I live in the UK. Patient confidentiality is protected by law - medical personnel cannot share personal information unless the patient gives explicit consent (with some latitude when someone is incapacitated and has a spouse/next of kin)

However there are some explicit limits. Medical professionals also have legal duties under Safeguarding laws; there is a professional and legal requirement to divulge information if it is necessary to protect the patient or other people from harm. If someone confesses to a crime it can be shared if there is a risk to other people (e.g. child or domestic abuse being sadly common examples). It's on a case by case basis; it would be a breach of patient confidentiality to share a confession if no one is at risk of harm. But where you draw the line is difficult - there is established case law that confidentiality can be breached "in the public interest" which is very subjective.

But it's obviously very subjective territory - if someone confesses to a murder 20 years ago, should you share it? You could argue that there is a risk that someone who has murdered may murder again, but you could also argue that there is no actual reason to suspect they would commit further crime especially if they're dying. It's also "in the public interest" to investigate murder and convict someone, especially if it prevents someone else from being falsely accused etc. It can be argued multiple ways, but most likely divulging that information to the police would be deemed an acceptable breach under the law.

One key part of all this is that a breach of patient confidentiality is a legal issue and the person &/or organisation (e.g hospital) can be pursued legally for the breach, including for compensation, and also via professional bodies for sanctions. So breaches can be pursued legally. So there is some recourse, but even if there is a breach, the information is still legally admissible in a trial.

It's very complex and difficult to blanket say all information is 100% confidential. A lawyer is retained specifically to represent someone under the law, so a 100% confidentiality makes sense. A doctor or nurse is there to look after someone's health, but also has responsibilities to the population at large, so confidentiality comes with caveats as you're balancing the safety of the one patient against other unknown people.

• Su = Switch User / Substitute User; it allows you to run a full shell as another user. It can be any user, but if you don't specify then it'll open a shell as the root user with its elevated privileges. It allows you to do everything the root user can while that shell is still open, until you exit.

• Sudo = SuperUser Do; it allows you to run one command with elevated privileges as the root user. Once it's done the command it usually then ends. You can actually also launch a full interactive shell with sudo -i but it's not really used much as it's easier to just type su and use that tool instead.

• Doas = Dedicated Openbsd Application Subexecutor (seriously). It's an alternative to Sudo that originated in Openbsd that also allows users to run a command with elevated privileges as the root user. Doas can also be used to open a full shell like Su (e.g. doas -su Username). Its code is smaller and tighter, and is seen as more secure than Sudo. It also has much more straight forward configuration. It's newer than Sudo, so although Doas is in theory better, Sudo is the default widely used tool across the vast majority of Linux.

Yeah, Sudo has been around for ages and is in pretty much every distro. So Doas just hasn't really taken off due to inertia. You can install it yourself in many distros, but people tend to default to what they know. I'm not sure if any linux distros default to it. Also tutorials all over the internet use "sudo" so it kinda embeds it more as THE tool.

It's similar with a lot of the core GNU utilities. For example "ls" lists directories and it's everywhere, but there are actually better written newer alternatives. They just aren't as widespread because people tend to use the GNU utilities together. I personally like eza for example.

EDIT: Just to be clear; Sudo is NOT one of the GNU Core Utilities, but Sudo originated in 1980 according to wikipedia. Doas was released in 2015.

I don't think it's bad for what they are specs wise, with the current distorted components market. I do think however that the price is higher than what the target audience will be willing/able to afford to pay which is a shame.

It won't do as well as it should have; I hope that doesn't put valve off the concept. The idea is right, it was just very bad timing for this particular launch.

Honestly the entire UK government and public organisations generally in the UK should remove themselves from Twitter/X. Musk has shown clear disregard for the UK and it's laws, and has personally interfered in UK politics and issues.

I don't think UK public organisations should be giving any legitimacy to X by making it a useful resource containing their information. They should instead pivot to mastodon - which would help grow public service social media as a concept - and stay with the other big social media platforms.

But there needs to be better regulation of social media anyway, and if companies like X refuse to be regulated then ban them. We're too far into the social media hell-scape now to ignore the dangers of unchallenged disinformation and lies on platforms that have no incentive or interest to stop it. We just have to look at the USA itself to realise that is not where we want to end up.

I'm interested to know how legal their proposed work around to the EU rules that an EU airline has to be ">80% owned by EU citizens". It being in a holding company owned by 2 Europeans but actually somehow owned by a US Investment company seems very dodgy.

This article is weird - the headline reads as if it's a done deal, but the content reads that we're in the same situation: Burnham's side pressuring Starmer to step down, Starmer's side denying he's going to do so. So the news is actually just Burnham's side want Starmer to step down.

I generally like the Guardian, but the coverage over the Makerfield by-election and Burnham's aspirations have felt quite biased. They had 10 articles on the Makerfield by-election itself on Friday, and a lot of the themes seemed to be pushing an inevitability narrative of Burnham being leader.

The Guardian is usually better at separating editorialising from news, so I've been a bit disappointed in the coverage. I'm actually leaning in favour of Burnham but it feels like the Guardian focusing on an inevitability narrative is like it's trying to help shape the story rather than just report it. It's a left wing paper but it's not a good sign that it's blurring the lines between editorial and news.

This is a good summary.

I think whats missing is a lot of the hope being put into Burnham is by disillusioned Labour MPs, and may not reflect actual change.

Burnham is personally popular, but being Mayor of Manchester is generally an uncontroversial role: he can't raise taxes and he has limited power, but he can be noisey complaining about how the Westminster Government mistreats the north and also claim a share in the success for projects like the integrated transport system. Things people don't like in Manchester he can blame on Westminster.

While Burnham is a good communicator, he can't actually change the fundamentals for Labour in government: there is no spare money even after tax rises, the economy is growing slowly (or shrinking slowly factoring in inflation) which both severely limits what can be done. Many Labour MPs fear they will lose their seats in the next election, and can't see how to change things.

Burnham may be better at communicating how bad things are but I think realistically he will also become very unpopular, as the problem isn't the prime minister as much as the reality. "Manchesterism" as a political philosophy is fools gold.

I'd also add: Burnham chose not to stand in the last general election when he would have been a shoe-in as an MP. He has instead had to gamble now to become an MP as he's seen an opportunity to become PM. While is gamble paid off, I'm not sure that shows very good political judgement, and may be a warning about what's to come.

It's a gold rush which will have consequences a few years down the line. The data centre market will get saturated, and with a probable collapse in the AI market thats driving this (particularly given the "winner takes all" approach all the players are following) and associated massive duplication of data centres running different AI models for different companies, it's likely to be a collapse, not a soft landing.

Hardware companies investing in expanding their output to service the data centres demand will be over producing once the market swings the other way. Expect prices to collapse and some of these memory producing companies to go bankrupt. This is another classic sign of a bubble: everyone thinks this will keep going and going, so they invest hard in having a chunk of it. But it will inevitably hit a wall - some AI companies will fail and their data centres become redundant, and the market overall will eventually swing away from endless expansion to consolidation. And thats best case scenario; more likely it a catastrophic collapse in which case the market is getting flooded with unneeded 2nd had product from data centres sold off during bankruptcy proceedings.

It's not a question of if the party will end, it's just a question of when. Even if people don't think the AI market will pop, the economics of building more and more data centres by unprofitable competitors in this market is unsustainable and has to end at some point. And the evidence is we're already well beyond the point of diminishing returns with current AI models in terms of scaling up.

So while times are hard right now for home PC users, I'd expect there to be period in the near future of oversupply and cheap components. This year? Next year? Hard to say exactly when but the writing is on the wall for the AI bubble imo.

Mastodon could do it; it would be in the interests of UK government (and other European governments) to embrace the Fediverse as a "public service social media". They could set up publicly run and maintained servers for the good of all citizens.

When the internet started it was shaped massively by Universities and public organisations, and in the UK things like JANET (the Joint Academic Network) really pushed it in the UK before it became mainstream, and continues to this day to underpin the education sectors internet infrastructure.

We've had nothing to help shape social media; but are well used to Public Servuce TV and Radia. The UK government and other public organisations have the scale to embrace the fediverse and help it grow by being a clear route to find public information updates, even if they are also choose to duplicate that information out onto other services like Threads / Bluesky or bigger platforms like TikTok and Facebook.

It's a real opportunity for governments to collaborate with open source projects in the name of digital sovereignty and independence from the US tech giants.

Nah they're not inherently grifts; they're pushed by grifters making money off the back of them.

I think Lemmy users are more likely to call these grifters out for what they are, because the user base has proportionally more technically minded people who understand what the technology is. Lemmy users have to an extent self-selected themselves into the fediverse. On other social media the absolute number of technically minded people will be higher but the proportion of technically minded people is much lower, so the voices are drowned out by those who don't understand he technology and it's limitations. And of course the grifters target those platforms with a lot of propaganda, because ultimately it's about selling shares and inflating share prices.

Anyway to answer you question, CRISPR gene editing is revolutionary and will have major impact. Nuclear Fusion despite it's slow emergence will also be revolutionary. Immunotherapy is an ongoing revolution; it's not a quiet revolution but it's also not getting the general focus it probably should be as AI appears to dominate the current zeitgeist.

We are actually living through extraordinary times; AI is a part of it but AI seems to be the bit getting most of the attention because we're in the middle of a stock bubble driven by AI speculation.

Yeah, I had Office 2010 and used that for years - probably up to 2022. It allowed installs on 3 devices at a time, and included Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I only switched to Office 365 when my work made it freely available, and I have it set up inside a windows VM on my Linux desktop for the very rare times I need to use office at home. Work are paying for all the redundant tools no one at work uses - like copilot. Don't see it as my problem.

But I can't recommend Office 2024 when it costs £120 for a license with online activation and install restrictions to one PC. Not when the alternative Libre Office is free, unlimited installs on all devices, and does everything a home user would ever need. Joplin is also a superb alternative to One Note.

I personally would never buy another version of Office; I have libre office installed and use that for my personal documents (like my budget spreadsheet and occasional word processing) and Joplin for my notes. And while Libre office doesn't have integrated cloud storage, all you need to do is add your preferred cloud storage system to your file manager in Linux or Windows.

Office 2024 doesn't really offer a good value proposition. And if you're really in the market for Office, then ebay to get valid licenses for Office Professional Plus 2019 or 2021is better value; £40 for the full suite (inc Access, Outlook, Publisher) is far better value than a direct license from MS for 2024. But it's just a product key card, so there is always the risk a license and access to downloads gets revoked eventually.

Poor Google, demoralised when another monopoly says it's not going to break into it's monopoly.

But fortunately Google used it's search monopoly to aggressively push Chrome, and now all that data that Microsoft used to scrape, Google now does.

Happy ending for the monopoly.

The big difference between distros is really how they build their distro and for what ends. Some distros are "general purpose", some are focused on specific roles/tasks like gaming or programming or servers, some are about stability, others are about cutting edge features. And you also have different underlying design philosophies - OSS vs proprietary, or Ext4 vs BRTFS, or Immutable vs mutable, pre-packaged vs build yourself.

So yeah, distro choice really does matter. The wide range of choices don't exist because people are being contrarian; they exist because linux can be shaped to different purposes and goals.

But I think the message to new users is also correct: distro choice doesn't matter much if you're starting out and just want a basic desktop environment. Whats going on in the backend or the design philosophy of the distro doesn't change the experience for most end users doing day to day tasks. A KDE or Gnome desktop environment with Firefox will feel the same, and gaming or word processing will be largely the same. It's when you want to go beyond generic use that the distro choice starts to matter..

Have you tried Scribus? It's a good open source alternative to Publisher and if it meets your needs it could spare you having to do a lot of faff around trying to keep Publisher going into the future.

But I get wanting to stick with something familiar. It's unlikely you'll lose access to Publisher in the short term. But I'd consider moving to something else now so you're not scrambling should Publisher stop working for whatever reason.

So there is a key message in this article which heralds big problems for the AI bubble: AI is being commoditised. I.e. AI users are no longer just going for the biggest/best model overall but instead looking for the "good enough" models for specific uses.

This matters because the entire AI speculative boom has been predicated on the idea that the AI industry is not a commodity but a monopoly in waiting like Search or Social Media - one winner will take all, and so investors are betting heavily on their picks to be The One. But instead it looks like AI is more like a commodity - it will instead be a market of many players, with specalised models and differing levels of sophistication for different tasks. In that world, there isn't going to be a "one winner takes all". Instead there will be choice, and people will go for the cheapest model that is "good enough" for the task at hand. Do you need the most cutting edge expensive model to proof read an email?

The crazy valuations of big AI companies was already a problem even if the idea one winner takes all was even correct. It would have meant investors were speculating on huge rewards for backing the right horse, and inevitably many investors were going to lose out as only one horse can be the winner. Everyone of course believes that their company is The One, and everyone else will be the ones that take the hit - typical of a bubble like this. But if AI is a commodity, then no investors are going to strike it super rich as no one company will be dominant and essentially print money for them in the future. So what you have a load of massively over-valued companies that will instead be bit-players in a big market, and never reach the income levels that justify trillion dollar stock floats.

It's not dissimilar to the dot-com bubble. The Internet didn't go anywhere but the first speculative investors were burnt hard when the bubble burst. Other companies came along and built the world the first investors hoped to own. It's looking like AI is going to same way - there won't be one Google dominating everything, instead there will be lots of failures like boohoo.com or pets.com or go.com.

I think we'll see the big companies like OpenAI and Anthropic rush quickly to get their floats done, because sensible investors know now is the time to cash out. Float the company, quietly sell your shares and let others take the hit as it all comes crashing down.

This is interesting, thanks for sharing. I think I even know the post you're talking about that inspired this - was it in the thread where someone was asking why OSS companies don't migrate away from Github, and someone responded that a lot of OSS projects are actually commercially run and don't really care about Microsoft owning Github?

I think your post is a good counter point in a sense that the relationship between OSS projects and corporate interests is complex and has always been there. The opportunity for GNU & Linux was born out of the corporate shenanigans you mention, even if corporations are heavily involved in both now.

I think the original poster was kinda right to highlight that OSS isn't really as egalitarian and hobbyist as some people like to paint it. But OSS software and projects borne out of the post BSD era did chart us on a much more collaborative course, and the licenses that evolved from that era have also limited the abilities of companies to dominate or abuse OSS completely. Far from perfect of course, but one of the many interesting "cause and effect" actions that have helped to make GNU & Linux, and many other associated open source projects become what they are now.

A few reasons. One is there isn't much flat land; most of it is hilly and even mountainous and covered in thick forests. The flat areas are occupied with farms and towns but the space is small and not enough for big cities to grow. The hills and mountains are heavily forested and there has never been a big enough population to need to encroach on them. It's also not great for building and farming, unless grazing animals.

The other big reason is there are no natural deep sea ports in that region. It's either marshy or the estuary of the river Colombia. Small fishing towns would be fine, but not big industrial ports that drive city growth (or did in the past). Meanwhile, Portland sits further back up the river with plenty of flat land and access to the water, so makes a natural port. And Seattle sits on the bay further north and is coastal, and a good port.

The dynamic got set up of big cities further back, and those areas never really grew. Once the land became part of state forests, then that restricts growth even more.

EDIT: Here is a topographical map showing in blue the flat land: https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/world/?center=38.54817%2C-119.79492&zoom=6

The headline is a little misleading: the feature has disappeared from consumer chips but AMD is not responding when asked why. As the article itself says: it's not clear if this is a deliberate decision, or a bug that has caused this issue.

The headline implies it was a deliberate action. Maybe it was, but at the moment we don't really know. But it is good that Toms Hardware is writing about this and drawing attention to this issue. It's concerning regardless of the reason, and it's also concerning how cagey AMD is being about addressing this issue.

It's a bit of a dumb "gotcha" question to be honest.

Name 3 Indian people right now? Name 3 Russian people right now? Name 3 Argentinian people right now?

Most people don't have a list of go-to names in their pockets based on nationality. And people in Europe will be much more familiar with other Europeans, and also Americans because we're inundated in coverage.

I'm British with Irish heritage and I'm struggling on the spot to name 3 Irish people alive right now, yet I see a lot of Irish comedians, actors, musicians and TV shows on British TV.

It's a specious argument that the question reveals what it purports to. Instead it reveals people are shit when put on the spot, and especially the further outside their day-to-day familiarity you go.