It’s gotten a lot better in recent years tbf in terms of those kinds of resources. Beginner recommended languages like Python are still a pain because it’s super easy for a beginner to bork how they set it up, but on the whole there’s plenty of online code sandboxes and other ways to get started.

Your point is definitely valid though. Why on earth would we want someone who’s just showing an interest in programming to write their own compiler??? Wtf? If someone wants to get into baking you don’t send them out into the fields for 6 months to grow some wheat.

When I was a kid I mucked around with html and css to make some GeoCities sites. I decided I wanted to learn how to code so I got a book from the library called “how to code games for beginners” or something. The thing never told you how to set up an IDE or compile the game. So I was just frustratingly typing out the code examples into notepad without a clue as to what to do. I think this was during the dialup era so it wasn’t like there was a wealth of info online.

I ended up abandoning programming for quite a few years. It just seemed like nonsense because writing graphics libs for C in notepad does feel like nonsense to a child. I wonder what life would be like if I had some better resources at that moment in time and decided you continue pursuing it.

Again that figure is the “total outstanding” amount and isn’t the yearly cost. If a mistake during childbirth causes permanent disabilities for that child over the course of their life then the compensation will be a decent sum paid out over a long time. There are other better targets for saving budget or raising tax revenues.

We need to grow the economy from the bottom up. Trickle down has been proven to be bullshit. There’s plenty of scope to raise taxes on corporations and via asset/investment returns marginally to offset investment in growing the economy and helping the worst off. The report you linked says that the UK has a lower total tax burden than many other developed nations. We don’t need to go crazy, but at the moment the tax burden is too heavy on big workers and too light on capital.

Rather than ask “how can we afford this?” try asking “how can we not?” The country is in a dire state. Cutting taxes on the wealthy and cutting services and benefits haven’t worked, trying it again is daft.

We found billions and billions for daft tax cuts and juicy contracts to Tory donors for dodgy services and contacts. No one asks “how can we afford this?” when it’s tax cuts for corporations or selling off profitable public owned assets. I think we can afford to spend a little more on helping people survive. The money spent on welfare also doesn’t just disappear, it goes straight back into the economy. The very poorest people can’t afford to have savings, it all gets spent on essentials.

Growing the economy is very difficult when people don’t have any money to spend. It’s a giant weight around the economy’s neck. If the Tories hadn’t been burning the country down for the last 14 years we wouldn’t have as many people struggling in poverty and wouldn’t have to spend as much. Unfortunately they have so we do.

How about we raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and reinvest that money into supporting the people of the nation and trying to grow the economy?

It’s also not one third of the NHS budget. The total “cost of harm” to the NHS Inc legal costs was £6.6bn in 2022-2023, the total budget was £180bn. That’s around 3.5%. Just use some common sense and think about what one third of the budget would imply. Is one third of the NHS made up of lawyers? Do you know just as many NHS lawyers as you do nurses and doctors? Double check “facts” that sound unbelievable and via outrageous before spewing them out for others to be misled by.

The jury system is bullshit and needs to go.

To counter this I used to visit some factories for a big contract manufacturer in the UK. They would often make say lasagne for the supermarkets and for the “premium” brands. Whilst they were all made in the same place, the “premium” brands products had much better quality ingredients in them and different ratios of the good stuff (say meat) to filler (say pasta sheets).

For some things it’s the exact same materials, but for many it’s different. You have to do blind taste tests to see which ones you prefer.

I find the opposite with some hobbies. If you buy a cheap acoustic guitar it’s going to be horrible to play and will probably sound crap. That might discourage you from continuing. More expensive guitars have a much better resale value too, so you’d probably be out of pocket for less if you buy a nice one and sell it again than if you bought a crap one and no one else wanted to buy it.

Off by 1 error. They’ll fit right in!

Oh it’s totally normal for someone to shoot themselves15 times with a gun that holds 11 bullets. They probably reloaded halfway through.

Eh only 43% of the vote though. It’s just FPTP that cause the majority in the house of commons. It wasn’t exactly a binding win for Brexit considering the parties pushing for either remaining or another referendum won more votes overall. Plus a big part of it was a vote against Corbyn, rather than a vote for Brexit.

General elections are too general to be used as justification for a single policy IMO.

I don’t understand this argument re Scotland. Brexit was a disaster for a country which had been a member with a trading block for a few decades and which only had some regulatory compliance laws on its own books to amend.

Scotland has been fully integrated into the UK economy, political system, and legal system, etc for hundreds of years. It would be many many times more painful and damaging for them to leave, and joining the EU after who knows how many years of sitting up there isolated wouldn’t make up for what Scotland would lose by leaving the UK.

We should be arguing for more cooperation and bigger unions, not smaller ones. Further devolved powers, a better system for representation of the nations in parliament, kicking out the Tories and bringing in more beneficial policies for the UK, etc should be the priority imo. Not even more -exits.

Yeah I think it’s because there’s so much less engagement here than on Reddit. The same toxic people would have been buried or down voted to hell over there, but here with far far fewer comments those toxic trolls will remain visible and take up a disproportionate amount of any comments section.

There’s also a selection bias thing going on, people who would get shadow banned or downvoted on Reddit find that they get engagement with their content here so stick around, the people who they put off will leave, which causes the toxicity ratio to go up and eventually the place will end up full of toxic commenters and posters. With a federated system this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve.

There’s some interesting musings on how this can affect the development of online spaces here which has stuck with me since I read it. https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/

Yeah “They are all the same” clearly wasn’t true then, let’s not fall for it again. It’s too damaging to the country.

Don’t bother engaging with them. They aren’t going to change their mind. That’s the downside with Lemmy. There are so few users that these obstinate trolls don’t get buried. Engaging with them just makes their bad takes and bad faith bs take up more space in a thread.

It’s possible they are a real person who’s been banned from most other platforms for spreading their bile and have settled here because the low engagement means their troll bait gets picked up, or they are a non US citizen trying to astroturf US political shit.

Yeah the article content really doesn’t seem as bad as the momentum folks are making it out to be, and you raise the salient point that this messaging is speaking to the groups of voters who labour need to bring over to win.

I personally would like to see a few more lefty policies over the next year, but grandstanding and promising the world means nothing if they lose the next election. I get why Starmer has been playing it safe this way, and I get why people are sometimes disappointed with it, but they are in it to win it and that’s a very good thing.

The country is in a real mess and we simply need successive Labour governments to start the long road to recovery. We often talk about how damaging the polarization of politics has become, so reaching across the divide to try and bring voters over shouldn’t be demonised.

It didn’t click with me with either, I tried it for a few hours then put it down and forgot about it. A couple of Christmases ago I went back into it with a mindset of “just focus on the story missions rather than exploring every nook and cranny” and I got far enough that it really started to click and I was hooked.

The story is incredible, pretty much the whole way through. The progression and combat is delightful. The world is beautiful so you end up exploring it whilst naturally following your quest markers. To top it all the expansions are amazing and have really incredible moments.

Keeping it simple and moving on was a smart move. Your portfolio doesn’t need to be super fancy unless that’s the specific skill you’re selling (fancy designs and UI). Most jobs aren’t doing anything with threejs. Most jobs are crud apps, so focus on demonstrating skills to do with that.

Svelte is also cool but the majority of jobs aren’t for svelte Devs, and most aren’t for Greenfield projects with bleeding edge tech. Where I am for FE it’s something like 60% react, 30% Angular, 10% Vue/svelte/whatever else. Just focus on building things which show you can do what the jobs you’re looking to apply for need.

If you’re going full stack then just focus on one stack and focus on building (preferably novel) actual things that all work together. If you have full projects showing you can self direct and implement semi complex systems from start to finish in a stack that’s close enough to what employers are looking for you’ll have a lot more luck landing a job.

For fucks sake. This division could lead to the momentum folks causing the labour party to split into factionalism again and lose the upcoming GE. Starmer isn’t going to be able to do much to affect any ceasefire or literally anything in the conflict whilst in opposition, but if the Tories squeeze out another 5 years the UK will be in a dire dire state. Keep your eyes on the fucking goal.

I sure hope that’s not the case. Would mean even more long lasting harm as they are on the way out of the door.

I don’t know if they’ll have time or enough political capital to get it through before November, and the reshuffle seems to be mostly trying to swing back slightly to the center, so hopefully they just write it off as a failed policy from Suella.

Good. Who even wants this? It’s a stupid and very expensive policy that won’t solve any actual problems.

Bring on the GE. Can’t wait for this lot to get the boot.

It’s doable once you know what you’re doing. I can do it all via the cli, but I personally use gitkraken most of the time and it’s just so much easier and more ergonomic.

I also see a lot of the Devs who insist they know what they’re doing create horrible messes of their branches super easily via the commit tree. People should just use whatever works best for them to get the job done.