people who want to get evaluated within 2 years, to pay for private assessment themselves.
- Comment on I'm sick of bad news and contention. comment things that you love about the UK. 4 weeks ago:
I don’t drive, but have almost never felt restricted by this. I’m able to get anywhere important to me, just with walking, cycling, buses and trains.
- Comment on Military aircraft reportedly blamed for UK air traffic control outage 5 weeks ago:
Leahy informed them their flight processing system did not have a dedicated backup due to Nats being in the midst of a “complete overhaul of its systems” and because the amount of data it keeps meant duplicating it would cost “vast amounts”.
Rolfe ruled out a cyber-attack, which was initially suspected, saying he “believes we’ve never seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation”.
Oh my goodness, that’s terrifying! How is it that bad? They sound like they’re just winging it and hoping for the best, and this is an air traffic control system!
- Submitted 1 month ago to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world | 4 comments
- Submitted 2 months ago to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world | 13 comments
- Submitted 3 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 1 comment
- Comment on UK considers forcing social media firms to prioritise trusted news 3 months ago:
I’m actually ok with this, if it only applies to the biggest social media companies (10million+ UK users) who have algorithmically ranked content. And it should apply to what gets weighted in the feeds, not whether the content exists on the site at all.
I think big tech companies shouldn’t be held responsible for all user generated content on their site, but they should be held responsible for the content they actively promote via the feeds, if they do so algorithmically. I think this article (from a US perspective) presents a good framework for moderation. The more you are a “dumb pipe”, the less moderation you should have, and the more you actively make user-facing decisions about content, the more oversight and moderation you should have. And, if you are a small provider (like the fediverse 😜) then you should be exempt from these regulations to encourage competition.
We have public service broadcasters who are regulated by Ofcom. It’s not perfect - Ofcom should be strengthened, made more politically independent and should have much more teeth, and they’ve been woeful in dealing with GBeebies - but the regulated public service broadcasters are among the most trusted news providers in the UK.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that any kind of restriction is a slippery slope. And I know the public service broadcasters are not perfect, there are problems of political interference that need to be dealt with, and of course they don’t appeal to everyone. But they are also among the most trusted news outlets?
I’m also sympathetic to the idea that the government is solving this the wrong way round. That they are trying to fix this on the supply side when really it’s a demand problem - people just don’t like the regulated news providers enough so they don’t get promoted by the feeds on social media. But that argument presumes that the tech companies’ feeds are purely responding to consumer demand; social media companies are now mostly owned by people who want to, or are careless about, interfering with our democracy and promoting particular ideologies. So I think the era of trusting that whatever the algorithms promote is just based on what we want is over.
- Comment on Scan to Verify You're Human 3 months ago:
I think they can use remote attestation on the mobile device to prove that it’s a physical device. They do that through Google Play Services or whatever the equivalent is on iOS. So, for instance, scanning the QR code on a custom ROM like lineage or GrapheneOS doesn’t work.
- Submitted 3 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 0 comments
- Comment on There is no such thing as a safe minority 4 months ago:
Thanks, updated now. Looks like they fixed a typo in the URL.
- Submitted 4 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 3 comments
- Comment on Man hit by van in Birmingham after residents take down union flags put up by anti-migrant group 5 months ago:
I was hoping we wouldn’t have to deal with another summer of this bullshit.
What’s the best response to this? Put up flags of other countries alongside? Use their move against them and see if they take yours down?
I’m wary of taking them down because 1) you get assaulted and used for content and 2) I feel they’re looking for a provocation and an excuse to dog whistle “I’m being censored and can’t even be proud of my country anymore”. But then maybe you should just take them down anyway because you can’t win either way.
- Comment on We’re NHS analysts organising together against Palantir. Here’s why 5 months ago:
NHS England is demanding that data workers across the NHS, from local hospitals to national teams, put huge amounts of sensitive health data into Palantir’s FDP. Meanwhile, Palantir’s UK CEO, Louis Mosley, publicly confirmed that if Reform UK wins the next election with a “clear public mandate” to share health data for the purposes of mass deportation efforts, the company will adhere to this.
- Submitted 5 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 9 comments
- Submitted 5 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 2 comments
- Submitted 5 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 0 comments
- Comment on Dominic Cummings’ "moonshot" agency awarded £52m to US tech firms 5 months ago:
For me, the worst part is:
The research agency was explicitly designed to be free from “red tape.” At Cummings’ behest, the Conservative government made the new agency exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Last year, Democracy for Sale won a legal challenge, which found ARIA must still respond to environmental transparency requests.
- Submitted 5 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 2 comments
- Submitted 5 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 10 comments
- Comment on Are there seach engines that dont depend Google and Bing, if not what are the barriers to entry of new search engines? 5 months ago:
There’s also YaCy, which is a peer-to-peer search engine. You index whatever you want, and when you search, you connect to lots of other indices.
I want to set up my own node at some point. My understanding is that the search results are hit and miss, but you have the power to improve things by building your own index of pages you want to search regularly. And this benefits everyone else too.
Since search indexing is so intensive, I think it’s the right technical solution for a truly open alternative.
- Comment on How should a news article website financially sustain itself? 6 months ago:
The idealistic approach would be: all content freely available, and ask readers to donate if they value it, to fund continual production of more work. E.g. Democracy for Sale. Even better if it’s under a free content license.
The practical scenario would be: make some content freely available, and put the rest behind a paywall. But the content should still be available in open formats like RSS. E.g. LWN, Stratechery.
- Submitted 6 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 3 comments