I don't think these laws are being made with the will of the people.
There's been no groundswell of opinion, no technically minded authority pushing expert opinion.
The same people lobbying for the online safety act were pushing age verification tools. The government is exceptionally unpopular, even by the standards of already deeply unpopular governments in recent years.
I despair of the situation in the UK. How have we ended up here?
The British people always take any new limitations with the classic stiff upper lip. We could very easily become Russia (without the military and natural resources), because the population has the same say nothing, do nothing mentality.
There's also always been a bit of authoritarianism in the British populace. Just look at how enthusiastic people are about banning things that annoy them. During coronavirus lockdowns, the people living around me constantly reported me to the police for going out for runs (which we were perfectly allowed to do).
We have a national crab in bucket mentality, which doesn't help any country. Intelligence, fitness and success are all things that British people love pulling down. Many people here care more about ripping everybody down than building them up. They live completely mediocre lives and are perfectly fine with the government nannying them.
The two main parties policies have converged, so have the older smaller parties.
The only choices we have that are any different are Reform and The Green Party, and possibly Corbyn's new party that seems busy imploding right now. Of those, Reform has some nasty people in it, and is rapidly attracting the worst of the Conservative party (look at the defecting MPs), The Greens and Your Party have some fairly nuts people and ideas too (in different ways).
I think ordinary British people are pretty decent.
> We could very easily become Russia (without the military and natural resources)
We have a much bigger economy than Russia.
> any people here care more about ripping everybody down than building them up. They live completely mediocre lives and are perfectly fine with the government nannying them.
I agree with the last bit.
People are also negative about their follow citizens. A lot of people believe the country is full of untrustowrthy "gammon". and back the government/establishment against the latter.
At least recently[1] most Australians and an overwhelming percentage of under-16s supported the ban. Similarly in the UK[2]. This is a topic in which it appears it is the online discourse that's wildly out of alignment with broader public opinion and I'd argue potentially one of the reasons may be that it will make it harder for bot-nets to mass-manipulate public discourse so easily.
I think people support a lot of things in theory. But in practice, less so. Probably because they're often implemented in ways prone to abuse or simply unfair to an average citizen.
I'll defend her on this one somewhat, Github has no exemption as written and she's doing her job.
It's just another layer in the stupidity of this all that GitHub would be blocked but steam, discord and Roblox are exempt because they're for gaming despite being infamous environments.
---[1]
(1) For the purposes of this Act, age‑restricted social media platform means:
(a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
(i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end‑users;
(ii) the service allows end‑users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end‑users;
(iii) the service allows end‑users to post material on the service;
(iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
(b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules;
----[2]
For the purposes of paragraph 63C(6)(b) of the Act, electronic services in each of the following classes are specified:
(a) services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to communicate by means of messaging, email, voice calling or video calling;
(b) services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to play online games with other end‑users;
(c) services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to share information (such as reviews, technical support or advice) about products or services;
(d) services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to engage in professional networking or professional development;
(e) services that have the sole or primary purpose of supporting the education of end‑users;
(f) services that have the sole or primary purpose of supporting the health of end‑users;
(g) services that have a significant purpose of facilitating communication between educational institutions and students or students’ families;
(h) services that have a significant purpose of facilitating communication between providers of health care and people using those providers’ services.
Except that the policy, in the vacuum it is in right now, is very popular in Australia.
It was one of the most agreed with policies at the most recent Federal election.
I hate it as a concept, but at the moment it is all "don't you want children to be protected?", and nothing of substance that people can meaningfully find objectionable (like imgur getting cut off).
I don't think it is particularly a policy of News Corp, although they're happy to run with populist ideas, and more just an issue the Labor party thought they could wedge the Liberals with.
You're describing virtually every policy for virtually every government, certainly since the coalition. Arguably a lot of what we've seen before.
The UK doesn't have governments, it has a public policy unit for global capital, with the Americans calling the shots on foreign policy, and a knee-jerk taste for authoritarianism at home.
Over the years the amount of safety and speech issues that have cropped up have accumulated into a force. The OSA and DSA were announced years in advance, with multiple opportunities for feedback and analysis (I looked into the outcomes at various points but never contributed)
I would say there has been a groundswell of opinion, it’s not something that is covered here on HN much.
It's less focused on the social, more on the jobs. With a limit on the number of job applications a user can make; sort of like Twitter, for job application count. And mechanisms to provide feedback to users. Basically trying to address a few shortcomings of LinkedIn as I see them (with other mechanisms in the pipeline).
But it has neither any jobs, nor candidates.
I'm not sure what the strategy should be to resolve that. I've tried a few things that haven't worked out yet.
The Henley data was poor, but this criticism was too. I don't think we have the data and I fear the Henley data actually underestimates the reality.
FWIW, anecdotally my peers with the means are all looking at leaving and some have gone. I've closed down my business, my wife is looking at keeping hers running remotely because of the staff in it.
And I'm typing this from a Dubai hotel room while I spend a couple of months seeing if I can set something new up that I can do from here. I don't relish saying that, but the UK is not in a good place and there's no light at the end of the tunnel.
Not much in the way of details in your post. You're shutting down your business and moving for... reasons.
It boggles my mind that any westerner would choose to live and work in Dubai. Their laws and rules are very different from ours.
I do see that they have made some steps toward reform of their debtors prisons. I'm very glad to see that, but I still do not consider Dubai to be a safe place to even visit, let alone live there.
The list of reasons really is too long to include. From the continued worsening of individual bits of tax legislation such as IR35, dividend allowances, employers NI, corporation tax, etc. to the stalling of real GDP per capita combined with an increased population and the consequentially stretched hospitals, transport, etc, the draconian policing of social media... it's pointless me trying to list it all really.
Dubai is a bit of a trigger for some people. Others I know are going/gone to Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, the US, Aus, Can, NZ, Singapore, France. Your mileage may vary - people leaving can generally give you similar lists of why, but where they go seems varied.
I used to live in Saudi for a time (25+ years ago), and actually really liked much about it then and it had changed markedly when I've been back more recently. I've visited Iraq, I've been detained in Oman under suspicion of espionage and still see virtues in the place. Dubai is positively liberal by comparison and becoming more liberal, while the UK is becoming more authoritarian and despite the official crime statistics, I'm not sure it's as safe as it once was.
>It boggles my mind that any westerner would choose to live and work in Dubai. Their laws and rules are very different from ours.
As long as you're not borrowing money from local entities, you're almost certainly not going to run into any trouble like that in Dubai. In practice Dubai is more libertarian than the UK; the government generally doesn't bother you or care what you're doing, as long as you don't get on the bad side of someone well-connected.
> in practice Dubai is more libertarian than the UK;
> as long as you don't get on the bad side of someone well-connected.
Thats a huge fucking caveat. given that the law is very much stacked in the favour of citizens, then if you do get into trouble, you're in deep shit fast.
Yep, but if you're moving from the UK you've probably got some kind of international business or clients so are unlikely to have much interaction with the locals. This is even formalised in the business system there; if you're not doing business with locals, you can open a free-zone company, which are much easier/cheaper to open, but restricted to primarily doing business with overseas entities.
It shouldn’t surprise me that people are unfazed by the fact that the UAE is built on labor by indentured servants with few rights and is rife with human rights abuses, but I suppose being “business friendly” trumps all if your top priority is avoiding taxes and accumulating wealth.
Arguably not. They both have pros, they both have cons and I can't predict the future.
But my intuition is, that on balance I can give my kids a substantially better life in Dubai. Safer, more sports, more languages, better school facilities. With parents less stressed but more motivated to work.
I think the picture of how the UK came to be what is today is a bit more complicated than just that take.
Are you ok with living in a country where the state has turned a blind eye to widespread grooming gangs?
Nowhere is perfect, to say the least. And my presence or absence has little affect on that. Labourers in the UAE are paid less than they would be in the UK, but more than they would be in their country of origin. And let's face it, the UK isn't giving them jobs. Is it better to give them low paid work as the UAE does, or better not to give them any work at all as the UK does? I don't think these ethical issues are simple, neither do I think there's one right answer.
>Are you ok with living in a country where the state has turned a blind eye to widespread grooming gangs?
Don't believe everything Elon Musk says.
I think the authorities were slow to go after some of these groups, perhaps in case they were perceived as being racist. But I'm not sure 'turning a blind eye' is accurate. People have gone to prison.
How did international student income drop with Brexit, when the UK now have 4-600k student visas granted in each of the last few years vs 2-300k pre-Brexit?
I’m not sure where you’ve got the stats from, but student visas granted dropped since 2022, acc to UK gov (-5% in 2023, -14% in 2024).[0]
Combined with universities' increasing reliance on international student income (over the last years) and issues accessing research funding, this can get universities into trouble.
Because universities borrowed staggering amounts of money and hired massive numbers of people.
The assumption was that international student numbers would be allowed to grow as fast or faster than in the past, ignoring the fact that the UK is not able to provide infrastructure for the people who live here let alone temporary inhabitants. There is no way to keep the bubble going (as with every bubble, for government and university administrators it just seemed unlimited because there are no limits to resources, dangerous).
Don't forget that the Universities focused on getting foreign students and cashing in instead of providing valuable education.
The quality of teaching is non-existent. It's about giving foreign parents ability to tell their peers look my brilliant child is studying in England! But really they are not studying. Attendance is not checked and lectures are a sham.
I TA’ed a course at my state university a few years back. We had some program that attracted hundreds of students from the UAE. Many were obviously from wealthy families and drove Mercedes and BMWs, etc.
The amount of cheating on exams and complete lack of effort on studying by the vast majority (+80%) was astounding. We were essentially hand feeding them to get them to learn the material.
The professor was very frustrated but (I presume) was told you can’t come down hard on them. They were obviously a huge income source for the university.
Reason #53 why modern university has basically become a scam.
This is such garbage. The only reason universities focused on getting foreign students is because the introduction of fees that don't increase with inflation means they are all slowly going bankrupt.
The funding squeeze is real, but that’s not the whole story. Universities didn’t have to turn into diploma/visa mills - they chose to. Instead of protecting standards, they pivoted to a business model of brand-selling: recruiting overseas students at inflated rates and cutting corners on teaching.
Domestic students end up with debt for degrees that deliver little value, often taught by underqualified lecturers. Those who complain get brushed off or quietly bought out with NDA-style settlements. Foreign students mostly keep quiet because openly questioning standards would devalue their own diploma.
So yes, funding cuts mattered - but the bigger scandal is how universities responded. They saw the “golden years” were over and decided to milk the brand, not safeguard education.
Actually, the Home Office / UKVI does require universities sponsoring international students to monitor attendance and engagement, and to report non-attendance. This has prompted many universities to formalise attendance tracking (barcode check-ins, attendance apps etc.), especially for visa-holding students. Whether they actually do it, is another question.
Yes, but it is not till quite recently that this implied formal attendance tracking of student attendance at individual lectures. For example, here is how UCL interpreted the requirements as recently as 2015:
AI produces code that often looks really good, at a pace quicker than you can read it.
It can be really, really hard to tell when what it's producing is a bag of ** and it's leading you down the garden path. I've been a dev for 20 years (which isn't to imply I'm any good at it yet) and it's not uncommon I'll find myself leaning on the AI a bit too hard and then you realise you've lost a day to a pattern that wasn't right, or an API it hallucinated, in the first place.
It basically feels like I'm being gaslit constantly, even though I've changed my tools to some that feel like they work better with AIs. I expect it's difficult for junior devs to cope with that and keep up with senior devs, who normally would have offloaded tasks to them instead of AI.
One thing about AI that I did not anticipate is how useful it is for refactoring though. Like if I have walked down (with the help of an AI or not) a bad path, I can refactor the entire codebase to use a better strategy in much less time than before because refactoring is uniquely suited to AI - if you provide the framework, the design, the abstractions, AI can rewrite a bunch of code to use that new design. I'm frankly not sure if its faster than doing a refactor by hand, but its certainly less boring.
If you have good tests and a good sense for design and you know how to constrain and direct the AI, you can avoid a lot of boring work. That is something.
It is, but again I'd caution that it will go and do things you don't want it to.
For instance, I've been working on an app recently with some social share icon logos in svg.
Whenever I get it to tweak bits of code elsewhere in the same file, 80% of the time it goes and changes those svg icons, completely corrupting some of the logos, curiously consistent in how it does it. Several times I've had that slip through and had to go and undo it again, at which point it starts to feel like the superfast junior dev you're using has malign intent!
I think this sounds a little like it's viewed through a lens of survivor bias.
If the UK had made a success of HS2 (difficult to imagine with governments in much of living memory, but let's sidestep all of that) then it could have been claimed, perhaps with some merit, that the UK was able to do something with rail infrastructure that the Swiss could never because they were hamstrung by their approach.
You might have a point if it wasn't for the fact that infrastructure projects in the UK generally cost more than our European peers.
The UK's inability to build is apparent everywhere – our extreme lack of house building, our lack of modern nuclear power stations, our sewage system operating beyond its capacity, poor national transportation, etc. If HS2 was an exception to the rule then I doubt there would be this much focus on it. HS2 is just the most costly and extreme example of the problems we face when it comes to major infrastructure projects.
It's a slightly mixed picture. Knife crime is one area that's been trending up for 10 years now. Shoplifting is at a 20 year high. Fraud is up. Firearms offences are roughly level.
But criminal damage is down. Of course, if you call the police for criminal damage, everyone knows they won't turn up and you'll just get a crime number, so unless you're claiming on insurance you're probably less and less likely to report it.
We shouldn't be aiming for London (with 200 phones stolen every day as it is) to reach the level of the worst European or American cities.
Assuming there are 9 million people in London, that means that 1/45,000 Londoners experience a phone theft on a given day.
We can then (very crudely) estimate the probability that a Londoner has their phone stolen over a ten year period:
1 - ((1-45000)/45000)^(365*10) = 0.08
So 200 phones a day translates to about a 8% chance of getting your phone stolen over a period of ten years.
I'm obviously not suggesting that the calculation above be taken too seriously. But it shows that 200 phones being stolen a day in a city of 9 million people is consistent with phone theft being a significant but not overwhelming problem.
(The adult population of London is around 7 million, and kids are obviously also victims of phone theft, so you won't get a radically different answer if you look at the population over a certain age.)
That number also doesn’t take into account the significant number of tourists that visit every year, which from what I can see amounts to around ~20 million people.
There's been a significant backlash against this and yet they're just extending it at every turn.
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