Ben Clifford @benc@mastodon.hawaga.org.uk

"It's nice to think of standards committees as these groups of industry experts, carefully weighing these decisions, but it's more accurate to think of drunken sports fans."

#Yow23 #YowConf

Aside from data protection concerns, one of my thoughts as I read the consultation today will be whether Ofcom envisages compliant options which do not entail paying an intermediary age verification provider.

I'm particularly keen to see if a Free software, self-hostable, approach is possible, as that might be more accessible for smaller sites which find themselves in scope, and perhaps more attractive to their visitors.

(Third party providers, set to make £££ from this, won't like that!)

HTML, The Programming Language https://html-lang.org/

My friend got #Covid and went to the government clinic to get #Paxlovid.
Guess how much she paid for the meds?
ZERO.
The doc also gave her 6 month supply of blood pressure meds. She had to pay for that, however.
RM1 (about US$0.25)
Universal healthcare is wonderful and I am glad #Malaysians have it.

#healthcare

In a list of Songs I Know With Incrementing Lists, _The Twelve Days of Christmas_ comes a distant second behind _I Know an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly_.

Pro tip: If you run a website and don't update your news section, bin it. Nothing says "company no longer operating"/CBA than news which is nearly a decade out of date *and* "*** Only on DEV box ***"

Normalize saying "I don’t know enough about the topic to be able to comment."

Looking for thermal bras online and they don't seem to exist in the way I was envisaging, so I've come up with a prototype

Fun example of non-natural number structural induction:

induct on the permissible moves in chess to show that there can only ever be eight pawns of one colour

I grew up in the Canadian Settler/Colonial education system and spent most of my life believing that Chinese ancestral worship was so silly.

Then sometime in my adulthood I'm watching grown men believe the fairy tale that they are self made billionaires because they chose the path less followed without realizing that someone had cut the trees, mined the gravel, and paved the road they are driving their Tesla down.

We have a saying in Chinese - when you drink water, think about the person who dug the well.

Ancestral worship is less stupid than billionaire worship.

who will be the fifth

Dear Millenials, Gen-Z, ++

/via https://www.instagram.com/p/CzdvKt0xQyd/

Came across this #meme about #Kissinger and I HAVE to share it with you

#RestInPiss

Today's ancient Unix trivia: in the Research Unix V6 shell, 'goto' and 'exit' were both external programs. They worked by changing the seek position on the file descriptor of the shell script (which they shared with the shell). This worked because the shell read its input line by line (which actually meant character by character).

Interested parties can read more on the V6 shell's control flow at https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/V6ShellControlFlow

My office commute is weird.

when the front matter of a book entirely in the default font says "Typeset in LaTeX"