u/ledow

Same.

I work in IT and my home IT is way more independent and resilient than anything I deal with in work.

Hell, the other day I installed a Shopping List app that plugs into NextCloud because, when I had to reset my phone and needed a new one, my shopping lists wouldn't come over from the paid-for app I was using ("Just go to your old phone and export..." ... great... except you can't if that phone is reset/dead!). So I went and found my own solution, that talks only to my servers, which keeps the data under my control, and lets me move and restore it as I need to.

I do host my own email and websites, but on a dedicated server that I rent and have full control over. I have the complete setup for that documented so, if it ever goes wrong, I can switch it out for any other server in a second, even one hosted at home. It's just better for email servers to be on non-ISP-customer ranges. I have actually changed server 3 times (to cheaper/better servers), so I know it works.

I'm reliant on NOTHING at home. All-Linux machines (since Windows 11, I've never been ALL Linux before, I always had some Windows) including primary gaming laptop and all my Raspberry Pi, NAS and other servers. I have all the original installers and software and configs backed up.

If the Internet is down, everything carries on working, except my remote access to the network. The external server still deals with email/websites etc. and then catches back up later if it needs to. If my external server is down, everything in my home carries on working.

But in work? I have 147 integrations into Azure alone. No idea what we'd do when that stops working.

So you're telling me that there are people out there who have to food-shop every 2-3 days because they literally don't have that much food in the house, without which they wouldn't have enough to eat, and at the same time those same people could just walk to a shop and buy 3 days of food and keep it in their cupboard without touching it without going hungry in the meantime?

Really?

Honestly, that's a Venn diagram with zero fucking intersection.

You've either got food for the week in your cupboard, or you can't afford to have a stock of food for a week in your cupboard.

No.

Pay your stupidity tax promptly, please, when that ticket drops into your letterbox.

If you can't control your vehicle sufficient to keep to a huge signposted number, or decide that you just couldn't give a shit, then I'm not sure you should be driving at all.

Also - it's a specific offence to warn other drivers of a police speed trap in the UK, e.g. flashing headlights, etc.

Tomorrow, the Mexicans are bringing mirrors.

"Do you hate the RNLI, then, Nigel? What about the St John's Ambulance? The Citizen's Advice Bureau? The Air Ambulance? Do you hate them all? Do you want to shut them all down with lawsuits? Because they do the thing that they've done for 100+ years which is the literal reason for their existence? Can you say that in a public soundbite so we can distribute that to your voters? I'm sure they'd love to hear that."

Yeah, that's no secret.

Yes, but more people died than those serving. Civilians, children, etc.

The UK population dropped by 3m in the first half of the war. Some of that will be people fleeing the UK (e.g. to return to Germany or other countries) but a lot of that was deaths.

Laws differ in how the police are allowed to respond to them, e.g. civil versus criminal law, and also what you can be arrested for, what the police can enforce versus the courts, etc. etc.

Ever phoned up and the police say "Sorry, that's a matter for the council"? It's because the law tells them what they can and can't deal with, and what the council should be dealing with.

Do you want the police enforcing putting your bins out on the wrong day, or using the wrong grade of cable in your electrical circuits? No. Because there are defined boundaries to what they deal with, and what laws they cover and can act upon. Hell, there's literally a huge BLOCK of a police manual that tells them exactly what they're allowed to do and what they are not (even when crimes have been committed).

Dumbasses.

Get off the damn computer, you moron.

Politician lies. News at 11.

And coming up later, grass hue shocker, pope reveals his faith decisions, and do you know where your bears are shitting?

Honestly, the biggest problem in international and UK politics is thinking that POLITICIANS as a class of people are even VAGUELY honest. They're not. They just do that to get into power. No honest person would go into politics, or last at all long in it.

Later revealed to be a local market trader, who apprehended the thief with the help of his younger brother... Rooney.

The boomers are dying and the generation most denied EU free movement and likely to take advantage of it can now vote.

It would NOT go the same way.

British intelligence services do this all the time (as does any intelligence service of merit) and have been for absolutely decades.

We warned you he wasn't safe to confide in before he even came into office.

To be fair, we've been telling Americans for fucking decades and they literally never gave a shite.

You want to know why the European cars are all "smaller"? It's because you can't afford to run your monstrosities on European fuel prices. Which you are now finally getting to enjoy for yourself, ironically because of your own president's arrogance.

But for years we watched you all drive stupid cars that we couldn't afford to run, and we're running our entire lives on a car that goes three times further on the same amount of fuel without any issues at all. And we can park the damn thing.

I drive a Ford Mondeo. In the US the same body is called a Fusion. In the UK, when I bought it, the engine sizes went from 1.5L to 2.0L. The SAME CAR in the US, the same chassis, the same brakes, the same parts, just a different engine, is for sale as the Fusion. It STARTED at a 2.5L when I bought my car. The US has introduced some smaller engines for it since, but it still doesn't sell the 1.5L in the US, I believe.

My car still does 130mph (did it on the Autobahn, it's more than capable of the advertise 160mph, but I did not feel comfortable at any higher a speed). I literally moved house with that car - every possession, every bit of furniture, everything, on my own, with that car, nothing else. It gets me to work every day in the same time as everyone else.

America is going to have to learn to cut back their consumption, and it starts with cars and oil. Because I don't know if you noticed... but invading and threatening places isn't working to lower oil prices any more, and the costs of the US fuel are now aligning with European fuel where we have equivalent (or better) fuel grades, heavy taxation on fuel (i.e. government could lower the price if it wanted to), and our cars are FAR MORE EFFICIENT than the US monstrosities, just ordinary cars... before you even get into the stupid truck things with zero visibility and child-killer blind spots.

Also America: "But there's nothing we can do about Trump or corporate enslavement or healthcare or.... !!!!!!"

Literally waiting for the AI collapse, oil collapse and/or a mini-WW3.

No way is anything solid, but economics thinking it is is what's got me worried.

Literally preparing for a utility-independent future so I have to rely on government and private companies as little as possible. To the point of making my own electricity, having a house that's entirely electric, and looking into atmospheric water generators.

Dunno what the fuck you think is solid, but you thinking it is what's making me not spend money on shite except the things I think I will need when prices skyrocket, I can't fuel my car to get to work, and you've poisoned or used up all the water.

When reality hits that a) AI is bullshit not worth the resources, b) oil is dead worldwide except on a far, far, far smaller scale and c) the above two are gonna cause economic collapse because you put all your eggs in their baskets and when it goes wrong the Middle East is going to be a warzone, Russia are going to hit desperate measures, and the US is going to fall over itself trying to pretend that it can just absorb any oil price because... well... it has to...

The readjustment to that is going to fuck the world over royally for decades.

All because of bullshit based on money and power that doesn't exist, in all three cases.

Graph theory is in fact involved in finding the moves required to get to the final solution. It's quite literally a graph theory problem (as well). Things like pathfinding, routing, etc. are smack-bang in graph theory.

The problem is that visual "graphs" have little to do with graph theory, and these graphics do not illustrate what the graph theory is doing.

Graph theory for this game would be far more complex visually because it would be about mapping every possible layout of the cube in a single node each, and lines between the nodes to indicate those with valid moves, and then analysing THAT graph (which would look nothing like that) in order to find the shortest path between the current node (what the cube looks like now) and the target node (what you want the cube to look like).

Bunch of stuff that could be standardised or removed.

Endianness. Array start indexes (zero or one, ZERO or ONE!??!). Forbidding floating point equality tests. The syntax of C switch commands. Just NOT DOING C++ would have saved countless billions of man-hours. The x86 architecture is shite and inefficient and has been "redone" a dozen times over and still suffers from problems (fortunately, only compiler-creators really have to deal with those). To be honest, the entire computer hardware architecture is still in need of a drastic change (we should not have hardware that can just DMA the entire memory range, or communicate via basically "trust" rather than explicitly determining types, sizes, etc. and message passing - it's one of the areas that we really neglect, and PCI is still just the way things happen, and why drivers have to be written in low-level memory-unsafe languages).

For C specifically, the whole preprocessor thing needs to die. Makefiles are ATROCIOUS (and slowly dying, so good), and the entire make process is utterly hilarious in how bad it is. "I'm sorry? You didn't include a header in one file among a bunch of fifty headers that you have included in every file, that you manage manually, and that's the only place in this ENTIRE DIRECTORY where you've defined a variable by the name you just used? Yeah, I'm gonna bug out and completely fail to compile until you resolve it! Oh, you have a circular dependency where file X depends on Y but Y mentions something that's later in X? Yeah, your problem! Even though I just could "remember" that and wait until I've parsed the rest of Y, but no, fuck you!". The solution to which was... preprocessor tricks defining preprocessor variables so you only parse each part of each header file once, even if you have to parse the entire file a dozen times, and you have to put #IFDEF tests around half the header to avoid the circular dependencies. That all really needs to die. IDEs basically did that by "let's just forget all this nonsense and preprocess it ourselves" but it's still there. Duct-tape and superglue.

All sorts of stuff.

A global industry that's 60+ years old and then becomes so critical that nobody ever wants to change it, so it still clings to 60's concepts as if the compiler has to save every single processor cycle while operating will naturally accumulate all kinds of legacy cruft that really never should have been.

I've given up and am planning a utility-independent future. I've got my own solar and batteries, so I can tell the electricity companies where to go, and I'm getting an atmospheric water generator (electricity and air to drinkable water) and greywater system so I can tell Thames Water where to go.

I got a smart meter put in for both, and my water bill is literally 1/10th of what it was before. Just because of the "we're gonna charge you based on the size of your house" nonsense. I live in a tiny 1-bed bungalow. They were literally overcharging me (and previous residents) TEN TIMES OVER. And still we get hosepipe bans, restrictions, price rises, increasing standing charges, etc. etc. etc.

My electricity supplier are still pricing my electricity unit price based on the gas price (like all UK suppliers do). I have no gas myself. And as far as I'm concerned, neither should they by now. But they still want me to pay that.

A few years ago I reached the point where I'd rather pay ten times as much to make myself entirely independent of these government-backed con-artists. I'm aiming for it by retirement (20+ years away), but actually I'm pretty much already there.

I fitted heatpumps to cut my electricity usage even more. Hell, I'm even looking at an incinerator toilet (uses only electricity to sanitise waste down to an ash you can put on the garden).

I'm quite literally just giving up on the portion of my income that goes on supplying utilities to me. Both the bills, plus the tax, etc. and just doing it my damn self, and doing a better job. That's how incompetent / fraudulent I see those industries as being.

FYI, my grid power has been off for 1% of the year in 2026 (stats courtesy of my smart meter), through either scheduled power cuts, maintenance, unannounced black and brown-outs for up to an hour, etc. etc. etc. My solar power - 100% uptime via battery.

What the fuck am I paying them for?

It is technically a Christmas song, as in it is part of the normal batch of Christmas songs.

It is, however, quite depressing for such a time! If they'd used that argument, I'd have agreed.

When I was working in an office with just one other person, I had a rule about Christmas songs:

"Strictly between the months of November and January, and only from the accepted Christmas repertoire."

This excluded Last Christmas, The Pogues (horrible song sung by drug addicts!), Do They Know It's Christmas, and a couple of others.

Not because they're not "Christmas songs", but because they're just downright depressing and that's not what Christmas songs should be.

Hold on, let me recycle a post from a few week's ago that I put on a post about Russia:

"Oh no... if only there were a simple solution to return to the way things were before someone deliberately fucked this up..."

The single most expensive, damaging and "holds me back" thing that I do as a person? Is try to be a decent, honest person.

Life would be so much easier if I could just allow myself to fuck people over.

Bugger.

Almost like we should hold them somewhere until we ascertain that to a good degree of evidence, rather than just allow them in, or send them back to potential execution, eh?

If only we had somewhere we could do that....