this blog is untitled

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Hello, UK peeps - especially those of you in England. The shitty Government is trying to cut the huge NHS waiting list numbers in England not by improving secondary care resourcing, but by making it harder for patients to get a referral to consultants and other secondary care services. Except in the case of urgent referrals where cancer is suspected, GPs must now write to consultants and other secondary care providers asking for advice and guidance on the patient's care. They have always had the discretion to do this, but now it's mandatory. This means that it's likely a proportion of patients will simply be bounced back to their GPs for their care to be managed in the community, and no further investigation will be undertaken. It undermines the role of GPs as clinicians and will increase their workload at a time when they're already overworked and under-resourced. But perhaps even more worrying is that those people who already find it difficult to access timely and effective medical care - e.g. people from ethnic minority backgrounds, disabled people, women and girls, LGBTQIA+ people, people living in deprived areas - are going to have yet another obstacle put in their way.