Whether it was the correct decision or not, it was done via a democratic vote. Now the leaders of the UK look to entangle the UK into the EU structure that is evidently against their mandate.
The current UK government was also elected by democratic vote, so they have a mandate that postdates the referendum.
You can argue their mandate is invalid due to the first-past-the-post system, but in that case the original decision to hold a referendum, and all subsequent governments that negotiated the terms of the EU exit are also invalid, since they all derived from first-past-the-post elections.
The current UK government have a mandate with regards to running the UK more generally, but leaving the EU was its own very clear message. There was a vote in 1975 to continue EU membership, and again in 2016 [1]. It very much feels likely something that should only be undone on another vote.
The vote was to leave or stay - there was no mandate for or against a specific relationship to the EU before even considering how drastically opinions have shifted since.
And there was considerable debate prior to the referendum within the Leave camp as to whether to go for a "soft Brexit" (close regulatory alignment) or "hard Brexit" (what the final deal ended up being).
Indeed parts of the leave movement explicitly used as an argument that a soft Brexit was possible, including explicitly airing the possibility of a Norway-style EEA membership. Given how close the result was, it's highly unlikely that there wouldn't have been greater support for a very soft option than for what we got.
I'd fully support a vote if rejoining was one of the options. It's pretty clear from polls that support to rejoin is far stronger than the support for Brexit was (in June, it was 55% for vs. 34% against, vs. 59% in support of a closer relationship and 20% against, and 29% supporting the current relationship).
But in the meantime it is also entirely unambiguous that there is a clear mandate for a closer relationship - the gap is so huge (much larger than the support for the current status quo ever was) that there's no real need for another vote for that and voters can punish parties that support it at the next general election.
> I'd fully support a vote if rejoining was one of the options.
Of course it would be, but people would need some kind of understanding on what basis that would be on.
> It's pretty clear from polls [..]
I think there is only one way to know for sure.
> But in the meantime it is also entirely unambiguous that there is a clear mandate for a closer relationship [..]
People of the UK do not hate Europe, but there is evidence to suggest that people of the EU do not view the people of the UK favorably [1]. But I think the point of sovereignty and cost is a big one.
It wasn't binding so the normal procedure and checks around a referendum could be ignored. Like disenfranchising the British citizens living in the EU.
It was just an exercise in testing the mood of the nation, don't you see? Just like a general election, if the electorate vote the wrong party, it is perfectly fine to just ignore the result.
The vote was non-binding due to the sovereignty of parliament [1]. It means that if a war broke out or the economy crashed, they would not be forced to continue at great detriment to the UK. But it doesn't mean that the vote was a mere suggestion - anybody who suggests such doesn't understand democracy.
Fair enough, the "advisory" nature of referendum in the UK does have clear reasoning that i wasn't fully aware of. However the idea of it being "advisory" was itself exploited, and used to make people think that Brexit would't happen anyway, even if the vote was to leave.
My suggestion was not that the referendum shouldn't stand because it was "advisory", but that there should have been rules applied around a referendum that could affect peoples lives so much. But, there are no such rules it seems, the majority in the Commons gets to decide that.
Which is why (almost a million?) British citizens in the EU were not allowed to vote, which doesn't seem very democratic.
And Europeans who were born in the UK and lived their entire life here.
It was a referendum of the the right sort of British citizen.
> However the idea of it being "advisory" was itself exploited, and used to make people think that Brexit would't happen anyway, even if the vote was to leave.
It could be argued also the other way, maybe people didn't engage or chose to continue because they were led to believe it wasn't possible to leave the UK.
> My suggestion was not that the referendum shouldn't stand because it was "advisory", but that there should have been rules applied around a referendum that could affect peoples lives so much. But, there are no such rules it seems, the majority in the Commons gets to decide that.
I think it was fumbled because nobody involved in enacting it were actually supportive of it, and the semi-permanent state (i.e. civil servants) were largely not in support.
> It was a referendum of the the right sort of British citizen.
I have more general thoughts about this, I think a country should be very careful about who or who can't vote.
Does that mean when a government is elected by a low turnout, that it is also not democratic? The current UK government was elected on a 59.7% electorate turnout [1], whereas Brexit was decided based on a 72.2% electorate turnout [2].
Democratic isn’t binary, it’s a spectrum. And I said it’s not a good example of a democratic vote, not that it is undemocratic. It’s closer to the undemocratic end of the spectrum. Though that turnout number is actually way higher than I remember, 70% is actually very high!
I don't know how it can be argued towards the undemocratic end of the spectrum, it was possibly one of the most democratic processes the UK has undergone in a long time?
If only there was a type of nation-wide poll that could be conducted to make such claims so strongly. Maybe we pick a single day, each side makes their cases to the people, and then they cast their choices to be counted. But I guess it can't be done.
Democratic vote which has since then been proved to be heavily influenced by the Cambridge Analytica campaign, so which probably did not reflect the actual opinion of the population. It was a manipulated vote.
I remember the UK government at the time spent £9.3 million of taxpayer's money to push a pro-EU leaflet out [1], not to mention a concerted effort from the news media. It's not as if there was not strong campaigning happening on both sides.
> Hardly seems to fit with the “we’re all in this together” argument.
It's a good job we offset all of our manufacturing to the likes of China, it's not like they have terrible environmental standards or share an atmosphere with us or anything. It's also a good job we closed our coking coal rich mines to import it from Japan instead [1].
I'm left in utter disbelief that any of this was allowed or condoned, it is nothing short of madness. The UK now finds itself in a position where it is incapable of doing absolutely anything.
Asimov appeared to feel uncomfortable with those who thought they were better than others because of their Mensa status, and some he states were typically right-wing. I am entirely unclear though how the claimed racist ideology of John Campbell Jr is related.
> I miss Isaac Asimov, and I miss the America that created him.
An America with a typically right-wing Mensa bias (and likely upper class society)? That's the America that the author misses?
> This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers, around 3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-cor, are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.
I was under the impression that there was still a trade export from TSMC to China [1]? Not to mention a near complete ban on ASML devices [2]? Maybe they exfiltrated a few chips into a lab, but can they really source production quantities?
> But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?
People using the same C1-Ultra core are struggling to get the same performance in applications where heat and power are important. It would be surprising if this is sustainable and not just a temporary boost.
> The Xring O3 will debut in the Xiaomi 18 Fold, the world's first foldable to use it, and the Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max, both launching in China in September 2026. Xiaomi also unveiled the Xring O100 AI chip and the Xring D100 smart-driving chip, the latter built to run models with up to 200 billion parameters locally, with commercial use planned for 2027. Reuters reports TSMC is producing the chips.
I guess we will find out very soon when Chinese customers get their devices. I don't know how they will even source enough LPDDR6 at reasonable prices.
For an OLED low-powered system, I use exactly this approach [1] [2]. The trick is to wake up, do some tasks, then go back to sleep until either a timeout or triggered by an event. The best approach so far has been the light sleep [3] which keeps some things up and running, but just sipping at the current.
I'm taking these learnings and applying them to an 5 inch e-ink device with an ESP32 to be a modern-ish PDA device.
Banksy is an establishment-approved protestor, they promote him regularly [1]. His artwork is regularly on display in galleries [2]. They could easily seize the works to pay for costs, but don't. His name is supposedly Robin Gunningham from Bristol [3], they could take him to court. The whole thing is ridiculous.
Designing/generating those assets is an incredible amount of work, it's the value-add on top of an engine that a game studio spends most of their budget on. Game reimplementations like this one get their own asset-sets sometimes, but it's rare and usually happens long after the game is working
Antenna design is a dark art, I like simple hacks like this.
> The two parts of the antenna are intentionally designed to create an omnidirectional radiation pattern without a pronounced directionality.
I worked on a project a while back to try to utilize this to detect the arrival direction of WiFi signals approximately based on received strength. Do this for enough base stations and you have a very crude positioning system.
As an individual this is mostly true unless you're touching broadcasting proper. As a business this is absolutely not true and noncompliance is a ticking time bomb that will bankrupt you.
As someone in Southern California who uses HAM, this is both true and not true. There's an older gentleman who has already spent time in jail for sitting on frequencies without a license repeatedly. After he got out, he jumped right back on it. He's got tens of thousands if not more in unpaid fines, but as far as I'm aware they cant get blood from a stone.
Another anecdote, dozen or more years ago a friend had a fault cable modem that was spitting out radio traffic I assume on some important frequencies in a dense area. They got a knock on the door from an FCC team who were tracking the interference down.
2.4GHz is already incredibly crowded and prone to interference (in urban environments). I remember once picking up emissions on a Bluetooth headset from a leaky microwave oven.
You can replace an inefficient (turns power into heat) antenna with a more efficient antenna which will then radiate more.
And some frequencies are regulated by effective radiated power, where they basically care about the strength of the signal in the strongest location, so a more directional antenna could push you over the limit.
I'm doing something similar, using the directionality of the antenna to turn an ESP32 into a high RPM gyroscope for use in a combat robot. Standard gyro chips top out well under 1000 RPM, and are much more expensive than an ESP32 board, plus the ESP can serve as the radio control link and brain of the bot at the same time.
cool idea. care to share more? my thought would be continuously measuring antenna impedance over time, and looking for a peak in this signal's spectrum near the rotation frequency. could also try with a photodiode (+ optional light source, or use ambient light) (this would be similar to an optical computer mouse), which i guess could be more directional, and thus give a stronger signal
Combat robots are more like RC cars than autonomous robots, the driver stays in control of the bot over a radio link. I use ESP-NOW, and get about 6000 packets per second from the transmitter to the ESP32 in the box, and each comes with radio link stats, signal strength and Channel State Information. Using autocorrelation on the signal strength gives you the rotation period, and using that you can establish a Phase Locked Loop to remove the drift of integrating rotation speed to get absolute rotation angle.
Whether it was the correct decision or not, it was done via a democratic vote. Now the leaders of the UK look to entangle the UK into the EU structure that is evidently against their mandate.
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