m-i-l
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
4,045
Submissions
834
Member since
Jul 30
Recent submissions
Comment · 9 days ago
It is this, but for a globalised shovel seller selling shovels to the entire world population, for people all over the planet to start digging in random places in the hope of finding gold. Very wasteful, disruptive and not likely to end well for most people, but likely to make a very small number of shovel sellers much richer than if they'd just used their own shovels to dig in areas with known gold deposits.
Comment · 14 days ago
And in the past it has been shipped in boxes labelled "fish"[0].
Comment · 1 month ago
Pages with adverts are downranked (i.e. likely to appear lower in the results) rather than hidden, so if there are enough other positive signals they could still appear higher in the results.
Comment · 1 month ago
I presume you mean SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) rather than SSO (Single Sign On). Six years ago I launched a boutique search engine which downranks pages which contain adverts on them (the theory being that this would remove the incentive for creating spam) and of course contains no adverts itself (to avoid what Brin & Page described as being "inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers"). Since then some other search engines have used this approach, or even gone further such as using the uBlock origin score in ranking.
Comment · 1 month ago
I built https://vintagepresents.com/ to try to sell my childhood comic and coin collections.
I believe it is the first eCommerce platform where all the products have date as an important feature and where the search and navigation are by date - the thinking being it could help people find interesting and original birthday presents and anniversary gifts. I've also built it as a multi-vendor platform so it can hopefully live on once I've sold my things. Note that I'm the only seller and it is all UK based at the moment, but it has just been launched.
I've a blog post with more info at https://michael-lewis.com/posts/vintagepresents.com-date-bas... if anyone is interested.
Comment · 1 month ago
In times of crisis it can be physically moved, e.g. under threat of Nazi invasion in 1939-1940 the UK physically moved over 1,500 tonnes of gold from London to Canada ("the largest known movement of physical wealth in history"[0]), and infamously at the start of the Spanish Civil War the Spanish physically moved 510 tonnes of gold from Spain to the Soviet Union (never to see it again[1]).
Comment · 2 months ago
In the UK a few decades ago, if you found a radiosonde from a weather balloon, it would have instructions on how to claim a recovery fee if you returned it for reuse. Sadly I never found one, but I knew this because my dad was a geophysicist and we lived at the time on a Scottish island which was one of the UK's launch spots. Looks like the recovery fee was stopped a long time ago, when the devices became cheap enough to be effectively disposable.
Comment · 3 months ago
Yes, a community effort against the botnets would be great.
The "good bots" which identify themselves and follow the rules are easy enough to block, so not a problem. It is the "bad bots" which pretend to be real users and hide behind residential proxies, and so are almost impossible to block at the moment, which are the problem.
Given that there are big companies openly (i.e. on the clearweb, not even darkweb) selling access to these residential proxy botnets of compromised smart TVs[0] and mobile phones and other devices, can we not simply get a database of the these IPs and block access from them? I would venture that almost every single one of those residential users are unaware that they have devices in their homes which have been compromised and are being abused in this way, so if they were to start seeing messages from more and more sites along the lines of "Access to this site has been blocked because unusual traffic has been detected from your computer network. Please check all devices on your network and remove any malware which may be routing this traffic." then maybe we could start addressing the problem at the source.
Comment · 3 months ago
Looks like they were focusing on greenfield rather than brownfield, presumably because the margins are much higher and therefore more appealing to venture capitalists, but getting permission to turn fields and forests into streets and houses is difficult (and often unpopular) for lots of reasons (with "software" not on that list).
If their real motivation was "to fix Britain's housing crisis", brownfield sites can be converted into residential use much more quickly and easily, and there is a lot of pre-existing support to make this easier - see e.g. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/brownfield-land-registers .
Comment · 3 months ago
> "Is it actually the case that deaths and injuries in H & N are distinctly worse"
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had radiation - many died in the following months from the "atomic bomb disease", now known to be acute radiation sickness, and many died in the following years from cancer, for example. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions_... for details of all the different ways a nuclear explosion can cause death or injury in the initial stage (1-9 weeks), intermediate stage (10-12 weeks), late period (13-20 weeks), and delayed period (20+ weeks). Bear in mind that the effects of radiation weren't well understood at the time.
Furthermore, all the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their children "were (and still are) victims of severe discrimination when it comes to prospects of marriage or work due to public ignorance about the consequences of radiation sickness, with much of the public believing it to be hereditary or even contagious"[0].
Comment · 4 months ago
See also Hugh Piggott's detailed recipe books for building wind turbines, e.g. https://scoraigwind.co.uk/all-of-the-books-by-hugh-how-to-ge... . They were originally printed paper books because they pre-date the internet, and have been popular, e.g. in Scottish island communities, for a long time. I see now they are available as paid eBooks, which seems reasonable to me because the price is very low and a lot of effort has gone into making them, but I wonder if that will be a problem nowadays with people expecting everything on the internet to be free.
Edit: There is also https://pureselfmade.com/ which uses Piggott turbine designs.
Comment · 4 months ago
I clicked on the link wondering if the twist might be that it was from state-backed troll farm, but not the country we normally associate with state-backed troll farms...
However, from the article: "This may not always be classic foreign interference in the state-backed sense. Sometimes it's much more banal. It's in some ways more depressing, ... People sitting thousands of miles away working out that Canadian outrage is a profitable niche. I think they may not actually care about Canadian politics at all."
I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money (and the platform owners a lot of money), rather than to "exercise their right to free speech" or whatever, given these people aren't saying anything they believe in (let alone have any interest in or even knowledge of). Not that you can really call it free speech if you are being paid to do it.
Comment · 4 months ago
> "Amazon famously remained unprofitable due to reinvestment and waiting for them to become profitable before investing was a bad bet."
Amazon wasn't profitable because it reinvested earnings into growth, while SpaceX is funding it's growth by taking on very significant levels of debt (which will take a big chunk of future earnings just to service). These aren't comparable from a risk perspective.
Professional services website: https://aeliantech.com/
Projects: https://searchmysite.net/ & https://vintagepresents.com/