What does "this is not a pay wall" mean - if I have to give personal information over, that is a price.

Didn't read - too expensive.

Your identity isn't considered of value to you, you can't monetize it. We can, but since it has no value to you, give it to us for free.

Disabling javascript let me read the whole article without any account nonsense.

Firefox reader mode also did it.

I just reload the page and hit 'esc' a bunch of times right after it loads but before the paywall pops up. Works on 3/4 of these soft paywalled sites.

Journalism is labor

I am so trained now, that I didn’t even read what they were asking for. Just closed the tab and came here to see if there was anything of value. Too expensive to even read their wall.

Yep this is what I did as well. I also just close tabs if it ever pops up a "sign up for our newsletter" thing.

Works with any random email, kinda fine tbh

I mean, test@example.com worked so info doesn't have to be that personal...

First work computer was Sparc IPX, a brief dalliance with HP D and K series, then had various Ultra, and servers were all sorts including E10k then various SunFire, and the Fujitsu Prime Power.

They were quite fun.

But can confirm, buying Sun was PITA.

Cheap!! USD6/gallon is about GBP1.17/litre, but actual price in UK is GBP1.97/litre

Cheap! GBP 1.97/liter is NOK 24.76/liter, while actual price in Norway is NOK 26.98/liter on average today (USD 10.98/gallon).

Betteridge

Its a shame that the various implementations are pretty horrible. Global state, static methods etc etc.

If you get rid of that, and just pass dependencies around, create some appropriate local abstraction around them.. the tooling, be it datadog or honeycomb does a great job making it useful. Can't really say the same for grafana, but ymmv - depending on budget

Seems like a shell company set up in January 2026 - never traded before.

How could they be getting loads of NHS contracts?

Will be interesting to see how it works out.

GP surgeries in the UK are privately owned, their relationship with the NHS is contractual. It would not be surprising if they can buy whatever B2B SaaS they feel like.

Zipped xml i wouldn't tbh. Its just not a great random access container. Compressed xml in a sqlite? Sure.

You dont know immediately if something that superficially seems the same actually is.

Copy and paste once is fine, twice, not so much.

Often I've seen two totally different things exist in one bit of code, no overlap!

Premature generification is bad, and leads the developer to believe that two things are the same, making it harder to see they are not.

Also, can make it much harder to see that a different abstraction would give a cleaner outcome....

Ax102-u

People seem to set their money on fire?

Not people! Just enterprises that want scalability.

Ive always suspected that this is all of a tax dodge, a money spinner, and a pr exercise "we gave xxx to charity" - no, your customers did.

Just set up a direct debit to your favourite charity.

> Just

the point of these drives is to get more people to give to charity. Then you use a lullaby-word as if setting up a charitable donation is as easy as saying "yes" when the checker asks if you want to give a small donation.

Well, my point was that maybe it actually isnt "to get more people to give to charity", maybe its actually something else.

Its actually very easy to give £5/month direct to a charity. Takes about 2 minutes, just gotta do it.

You're overthinking this. There's a publicity element to it, but the money just gets given to charity, like they say it does. It's not a conspiracy or a tax accounting trick.

How can you tell? And is this definitely universally true or just true of the 1 instance you happen to have personal experience with?

Same way I can tell that my next door neighbor isn't poisoning my water supply or that Tesco doesn't have a secret chemical weapons program. That major supermarket chains are running scam charity appeals just isn't a hypothesis worth entertaining in the absence of any evidence for it.

Because the risk of fraud is too great for major corporations. They have accountants and businesses people who would report it.

The risk with charity money is not the companies collecting a few cents but the charity itself.

Agree - I don't think a giant multinational should get the cumulative charitable donation through their "Gavin Belson Foundation", and frankly it coming while you're checking yourself out, and navigating all dark-pattern "share your email for an e-receipt?", "want our deal of the day?", "enter your loyalty card?", "fill out this poll?", "are you collectioning stickers?" nonsense really grinds my gears. I just want cheaper groceries!

ah, thanks for introducing me to this business model! :-)