chebe | Network

Christmas Eve dog walk
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

1. The seven reasons why reversing Brexit won't happen (at least neither quickly nor easily): (tags:UK Europe doom trade )

I called them back at 7:00. Got through to someone helpful who has given me the location of a pharmacy that we're going to visit first thing tomorrow morning, who have been instructed to help us.

No idea why that didn't happen the first time!

andrewducker

I am an idiot who forgot my blood pressure medicine when I came down to Devon to see my parents.

So this morning I went in to the local pharmacy. Who can't help me because NHS England and NHS Scotland are two different organisations. But they told me to call NHS 111 and ask them for help.

NHS 111 said "We don't have anyone available who can prescribe, call us back after 6:30PM, or talk to a local GP as "Unregistered or Temporary Residents". So we went in to my dad's GP and they said "We don't help in that situation, go talk to NHS 111, they'll help you." - which would seem to leave me in an endless loop.

Just in case, I called my GP surgery in Scotland, who said that they can't prescribe in England.

At which point, as nobody is considering this very important, I think about the only options are to either call back after 6:30 tonight or to just do without for a week. Which, having checked online, doesn't look like a great idea.

Edit: I called them back at 7:00. Got through to someone helpful who has given me the location of a pharmacy that we're going to visit first thing tomorrow morning, who have been instructed to help us.

No idea why that didn't happen the first time!

andrewducker

1. New wave of fake stories about curbs on personal freedoms and bogus taxes rack up millions of views on social media: (tags:AI fraud disinformation socialmedia doom )
2. Scottish bus journey times being 'killed by congestion' in cities: (tags:buses Edinburgh Scotland transport )

andrewducker

7 days ago was our earliest sunset (15:37)
7 days from now is our latest sunrise (08:44)
Today is our shortest day (6:57:37)

I am looking forward to the return of the light.

andrewducker

Someone set up a bot to process a year's worth of Hacker News submissions/comments and generate an amusing summary, complete with a personalised XKCD. And, frankly, it did a great job.

"The Legacy Defender General"

A seasoned architect who spends their days patrolling the wall between actual engineering and unsustainable AI hype while desperately trying to keep their Windows 10 box alive until the heat death of the universe.
You are the only person on the internet who still remembers what a build script does and why we shouldn't let LLMs touch them without adult supervision.

Roasts

🔥 You have the energy of a man who would rather spend four hours debugging a custom Git hook than thirty seconds clicking a button in a GUI.

🔥 Your posting history is just a very long, very polite scream into the void about how AI is basically just Accenture in a trench coat.

🔥 I haven't seen someone this committed to public transport and vertical taskbars since the last time a Linux kernel developer got stuck in an elevator.

Predictions 2026

🔮 The Great Migration - You will finally buy a Steam Cube after your Windows 10 machine starts emitting a high-pitched whistle every time you open a browser tab.

🔮 AI Realization - You'll post a 4,000-word manifesto titled 'I Told You So' after an LLM successfully deletes a production database using a build script it 'hallucinated' was optimized.

🔮 Local Hero - You will be appointed the unofficial 'Minister of Trams' for Edinburgh after submitting your 100th link about geoblocking and public transport network maps.

🔮 Rust Awakening - You will successfully convince a junior developer that Rust is 'woke' but only because it respects the personal space of memory addresses.

(If you're on HN, and the site hasn't been melted down from demand yet, you can get your own here.)

andrewducker

9 years ago I bought Bloodborne as one of my first Playstation games.
I was rubbish at it.
I'd play for a bit, get stuck on Father Gascoigne, go play something else, come back two years later, repeat.

Today, having not played Bloodborne for months, I thought I'd give the fight a few goes through, to warm up on the game again. It took me at least ten minutes of wandering about to remember what the buttons did.

And then I beat him first time, without it even feeling that hard.

I made mistakes, I nearly died twice, and I'm not sure I *deserved* the win, but for the first time he felt clumsy, and like he was giving me space to breathe, and I wasn't panicking all the way through the fight.

And now I get to play the other 90% of Bloodborne.

(I'm now trembling quite a lot, as my adrenaline levels drop back to a reasonable level. If you'd like to see what the fight looks like, for someone rather better than me, here's an example).

andrewducker

1. Combining over 650 "Greatest Comic Book" lists to find the critical consensus on the 200 Greatest Comics of All Time: (tags:viaLinkMachineGo comics recommendation )
2. Jury trial reforms: How did the court backlog get so bad?: (tags:uk law austerity )
3. Facebook tests £9.99 monthly subscription for sharing more than two links: (tags:facebook business )
4. Heart and Kidney Diseases, plus Type 2 Diabetes, May Be One Illness: (tags:heart disease diabetes )
5. Christian couple who believe homosexuality is 'wrong' blocked from fostering children (case went to the high court): (tags:bigotry adoption LGBT UK religion )
6. 2025 in polls: (tags:uk polls politics )
7. £100 UK contactless card limit to be lifted from March: (tags:uk money Technology )
8. YouTube bans two popular channels that created fake AI movie trailers: (tags:youtube ai trailers fraud )
9. How Dinosaurs Thrived in the Snow: (tags:dinosaurs snow weather cold )

andrewducker

1. Looks like the BBC are bullying people out unless they're bigots: (tags:LGBT bigotry BBC OhForFucksSake )
2. Analysis finds "anytime electricity" from solar available as battery costs plummet: (tags:electricity solarpower batteries )
3. Twins reared apart do not exist (The shaky science of genetic determinism): (tags:genetics twins iq history psychology )

andrewducker

About a month ago Gideon watched a bunch of videos about Minecraft, asked if he could play it on her tablet, got a few pointers from me to get him going and then dove in and started building stuff. At an impressive rate considering that he can't read any word more than 4 letters long.

Yesterday I mentioned Minecraft to Sophia, and she showed interest, so I set her up on my desktop and she got stuck in. She's asked for more help than Gideon has, but has been happily building herself an underground house. And just now I wanderd into my office to see her on the desktop and Gideon sitting on the floor with his tablet, with the two of them intermittently showing each other cool things that they'd found.

So tonight, after they're asleep, I'm going to set them both up for online play, and rent a realm*, so that they can be in the same world with each other.

*I am totally willing to pay £3.99 per month to not have to maintain my own server.

andrewducker

1. How Screen Time Affects Childhood Brain Development: (tags:brain children funny screens )
2. Four reasons why the UK is already at war with Russia: (tags:Russia UK war )
3. Looking Back at the Work of John Varley, 1947-2025: (tags:scifi obituary )
4. Dating a man who's most likely autistic: (tags:autism relationships )

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
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Curious thoughts

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A long awaited victory

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Life with two children: Renting realms

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