So a random person on Reddit claimed there’s about 800 million possible uk mobile numbers, some people have multiple numbers so ballpark 80 million active phone numbers. This gives around a 1:10 chance of picking an active number at random. If there’s actual patterns in the numbers this could be even more likely.

What’s interesting is this won’t have been a realistic sounding number.

Company lines typically start 0300 or 0800 but mobiles are 07… Something.

So if it was just hallucinating, it did so badly.

This was a deciding factor for me choosing to get Thermoblock rather than a boiler. I keep it on the counter ready, so there’s no unpack time.

By the time I’ve ground the coffee the machine is warm and ready to go, and I use a distributor rather than a tamper because it’s less fuss and I don’t notice a difference.

Espresso takes around 30-40 seconds including grinding, steaming milk another 70 seconds but this can be done at the same time. So maybe 90 seconds plus clean up.

Across Europe there’s different recommendations in every country, and no evidence of different illness/mortality rates related to the recommendation.

France says tap water is safe for all ages.

If you’re in the US, I totally get why you might want to keep boiling your water, but remember that boiling doesn’t remove lead.

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America doesn’t have a mainstream left party.

It has a status quo party (Democrats) and a fascist party (Republicans).

Clearly the status quo sucks for most Americans, so they’re more tempted by fascist alternatives.

It being undemocratic is actually pretty important for the system to work.

Because only the house of commons is elected they have legitimacy and the house of lords knows that while they can resist some dumb crap, they do ultimately have to accept the decisions made there.

If you have two elected houses you end up like the US with the senate blocking everything the house of representative does.

A more representative second house with less rich people and politicial cronies would be nice though.

Tariffs don’t work for service roles.

Anything where the output of the job isn’t physical, e.g. writing code, designing something, answering a phone, is super hard to track.

This is actually why the US seems to be running a trade deficit with so many countries. Companies like Google, Meta and Amazon take money from all over the world in exchange for services like advertising, and then it eventually gets spent on goods from other countries.

If LLMs just copied stack overflow they’d respond to every question with “Closed as duplicate. Question already answered.”