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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 11th, 2024

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  • The centrism is a side effect of First Past the Post surprisingly. Look at countries with proportional representation. Compare the far right seats in European countries to seats here held by the Brexit / Reform party. If I recall correctly, the 2015 election results are one of the worst, with the Brexit party getting close to 13% of the vote and only 1 seat.

    FPtP tends to force parties to compromise before election to gather support. Successful PR governments require the compromising after the results to form a consensus.

    The results from this paperare quite interesting at comparing voters to how MPs vote. Essentially the average CON voter is actually more socially conservative than how CON MPs vote. Similarly the average LAB voter is also more socially conservative than how LAB MPs vote. Essentially if you make the populace pick, they’ll prioritise social conservative policies first even if they wanted more financially left policies.







  • Non- tech: I’m a psychiatrist, generally working with offenders in hospital and prisons. The clinical work is always interesting, and im usually thankful for openness at which people spill their life stories to me.

    Tech: I’ve kinda thought myself software development since I started working as a doctor. There’s just too much inefficiencies in the way we work clinically day-to-day due to the sheer amount of defensive practice inherent in the health system. Started off with personal tools to “assist” the electronic systems in place. But since then I’ve launched and maintained a number of digital clinical tools in a few local hospital which I’m pretty proud of.




  • For the backend I used the ADO library to create a MSAccess DB on a shared network folder. Then it’s a matter of using VBA to generate SQL commands to same library to read / write records from the DB.

    For the frontend, I use VBA to generate a HTML document from the fetched data. For the IE control in a user form, you can then write the HTML to it. During this process you can bind local VBA variables to any of the html elements in the page.

    A common flow would be:

    • User clicks an element in a table
    • simple JS on the page does some calculation, stores a value in a hidden input and clicks it.
    • the user form variable detects the click in the monitored element, reads the changes, and acts on it.

    I also have VBScript to act as the launcher by copying the excel file to the local machine, and launching the local copy. This solves the concurrency issue.


  • I can really emphasise with Samir. Working in healthcare I’m basically limited to just the Office applications. However in the past few years I’ve been able to cook up solutions by reading / writing to file based databases, and using VBA to generate and bind to HTML contents on the fly for the built in IE11 instance. It’s as close to getting to some kind of web-stack within the confines of IT Sec in healthcare.




  • I think ultimately it depends on what your use case is. Comparing Apollo to any web version of Reddit, there were already a few use cases which were definitely superior in my view:

    • the video / gif player with supports scrubbing by touch.
    • packaging comment chains into screenshots to share, with automated features like blurring usernames, selecting depth of parent / child comments to include, merging with post content
    • being able to “favourite” a sub without actually subscribing
    • hiding posts that you’ve already seen

    Ultimately, as with any tool, the best tool is the one you have on you.