Steve Hill 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺

https://mastodon.nexusuk.org/@steve

|🦆| Climber, windsurfer, Welsh speaker, Technical Director of Opendium (npub1ku3…qguk) |🐱| Dringwr, hwylfyrddwr, siaradwr Cymraeg, Cyfarwyddwr Technegol Opendium (npub1ku3…qguk) |🦆|

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NexusUKOrg
Blog: https://blog.nexusuk.org
Work: https://opendium.com

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Last Notes

2026-06-23 11:46:05 CEST

Hmm, this is a bit horrible. I have #TOR set up on my firewall to catch traffic to a few web sites and send it via not-UK exit nodes. Recently I have noticed some of those sites detecting that I am in the UK regardless, but only when I use my phone (even in Firefox in private browsing mode). I'm not *sure* but it looks like connections are going to socialuserlocation.googleapis.com, and if I send that via TOR I no longer seem to be detected as in the UK.

2026-05-31 20:26:56 CEST

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beware, Cloudflare fingerprint clients and most educational web filtering cannot pass (CF seem to think that blocking schools from websites is a good thing!)

2026-04-28 19:40:50 CEST

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I don't even think the answer is parenting. They frame the problem as "social media is bad for children", whereas the evidence is quite clear that social media is bad for *people*. The solution is therefore not to ban children from SM, but to regulate SM so it isn't so harmful to everyone.

2026-04-15 11:20:23 CEST

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chances of hitting a meeting that is actually in progress at the time are presumably close to nil though?

2026-01-12 17:59:40 CET

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I'm sure... I'm just not sure why they can whilst other professions can't!
To be honest, I think I would be too embarrassed to present that kind of hourly rate to a client!

2026-01-12 17:53:23 CET

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We had to engage a lawyer for a property dispute. I was stunned by the hourly rate for some fairly basic work and honestly don't understand why it is so high. It is a job that I certainly don't have the knowledge to do. But I don't feel that my work requires any less knowledge, and there's no way that I could charge even a fraction of his hourly rate. I can point to a bunch of other professions that surely require just as much skill and training and also don't come close to that rate

2025-09-15 13:40:10 CEST

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I told my sister what I pay A&A, and she was shocked... because it turns out that she is paying BT more for basically the same service... (yes, I don't know how this is possible)

2025-08-27 08:07:47 CEST

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I think its a bit of a stretch to call a bunch of independent non-interconnected BBSes "the internet" just because you could dial into any of them over analogue phone lines.

2025-08-26 15:16:59 CEST

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How about going back to the pre-internet approach: if the thing you needed was on a US based bulletin board, were you willing to pay the per-minute international calling charges, login to the BBS and navigate to the download as quickly as possible, and download at a stonking 14.4kbps (or possibly slower)? :)

2025-07-25 08:12:46 CEST

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important questions need to be asked: why does the hacker in the picture appear to be wearing a bucket on their head?

2025-05-04 21:33:10 CEST

One side of our lawn has erupted into seed heads, and the other has not. #NoMowMay
https://mastodon.nexusuk.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/451/228/225/641/687/original/b770887955bbb00c.jpg

2024-09-10 16:31:07 CEST

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"Humans don't hoover up terabytes of data and then calculate the probability of e.g. words occurring together"
Don't they? We learn natural language, which is certainly about learning which words occur together, we hoover up lots of data over the course of our lives to learn how to do stuff.
"have teams of workers endlessly curating data intake"
Parents and teachers do exactly this.

2024-09-10 15:41:02 CEST

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How do you prove that a human is "intelligent" or "concious" or has any kind of internal thought, rather than simply *appearing* to do so to an external observer?

2024-09-10 13:48:07 CEST

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I have no particular opinion on whether an AI is in any way intelligent or concious, but it always strikes me that arguments for why it can't be concious always seem to revolve around "because I understand that it works by doing X, Y and Z"... but we don't understand how humans work so how do you know that they don't also work by doing X, Y and Z?

2024-09-06 14:19:16 CEST

Utterly bonkers.
#EV #Hydrogen
https://mastodon.nexusuk.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/090/567/411/220/714/original/019271228b0a8ecd.png

2024-08-19 18:14:47 CEST

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I bet exercising those statutory protections is basically impossible though - first you'd have to convince Vinted / Ebay / whoever to release the address of the seller so that you could send them court documents... So I guess you'd first have to sue Vinted/Ebay to have the court order them to release that data (which ordinarily GDPR would prevent them from releasing)?

2024-08-19 18:08:27 CEST

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Ah, ok - so their income is entirely from the "buyer protection fee" that buyers are charged instead?

2024-08-19 17:34:16 CEST

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Actually, I've recently bought some stuff off Vinted: they present you with a price of the item, and then when you click pay it adds on a "buyer protection fee" which (as far as I know) you have to pay. So more or less the same thing - you pay an explicit fee for a dispute resolution service. I hate it - should just be covered by the seller's fees :)

2024-08-19 17:25:47 CEST

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At the end of the day, its just another cost of doing business and I don't think there's any reason to single it out other than any other cost you might not particularly agree with being required to pay. All cost increases either lead to increased bills for the customers, or a decreased profit margin for the business.

2024-08-19 17:10:34 CEST

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That said, I'm deeply suspicious of "industry funded regulators" - I mean, look at the ICO, who are utterly pointless.

2024-08-19 17:08:46 CEST

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We need *something* to keep unreasonable ISPs from being unreasonable, and it needs to have a low barrier for the customer. But I'm not sure the one-sided nature of ADR is a good idea at all. Maybe better to have an ombudsman (could be funded by the industry, but a flat fee rather than a per-claim fee that ends up being a way to threaten an ISP who has done nothing wrong).
Not limited to just ISPs, of course - all types of service providers are guilty of abusing their customers!

2024-08-19 17:00:56 CEST

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To be clear: I don't think a one sided thing like ADR is a good thing, although I have advised someone to threaten ADR when the service provider was being patently unreasonable.
(Person had FTTC on a POTS line. Terminated their POTS + internet by emailing ISP + asking BT to cease POTS. 6 months later, ISP demanded to be paid for 6 months of service because "we don't allow cancellation by email". Despite them not having provided any service since the line had been ceased...)

2024-08-19 16:50:54 CEST

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TBH I thought the whole point of ADR was to give the customer a thing to beat the service provider with, because it doesn't matter who wins or loses, the service provider still has to pay.