It is being pedantic, the others are talking about Amiga games when they say "the Amiga struggles". While the video output was always 50/60Hz, there were plenty of games that failed to update at that rate, taking 2 frames (25/30Hz) or 3 frames (16/20Hz) or some jittery janky mix inbetween.
It could be that what they wanted to do just couldn't be done in 1 frame. Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
Compare games with perfect framerates like Turrican 2, Superfrog or Leander, with games that don't, like Magic Pockets, Xenon 2, Driller. In fact, compare the official version of Stunt Car Racer with the cracked version, where the crackers massively improved the drawing speed and thus the framerate!
"Non-interlaced" is just sending the same line for both fields, "interlaced" is sending different lines for each field. You can update your "non-interlaced" screen at 50/60Hz and the viewer will see movement, because it's transmitted for both fields. If you were updating just one line of an interlaced screen at 50/60Hz, it would only be transmitted every second field, so the viewer would perceive 25/30Hz movement.
For high-resolution monitors, Commodore and 3rd parties offered a "flicker fixer", which took the raw output, buffered both fields in its own RAM, and re-emitted the combined image as a single frame.
No, there is actually a difference between an interlaced and non-interlaced signal. A non-interlaced signal has an integral number of lines per field without the half-line that an interlaced signal would have. With a non-interlaced signal, a classic CRT will scan all of the fields with the same alignment instead of interleaving even/odd fields vertically. There was a definite visual difference between a non-interlaced mode and an interlaced mode repeating the same screen for both fields.
It’s worth noting that this is not actually explicit in the standard so much as it is just a natural consequence of not including the half-line. Since the raster is continually moving across and down, including during all retraces (until the actual blanking pulses reset them), the presence of the half-line means that the horizontal retrace doesn’t reset at the end of the half line, it just continues scanning horizontally while the vblank pulse resets the vertical deflection to the top of the screen. Similarly, all scan lines are actually very slightly tilted down on all CRTs unless there is compensation for it. The vertical deflection is consistently moving across the length of the horizontal trace.
Edit: if you have a set that is miscalibrated or worn out, you can end up actually seeing the retrace lines during what should be blanking
The Amiga had a great trick. Both the CPU and the display/audio hardware share the same RAM (called Chip RAM), so they have to arbitrate for access to it, through a chip called Agnus, which prioritises who gets to read/write memory, depending on importance. You can starve the blitter, you can starve the CPU, but you can't starve the audio or video or disk I/O. As the 68000 CPU only needed memory access every second clock cycle, the Amiga designers arranged it so that the custom chips preferred odd cycles and saved the even cycles for the 68000. So your 68000 runs at full speed.
But if you need more and more work done by the custom chips, it starts to rob some of the even cycles from the 68000.
If you have a 16-colour lowres screen (4 bitplanes), Denise (the chip that turns RAM values into video signals) only reads display data on odd cycles. But if you add another bitplane for 32 colours, she needs some of the even cycles. If you add another bitplane for HAM or EHB mode, she needs even more.
In hires mode, it needs twice the bandwidth for twice the pixels. So if you have a 4-colour hires screen, it only needs odd cycles and the 68000 is full speed. If you go for 8 or 16 colours, it starts slowing the 68000 down.
This is why the default Workbench screen is 4-colour hires. It's hires to look nice and professional like an IBM, and not like a kid's toy like the Atari ST's default lowres GEM interface. It's 4-colours to show it's colourful and not black-and-white, but it's not 8- or 16- colours because that would nearly halve the speed of the CPU !!!
> This is why the default Workbench screen is 4-colour hires. It's hires to look nice and professional like an IBM, and not like a kid's toy like the Atari ST's default lowres GEM interface
The Atari ST had a professional resolution of 640x400 monochrome with a 70hz refresh rate. The Amiga had a 640x200 resolution non-interlaced, or a 640x400 interlaced which was basically a kid's toy.
It was nice of the ST to offer a special black and white screen mode on a custom monitor. The Amiga had the memory bandwidth to offer the same, but chose to only offer PAL/NTSC and no other custom video signals at launch, probably to avoid making its display chip even more complicated.
The Amiga had a "professional" resolution of 1008x1024 PAL or 1008x800 NTSC, 4-colour greyscale with a 15Hz refresh rate via its A2024 monitor (which effectively sampled 4 screens worth of video output and stitched them together).
You could also buy a "flicker fixer" (later included internally in the A3000) which gave you full colour 640x512 at 25Hz or 640x400 at 30Hz if you didn't like interlace.
But different strokes for different folks. The Amiga distinguished itself by being easily genlockable to video and having a 4096 colour palette and 21kHz 4-channel 8-bit sampled sound replay in 1985. The ST distinguished itself by having MIDI ports and a choice of either monochrome monitor, or the TV (or a colour monitor based on NTSC/PAL) if you wanted to do anything in colour. It found its niche in controlling other musical devices.
But the ST did have a garish green low-res desktop by default.
I never knew anyone who used the ECS "productivity" modes. That would've required an expensive multisync monitor since other Amiga stuff would still need the 15 kHz support. The only useful feature of ECS, as far as I can recall, was support for additional chip RAM.
Later Amigas also supported VGA monitors with 31kHz horizontal refresh rate, with just a passive adaptor.
I used a VGA monitor with my Amiga 1200 up until I switched to PC, and a tweaked video mode with 704×520 pixels.
If you wanted to play games on an Amiga or an Atari ST you needed to use a TV-signal compatible 15kHz monitor or a Multisync monitor.
I ran desktop programs in 640×200 mode with four colours on both my ST and my Amiga 500 before I upgraded.
There were also "flicker fixer" add-ons for the Amiga, converting the interlaced modes to VGA signals: one was built into the Amiga 3000.
I so wish we could go back to that convention, rather than the silly '0x' convention. Every language I write in my head (and there's been a bunch) uses that.
Was all this engineered and then implemented, or did they play it by ear? Seems very complex for the time. Now with Pis and ESP32s one can just cobble up together whatever Frankenstein with off the shelf parts, but this seems very elegant with bespoke chips, sans 68000. This is way way way over my head, but intellectually intriguing.
Most of it was architected before implementation, The timing was a pretty core part of the system, I believe the intention was to give every machine some fast RAM that had a CPU only bus, but that fell to budget demands. You could still get a memory expansion which the CPU would have all to itself. There were a few details that were late tweaks, and there were a whole bunch more that could have been easy additions at implementation time if they had known at the time what we knew after 20 years worth of demo coding on the Amiga.
A lot of the features of the Amiga came from exactly that form of hindsight with the 8 bit machines. The Copper, sprites being arbitrary height, and display addresses being 'live' rather than top-of-frame initialisation values came from seeing programmers of the 8-bit machines finding tricks to undo much of the fixed function behaviour so they could reuse sprites or trick the display RAM fetch to suddenly jump to another place. The Amiga came with a lot of that automatic behaviour removed and then performed by the copper allowing for low level coders to just access the core behaviour instead of trying to trick the hardware into doing it (like the way you remove borders on the c64)
That's likely to end up Balkanized like the fediverse, where every instance has a list of other instances they refuse to federate with, often because politics or petty drama. Though to be fair to the fediverse, sometimes it's because those other instances are full of child porn and most people just don't want to see that.
It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (https://mastodon.social/about)
A lot of such issues could likely be resolved by a better thought out protocol. There are certainly plenty of self righteous people who would refuse to federate purely on principle but more typically the issue is simply that one does not wish to be exposed to or traffic in any way the content in question. A well thought out self categorization system could largely address that need - you'd only need to refuse to peer with those who failed to apply it. AI also makes any such effort easier than ever.
weirdly enough that reminds me of wattpad and ao3, where wattpad uses much nicer sounding terms while ao3 uses as accurate terms as possible. (which makes ao3 seem more "degenerate")
If you want to follow some CP poster on nadeko.pw then you can ask your admin on tsundere.love to unblock it and he will probably just ban you for admitting you like CP.
Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything? Even warez sites have rules.
> Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything?
I'm not sure, but the OP was postulating that Forgejo instances could federate to solve the problem that the Dutch government runs its own instance to develop its software (including using AI extensively) but wants to engage with the wider community so is currently hosting things on Codeberg's centralised instance of Forgejo, and Codeberg's administrators hate AI.
Adding federation doesn't solve that problem, it just moves it one level up. To collaborate with the Dutch government, you either need to directly register on their site, or set up an entire copy of Forgejo, publicly hosted, so you can federate your one-user instance with them, or you need to find a different instance that someone else hosts, and be at the mercy of that instance's admins, who may be even more cruel and capricious than Codeberg's.
What I predict is a future codeberg.org/about saying
code.overheid.nl Suspended (slopfondlers)
And a future code.overheid.nl/about being full of dodgy Forgejo instances that host porn games
Federation is a people-problem, not so much the resource problem.
Mastodon servers defederate because the people (or rather, the admins, perhaps prompted by the users) of instance A don't want anything to do with the people (who toot at the discretion and policies of the admins) of instance B.
Codeberg's AI position, as stated and voted upon, does not mention resource usage at all. That's completely invisible from the discussion. It is exclusively argued against on accord of 1) unclear copyright ownership, and 2) users have no idea what's in the code, therefore it could be full of security flaws or harmful code.
So they would not want to federate with another instance that used a lot of AI-generated code, even if it claimed an open license, even if that federation caused little-to-no usage of their CI. They would fundamentally disagree with any other instance that allowed mostly-AI-generated projects. They would therefore block such instances, if federation was a thing.
Those are all problems codeberg doesn't want on its system. Allowing a codeberg user to comment on someone else's system wouldn't bring those problems to codeberg.
Why should a fallible, biased human “admin” be able to block an individual from communicating with another individual or group of individuals? This just creates weird social silos and echo chambers. It’s made worse because the people who choose to be jannies are often deeply broken people.
The Fediverse has the whole model backwards as a result of its design. Either individuals need to run their own instances, or identity needs to be completely ephemeral and flow through many servers as it does in Nostr. A Nostr admin can choose not to host data from a given identity, they could even use an identity whitelist, but users normally subscribe to multiple relays. In the end, the data gets through, while the relay admin can keep their own hands clean if they have a problem with the data.
Note that having this freedom does not preclude you from voluntarily signing up for blocklists. But this is an active choice, and it can’t be suddenly imposed on a set of users.
I have one with a spam filter that I control myself, not some BS like GMail who wants to decide for me. It’s well-tuned at this point and hasn’t given me problems.
If I want to, I can opt in to any number of spam blocklists. That’s kind of the point—it’s opt in.
Great! But why hasn't 2.0 installed automatically on all devices that already have F-Droid?
- go to F-Droid -> Updates. "Congratulations! Your apps are up to date."
- refresh the repositories. "Congratulations! Your apps are up to date."
- search directly for f-droid in apps. "This app was built for an older version of Android and cannot be updated automatically."
*facepalm* never change, F-Droid. You might not be able to automatically update the app because of Android API restrictions, but there's no reason your app can't tell me it knows there's an updated version I could be asked to apply manually, is there?
EDIT: it still says version 1.23.2 is "Suggested" even when 2.0 is installed. Perhaps this is a reason? Nonetheless, there's no setting to choose a different version policy, i.e. install 2.0 because it's newer, even if not "Suggested"
What does "Suggested" even mean? According to https://forum.f-droid.org/t/how-does-f-droid-suggest-a-versi... it's set manually by the person maintaining the metadata, which makes it even more of a facepalm if F-Droid are announcing 2.0 on their homepage but nobody set CurrenVersion=2.0 in their own metadata.
Reddit often contains completely made up but believeable bullshit, so I wouldn't cite anything you see there. Every single post or comment could be a creative writing exercise to gain karma or sow discord.
However, if you want hard evidence what that post was claiming, I can give you a real citation from 2018:
> A house linked to an "offensive" video showing a model of Grenfell Tower being burned on a bonfire has been searched by police. Six men [...] were arrested on suspicion of a public order offence and have been released under investigation. A video shared on social media shows a cardboard model of the tower being set alight by a laughing crowd.
> Basically, yes. [...] if you make offensive comments in your home and they are recorded and posted online, it might be possible that you could be prosecuted.
- people who saw the video and were offended by it are happy "something was done"
- the CPS is happy because they gott'im
- the courts are happy because they got paid double
- the guy accused of offending people is happy this multi-year ordeal where the CPS won't stop hounding him until he confesses his guilt is finally over
- MPs are happy they didn't need to change any laws no matter how unreasonable they were
All good, right?
Are we also going to spend years prosecuting someone who mockingly reenacts the sinking of the Titanic? Or is that somehow water under the bridge?
What is this country coming to when you can't post a social media video laughing at families from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, burning to death while saying "all the little ninjas getting it"?
It's political correctness gone mad.
> "By 2017, Grenfell Tower housed a remarkably diverse community. Up to 600 people lived in the building’s 120 flats, representing a rich tapestry of nationalities, ethnicities, and generations. Residents hailed from countries including the UK, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, among others." - https://grenfell.soton.ac.uk/week-1-who-lived-in-the-tower/
> "The Grenfell Tower fire inquiry "must not ignore" the impact of race and poverty on the disaster, a lawyer representing survivors has said. .. The inquiry returned this week after a four-month break due to coronavirus. "The Grenfell fire did not happen in a vacuum," said Mr Thomas in his opening statement. "A majority of the Grenfell residents who died were people of colour."""" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53320082
Yes, the video is offensive, racist drivel. But I respectfully put to you that the crux of the issue is not about what was said, no matter how awful it was; it's whether the state should have a role in controlling what private individuals share amongst one another.
The people in the video didn't upload it to a social media platform like Youtube, they wanted to keep it private to their friends. It would also have been taken down by the likes of Youtube. The only reason this case got to where it did is because the video ultimately reached a wide audience virally by people forwarding it on, and that enough of that audience didn't like it and wanted someone "done" for it, and the state obliged. But nasty, mean, dark, sick, racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynist and all other -ist jokes are told day-in, day-out, between people who like that sort of humour, no matter how much other morally righteous "right side of history" people want that not to happen. You can't stop them. You can only go after scapegoats if such things breach their usual boundaries.
Over 1,500 people died at sea when the Titanic sank, including black, Chinese, Jewish, Turkish, etc. passengers. It was an dreadful fate for each person, and it caused much grief for the victims' families and friends. I'm still going to joke about it, though. "How do you think the unthinkable? With an itheberg."
> "whether the state should have a role in controlling what private individuals share amongst one another."
The state has a century long history of answering that in the positive; under the Criminal Law Act 1977 a person agreeing with another person to do a crime is guilty of conspiracy to commit that crime[1]; section 5 talks about "the offence of conspiracy at common law" which it replaces, including when it does/doesn't apply to "conduct which tends to corrupt public morals or outrages public decency".Further back, the Offenses Against The Person act of 1861 says that encouraging, soliciting, or proposing to any person to murder another person is a misdemanour punishable by imprisonment for life[2].
AFAIK the UK doesn't ban the classic film The Towering Inferno which is about people dying in a burning tower block. The Titanic has no remaining survivors to be offended where the video here was <2 years after the Grenfell Tower fire, and your joke about the Titanic isn't mocking the dying, it's mocking the builder's hubris. So it's more about the "outraging public decency" part.
Even the most free-speechy places have arguments about what free speech is acceptable (classic example: yelling 'FIRE!' in a crowded theatre) and have ideas about free speech, with consequences.
I would rather the UK government had put that effort into earlier holding the tower management company to fixing the problems reported by the fire brigade and the Grenfell Action Group in the years before the fire, and knocking the Council for trying it silence that group for repeatedly reporting fire problems, and of course for the excellent business decisions to save money by using flammable cladding.
In this particular case, the IT consultant was owed money by a failing business, and he put 1) a picture of the business premises, and 2) pictures of him firing guns, on a website where he was sure the business owner would see it.
That's textbook intimidation, which in certain cases is a crime in the UK, and even some US states. You can also do it offline, for example, by sending a letter to the victim containing a photograph of the front of their house, and a photograph of you firing guns. The implication is pretty straightforward and doesn't even need to be stated: "I have guns and I know where you live. Pay me that money you owe me or I might use them." That implication is still there, for the victim, even if you add surface text like "Hey everyone look at these cool things!"
Only _after_ he was arrested, and the police went looking around his house for guns... did he admit that the pictures were taken overseas, he doesn't actually own the guns. And yet that's what the article leads with, like it was a known fact from the get-go and those silly-billy police knew that but went looking for them in the UK anyway.
This article is a great lesson in how to mislead without saying anything untrue.
His own words in a different article make the reason for the arrest clear:
> “The arrest was based on two separate social media posts,” he said. “One was the photo of myself with the shotgun, [...] And the second one was my LinkedIn banner at the top of the page.”
> “I used the photo my business partner took on his premises as a header photo on LinkedIn with the intention he would look at that and go, ‘Why’s this guy posting that? I’d better call him and find out rather than dodging me’ as it had done for months,” he said.
EDIT 2: for avoidance of doubt, he did three days in a row of LinkedIn blog posts, where
1) his PFP at the time (shown in the top-right corner) was a picture of the business premises
2) the text of the post talked about the "delinquent client"
3) the post ended with a no-context-given picture of him posing with guns
EDIT: and your second example is also dangerously misleading. Jason Arday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday) and/or his university reported 2 professors and 1 journalist to the police, pretending their requests for comment on his plagiarism were harrassment. For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech). What spiked the story is that Jason Arday and/or his university got very expensive reputation lawyers Carter-Fuck to send a C&D to the journalist's newspaper, promising expensive litigation if they published the story. That is what spiked the story, not intimidation via false harassment claims. Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
> In this particular case, the IT consultant was owed money by a failing business, and he put 1) a picture of the business premises, and 2) pictures of him firing guns, on a website where he was sure the business owner would see it.
From your own link, this was from 2 separate posts. I don't know man, this sounds like an excuse from the company to cause trouble and avoid having to pay the owed money.
Also the “website where he was sure the business owner would see it” is a cheap way to hide the fact that he posted on his on LinkedIn, which he used as his social media network. You can just say LinkedIn. We know what LinkedIn is.
Now imagine you owe this guy money, he's admitted in public that he put a picture of your business premises at the top of every blog post he makes on LinkedIn in order to get your attention, and his latest blog posts on the LinkedIn website therefore shows YOUR WORKPLACE and HIM SHOOTING GUNS.
Juxtaposition that he admits he wants you to see.
You can read all three blogposts. Note he has switched out the picture of the workplace (top-right PFP):
> I am disappointed that absolutely nothing has come back from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade (OR his Department) regarding my delinquent Client.. this is concerning as despite continuing to owe me
"delinquent client" who "owes" him and once again, picture of him shooting guns apropos of nothing, nothing explaining where he is, whose guns they are, just him shooting guns. Guess he just likes to shoot guns while talking about his "delinquent client" who "owes" him and he's put a picture of the delinquent client's premises as his PFP.
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
And again no-context gun photo to add to the blog post about his delinquent client
Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
I read the posts. He's obviously writing daily updates and posts and includes pictures from his travels.
The photos are obviously target shooting. This is a common sport in many countries.
Your argument is that because he wrote long daily updates about what he was doing and included two unrelated things, that he's implying that the guns are for those offhand remarks?
We get getting farther and farther from the real problem, which is that the UK police have been weaponized to respond to people's social media posts about how they make others feel. That's a ridiculously low bar.
He's made veiled threats with just enough room to say 'What? It's just some holiday photos' I don't think he should be prosecuted, but I'm fully on board with the old bill knocking on his door to say 'you're treading on thin ice, stop acting the cunt'
Nah, they should have looked at the complaint and realized that it wasn't an actual threat and that should have been the end of it. They shouldn't have charged the guy who complained with making a false complaint, but they should have told him there wasn't enough in those posts to do anything about. I don't doubt that guy was fucking with the company that owned him money, I doubt that he was actually threatening to shoot anyone. Police should absolutely not be knocking on people's door to tell them to stop being cunty on the internet. That's not their job (or at least it shouldn't be).
> Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
No, I don't understand why he would.
Nothing there was intimidation. Pretending it is intimidation is stretching crudility. The fact that he got arrested over this is straight up nonsense, IMO.
All the posts read like blog-style posts, and there wasn't any aggressive language used there at all. He also mentioned he was meeting with people to resolve the issue through legal means in the posts.
I suspect the owner who owed him money was acting maliciously.
More like "Here is a picture of an assault rifle that is clearly me on holiday because many of these guns are illegal in the UK."
Both the police and whoever claimed to be intimidated would/should have known better.
The problem whenever discussion of any of these subjects is that there will be people that are determined to pretend there isn't a problem in the UK with these laws when it is quite clear there is.
This is one of three days worth of posts where he talks about his "delinquent client" and ends with a picture of him and guns (with no explanation of why, where or how him and the guns are related to the body text). He put an image of the business owner's premises as his PFP in the top-right corner, which is now a picture of some people sitting in chairs. The business premises, "delinquent client" body text and gun photos appear on the same page.
Argh yes, context. I was wondering why the police were doing what they were doing. Police don't randomly do that to someone, there had to be a reason. Context is king.
Read the actual articles the person linked. The comment you’re replying to uses weasel words like saying “put them on a website” to conceal the fact that the “website” was the guy posting different unrelated things on his social media feed.
In the second case, the person involved was weaponizing the police against a journalist who had uncovered something about a completely unqualified university professor who had a fraudulent background story. The police didn’t do it “randomly”. The professor knew how to use the laws to intimidate and silence his critics (when even the GP comment admits).
Even the police later admitted they should not have gone as far as they did.
I did read the article, and my only takeaway was that it was missing context.
But I agree that the law is being weaponised by bad actors, but irrespective of that the police are duty bound to investigate. They take the blame too. It's one of the few jobs everyone else knows how to do better than the people doing it.
Could you elaborate on how he was “completely unqualified”? AIUI his PhD was cleared on any claims of. It being untoward. Maybe something I missed, of course.
The website, which is also his social media feed, is LinkedIn. Both the header image (of the ower's premises) and pictures of the owee shooting guns are on the same site. Hence the complaint of intimidation from the ower.
In the second case, once again you repeat your nonsense. The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself, did not put the journalist off publishing.
> Despite the thoroughness of my investigation, THE did not run the story. While I was personally disappointed, I understood; by this point, Arday’s solicitors had been in touch with THE and it was clear that the story could tie the publication up in months of expensive litigation. Even if we were right – and I stand by my reporting – it would have been ruinously expensive.
You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit. It was LAWYERS LAWYERS LAWYERS suppressing the story.
> You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit.
You're the only person in this thread using the phrase "chilling speech" and you keep admitting that they did.
Let me quote you on this topic:
> The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself,
> In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
These are all three your own quotes from this thread. The last quote isn't even accurate because the police DID take action in the form of contacting the journalist and telling him to desist.
I am in generally in favour of some sentiments you're expressing, but you're also wrong on the facts. If your facts are wrong, it harms everyone who shares your sentiments because you're arguing with verifiable bullshit.
You're trying to argue that Jason Arday held journalists at bay by reporting them for harrassment, therefore the UK speech laws are bad because they let wrongdoers avoid scrutiny by making harrassment claims against their scrutinisers. That is incorrect. There was only one journalist, and Arday held him off by engaging private lawyers. The harrassment reporting did not stop the journalist.
Arday falsely reported two people for harrassment to the Metropolitan Police, one professor in 2023 and one journalist in 2025. The (Devon and Cornwall) police declined to pursue the 2023 case. The (Metropolitan) police investigated the 2025 case for four months, then decided to take no action (no charge, arrest or caution). The investigating officer phoned the journalist to tell him the case was closed (they can do that). The fact that there had even been an investigation caused a chilling effect:
> But were my enquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
I'd say that even in the professor's case, it could've had a chilling effect. If the police had interviewed anyone related to the professor, there could've been leaks and/or career-stunting rumours.
The officer requested the journalist not contact Arday. That's overreach, and shouldn't have happened.
The head of the Metropolitan police admitted the investigation should not have even been started. That's not the law at fault, that's shoddy policing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
But ultimately, it did not "spike the story". That was 100% on the lawsuit. Both things are bad
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
Wait, this is the threat?
I'm bewildered this could be grounds for an arrest. That's pretty scary.
It's the combination of the paragraph about the 'delinquent client' and the picture of him pointing a gun which could be construed as an implied threat. I don't know if that would hold up legally, but in any case, no charges were brought in the end.
As to why the police did anything at all, the most likely explanation is that once the 'delinquent client' reported the LinkedIn posts, the Police saw a photo of someone using a shotgun who didn't have a shotgun license. Unaware that the photo was taken outside the UK, they probably decided that the combination of an unlicensed firearm and a possible implied threat was worth investigating.
Are you really defending Arday harassing journalists through the police and being overjoyed because just this time the police was not overzealous enough to arrest them (very likely they were fine only thanks to the huge media attention)? Unbelievable.
I'm not defending Arday at all. I'm pointing out OP's claims are bullshit. At no point did anyone "spike" stories because Arday called the police on them.
OP appears to claim that involving the police is the way to get journalists off your tail. It isn't, and it didn't deter either the professors or the journalist. The much more effective way to get journalists off your tail, which OP didn't even mention, is lawyers. But that doesn't let OP rage against UK laws so he went with the bullshit claim instead.
There was absolutely zero media attention at the time police processed Arday's complaint against professor David Harris, in 2023. They closed the complaint without taking action. The professor didn't even know he was being investigated. His colleague Martyn Hammersley then went over Arday's head straight to the faculty. So much for the police getting people off your case!
In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect and the police had no legal basis to direct him so. Again, this was long before any 2026 media attention.
It wasn't media attention that saved these people, it was that what they did wasn't illegal. The police shouldn't have given Arday's claims as much merit as they did, but no matter what Arday said, there was no evidence of crime there, it was never going any further than that.
Only once the deets about Arday were leaked by Cambridge faculty to Cofnas and he published them, and the media firestorm begain, did the details of the police phoning the journalist become known, and in reaction to that, the head of the police said that was clearly wrong and should not have happened: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
Well he's dead now in no small part because he was 100% correct that partisan activists amplified by friendly "journalists' would follow the usual playbook of creating a reality distortion field by repeatedly lying and republishing each others half truths and outright lies into a massive gish gallop.
Same question as always. What were the lies? Because all the ones I've seen were either found to be true or they were exaggerated versions of statements and then attacking that as a lie.
Especially rich to talk about habitual liars when it's a bunch of British press outlets and activists accusing others of being liars.
> 1 The Racism Of It All: It is not news when white men commit academic misconduct. It gets reported in a handful of stories, there’s a bit of media attention, but everyone quickly forgets about the problems.
> 2 Arday Was Definitely Guilty: The second point is somehow even more frustrating. Yes, Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys. Yes, the amount of scrutiny he received was obviously connected to the colour of his skin. But also, he definitely did plagiarize. And not just a little bit. His work is riddled with clear, obvious, and extensive theft from other published academic papers.
> You do not need to trust race realists or other unpleasant people. Just download the thesis and check for yourself. It is clear that a significant portion of the thesis was copied directly from other people’s work. This is not in doubt, it’s not in question, and the fact that so many people online are arguing that the plagiarism charges are false because a university said so is deeply depressing. It’s arguably the worst case of plagiarism I’ve ever seen.
> Whatever your thoughts on plagiarism, it’s clear that Arday’s work harmed very few people. As he himself said, “I didn't murder somebody”. If he hadn’t been a Black academic and a poster child for diversity at Cambridge university, we’d probably have never known his name.
> For some of Arday’s supporters, acknowledging that any of the media scrutiny was justified has become tantamount to siding with his “killers.” He is instead a martyr—the victim of a “lynching”—and the inconvenient fact of his fabulism must be tidied away from the virtual shrine. This is an emotional position rather than a rational one, and its very indefensibility makes it a greater demonstration of tribal loyalty. Insisting that the academic was completely innocent, in the face of all the evidence, sends a strong social signal that you hate the right-wing media and care about racism.
> The postmortem airbrushing of Arday’s story also ignores how that story twisted and turned while he was alive. When The Guardian confronted him with the implausibility of some of his tall tales, Arday responded by editing them in real time: Yes, he had once claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, an exceptional feat for an endurance athlete, but what he actually meant was that he took daylong rest breaks in between. Yes, he had claimed to have raised more than £5 million for charity, but actually this was with the help of “many fundraising collectives” whose participants he could not name because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
As they might say on Reddit, "Everybody Sucks Here". Arday the fabulist and plagiarist, the academic institutions who didn't vet him because they were razzle-dazzled by his bullshit lifestory (then drop him like a stone when their attempts to keep his plagiarism hidden don't work any more), the popular press who are happy to amp up a public shaming for clicks and views, the anti-woke and the racists who say this just confirms what they thought about DEI, and the anti-anti-woke and anti-racists who will deny the bleeding obvious if it makes them appear virtuous to their peers.
I mean, it opens with "It is not news when white men commit academic misconduct." then lists several cases where white men committed academic misconduct and made headlines in mainstream media around the world. Then walks that back with "This sort of massive media storm almost never happens for white academics".
Ultimately it's true that racists amplified the story, and once the story was positioned as being about race/racists that contributed (in part) to its longevity, but I don't see anything in that post to justify the claim that "If Arday had not been a young, successful Black academic, the chances that anyone would’ve looked into his work are low." and especially that "no one would’ve cared."
There was plenty of drama to fuel the media too. The accuser was suspended from the university where he worked, lawsuits were filed to try to bury the story, the police publicly apologized for harassing a journalist, new laws were proposed limiting the freedom of the press, statements were made by high ranking politicians and by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the accused committed suicide, there was a whole lot going with that situation way beyond the internal academic investigation about plagiarism and race issues. Of course it'd generate more mainstream press than say, a spider biologist who faked research data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pruitt (although that was a pretty big story in certain circles)
Step 1: put out the suggestion that the lies weren't lies
Step 2: don't read the responses
Job done!
EDIT: I'll give you one set of lies. Is it "exaggerated versions of statements" or you just didn't see them?
If I say I won the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing a cure for cancer, and I have no evidence of either, but I insist I did both and make up a lame excuse as to why you can't see my prize (it's away being washed today) or why you can't find my cure (the journal pretended someone else wrote the article because they're all against me, but trust me mate it was really me who wrote it) am I just making "exaggerated versions of statements" in your view?
> In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.
> The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.
> The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.
> He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.
> Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.
> In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.
> When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.
> When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.
> Arday had contacted the Met to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris after his plagiarism allegations and, because he was based in Plymouth, the case was handed over to Devon and Cornwall police. Correspondence seen by the Guardian confirmed that the force declined to pursue a case against Harris.
> Arday took no photographs of the bullet, the banana, the corrosive substance or the pig’s head. The only other people who saw any of the items were close family members, who told the Guardian Arday had shown them the bullet and the “poison”. Arday could produce no messages from the time in which he discussed any of the items with friends, family, colleagues or the police.
> There are many examples of prominent black figures being intimidated [...] But the abuse and harassment Arday has outlined would be some of the most extreme any academic has been subjected to in the UK. When Arday was asked about his claims by the Guardian, he stood by them. “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he said. “Why would I lie?” He would be jeopardising his career.
Every time I hear a story of "horrible abuses in UK where people get arrested for talking on the internet" it turns our they intimidated or scammed or bullied someone.
99.9% of the time I see this claim, it's right-wing Americans or bots trying to make the UK look like a hell-hole. They completely ignore the context surrounding it, and simply prefer to believe the claim.
No point even arguing with them, it's a lost cause.
> 99.9% of the time I see this claim, it's right-wing Americans or bots trying to make the UK look like a hell-hole.
Given you got the nationality wrong 2/3 times in this comment section and they weren't bot accounts either, you might want to adjust that number.
You got the political lean wrong at least once as well. This might be the time to adjust your worldview. Empirically it doesn't seem to mesh with reality.
I've seen the posts myself now and there wasn't any intimidation.
What seems to happen on these stories that anything that might be construed as a threat will be, to pretend there isn't a problem with the speech and online laws in the UK.
It very tiring to have people like those on this thread pretend there isn't a huge problem.
Your own quote clearly says it was “two separate social media posts”. The article I linked clearly says he was arrested for one count of stalking and another account of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
> A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and another allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.
You’re trying hard to link the two as “textbook intimidation” but the firearm post that triggered this was just a vacation photo and post about his vacation.
You’re being misleading by saying he “posted them to a website” without explaining that what you mean by “website” is that he posted them on his personal social media.
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
Incorrect to say the police “took no action”. They contacted the journalist and instructed him to desist. The police later admitted it was a mistake to pursue the case. It says all of this in the link you used:
> Arday made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, alleging harassment that was affecting his mental health; the police asked Grove to desist from further contact with Arday.[80] Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later said that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.[81]
It’s confusing that you’re trying to claim the police “took no action” when they admitted fault for following through with the complaint and they told the reporter to desist.
> Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
If the expensive lawyers are equal in the UK and US, then that’s not the important point of this story. It’s the part about him engaging the police and the police following through with it.
I also strongly disagree that it’s equivalent in the US. That expensive legal firm would be utilizing the maximum extent of the laws available to them in the UK, which includes the very harassment laws we’re talking about!
You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
> You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
It's not a UK speech policing policy issue, the topic of your post. The criminal law doesn't support Arday using false claims of harrassment to deter journalists.
You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue in terms of barratry / SLAPPs / cost of litigation / etc. No country, certainly not the US, has sufficient protection for whistleblowers against well-resourced litigants, and it is they (not the UK criminal law) who are successfully chilling speech.
Here's the full text of what you said. It's what we're talking about:
> There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
You don't mention the threat that civil lawsuits pose to speech at all. And yet it was the threat of a civil lawsuit that actually quelled speech here.
You have no evidence that action A ("he would report them to the police for harassment") led to outcome B ("to spike the stories").
Jason Arday did not spike any journalist's story by reporting them for harrassment. He, or his universty, did spike the story by engaging reputation lawyers. He could do that in almost any country, including the US, despite its stronger free speech laws. Unless a US state has an effective anti-SLAPP law, it is very likely all that is needed to shut people up is to threaten a lawsuit they can't afford.
The thing you want to be mad about -- the police unlawfully instructing a journalist not to contact someone -- is a bad thing, is not even legal (i.e. the UK state doesn't actually allow it, let alone condone it), and it had no effect on the journalist. They still wanted their story published. It was the private threat of a lawsuit that spiked it.
“Getting the police involved” is a lot less exciting in the UK compared to the US. Our police don’t have a nasty habit of getting scared in the dark and shooting anything that moves. Mostly because most officers in the UK don’t carry firearms, and the UK often struggles to recruit officers into firearms units because officers just don’t want to mess with guns.
As a result getting the police involved is often little more than a slightly awkward chat at the front door where the officers politely ask you to stop being arsehole, but everyone knows the police are a bit limited in what they can actual do. Either because no crime has actually been committed, or because they don’t really have the time to properly investigate even if a crime had been committed.
Actually getting arrested takes some effort. The police really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and mess that comes afterwards if they can avoid it.
> arrested on... another [count] of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
> > arrested on... another [count] of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
> That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
Isn’t that literally what the quote, which was from the article, says? It didn’t contain the word “count”. You added that. The quote says he was arrested on suspicion.
I'm pretty sure the general cinema-cartoon-watching public would've known who Stokowski was, having likely watched Disney's Fantasia (1940) where he appears prominently.
It could be that what they wanted to do just couldn't be done in 1 frame. Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
Compare games with perfect framerates like Turrican 2, Superfrog or Leander, with games that don't, like Magic Pockets, Xenon 2, Driller. In fact, compare the official version of Stunt Car Racer with the cracked version, where the crackers massively improved the drawing speed and thus the framerate!
Compare the scrolling of https://youtu.be/V1R7Pd329Bc?t=1969 or https://youtu.be/wFtLGDywZlg?t=553 with https://youtu.be/_4U4ZW37haU?t=114 or https://youtu.be/BXR2yswfC6E?t=862 -- it's purely the programmer's fault.
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