ambitiousslab
@ambitiousslab@feddit.uk
I used to be @ambitiousslab@feddit.uk. I also have the backup account @ambitiousslab@reddthat.com.
- Comment on Man hit by van in Birmingham after residents take down union flags put up by anti-migrant group 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 9 comments
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 2 comments
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 0 comments
- Comment on Dominic Cummings’ "moonshot" agency awarded £52m to US tech firms 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 2 comments
- Submitted 5 weeks 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 weeks 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? 1 month 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 2 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 3 comments
- Comment on Migration minister fails UK citizenship test question 2 months ago:
My partner, dad’s partner, and so many colleagues at my job, wasted so many weeks studying for this stupid, irrelevant test. If you add up all the people who have to take this, how many person hours have we wasted as a society.
We really need to get rid of this test, or at a minimum strip it down and make it about how to vote and access public services. But even then, if someone wants to learn that, they will of their own accord and in their own time anyway.
- Comment on Migration minister fails UK citizenship test question 2 months ago:
67% for me, looks like I’m getting kicked out
- Submitted 3 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 3 comments
- Comment on What Is 'Pathways' And Who Is 'Amelia?' The Controversial Memes About The Viral U.K. Anti-Immigration Goth Girl Explained 4 months ago:
Nice to see that even in the virtual world, anti-immigration protesters don’t know what the flag is supposed to look like.
- Comment on When hardware products reach end-of-life, companies should be forced to open-source the software 4 months ago:
Now, I’m not asking companies to open-source their entire codebase. That’s unrealistic when an app is tied to a larger platform. What I am asking for: publish a basic GitHub repo with the hardware specs and connection protocols. Let the community build their own apps on top of it.
I agree with this. I think the most important thing is not necessarily the original company releasing the code (although that would be nice), but it being easy (and legal!) for hackers to reverse engineer and/or build on top of the platform.
The irony is that, since most such products will have some GPL’d code in there somewhere, most products already basically have such a requirement, thanks to the section requiring complete corresponding source including installation instructions. Hopefully, the Vizio case will establish the precedent that users can take action against such companies.
- Comment on Keir Starmer abandons plans for compulsory digital ID 4 months ago:
I’m happy this has happened. I’m still pretty wary, though. Can there be a cross party debate and agreement on what the limits should be? I worry this will just get pushed through later on, like the encryption backdoor clause of the OSA.