I always liked how the best argument against wind farms they could come up with was they’re an eyesore, even though they’re not really that different from windmills, which nobody objects to. But yeah a massive grey cube that drains all the fresh water out of everything in a 10-mile radius is just fine.

‘Jam’ can mean a fruit preserve, to play music, a stuck door, traffic, to cram something into something else, a tense situation, or to block a radio signal. All spelled and pronounced the same.

My ideal scenario:

• As technology improves, it becomes increasingly easy to run AI locally at home.
• The hardware companies/data center AI companies eventually fuck each other over because big corporations always fuck everyone else over eventually and it stops becoming profitable.
• NVIDIA etc. come crawling back to the consumer market, offering things at reasonable prices again. Data centers sell off all their shit and absolutely flood the market with cheap RAM & graphics cards.
• Some other company has started making the hardware in the meantime and the public tells NVIDIA to go fuck themselves and we watch them go into a slow IBM style decline.

Although what will probably happen is the companies will fuck each other over, prices will stay high forever and the data centers that go out of business will just burn all their hardware and all of this will have meant nothing.

I agree nobody is 100% trustworthy, but as a side note Mullvad’s no-log policy has been proven fairly recently after they were raided and the police found nothing at all.

Yeah we had a sweet deal before and we pissed it away. I don’t see why we should get the same terms if we rejoin. That’s just the cost of being stupid IMO

I suspect the ideal outcome would have been to have Leave almost win, like if it went 52-48 the other way. That way they could still keep saying it’s “what the people want” and keep using it as a wedge issue, but without having to actually do anything.

I also got mine refurbished, so that way Google presumably doesn’t get any money from me, at least not directly.

I have a pixel 8 pro currently, but I was running it on a 4a before that. It’s a bit of a trade-off, you get more privacy obviously and some more manual control over stuff, but also you lose some convenience. I’m kind of used to it now though.

It also depends on how deep you want to go with de-googling and stuff too. Currently I’m trying to avoid Google as much as possible (which sounds weird to say when using a Google Pixel lol) so I’m using things like Aurora Store and Obtainium as app stores.

I am in this rabbit hole too! I recently discovered that 3/5 of my external drives are still using inferior LUKS1 encryption instead of LUKS2 so I have to figure that out. Also I just got a yubikey and set it up with challenge-response so now my laptop needs the yubikey inserted, and a password and you have to press the button on the yubikey to unlock it.

All of this is very unnecessary because I have no data that is of any use to anyone else, it’s just become a fun project to see how locked-down I can make my laptop.

Edit: also posting this from my phone running GrapheneOS lol

If we’re just talking famous people and not family/people I knew, Douglas Adams. I don’t like living in a world where Douglas Adams dies at 49 and Henry Kissenger lives to be 100.

https://cybernews.com/security/researcher-releases-bitlocker-bypass-and-privilege-escalation-exploit/

This guy seems to be dropping them on a good schedule lol

Bulgaria’s tourism minister must be shitting it right now though lol. “We have to host WHAT next year?”

Also if you saw all the Moroccanoil sponsorship all over Eurovision this year - let’s just say that company is not Moroccan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moroccanoil

I started putting together a RAID, got the housing and the first drive, the plan was to buy a drive with each paycheck until I had the 4 drives I need. The first drive was like $250, arrived last week. Then I checked the price this week and the same drive is now $650.

I use a yubikey on my laptop, but I use it to make it even harder to log in. It’s set to challenge-response so you have to have the key in and enter a password to unlock LUKS. Bit overkill but it was more just to see if I could do it lol

Also the British custom of asking if you’re alright which must adhere to the following script:

“Hiya, you alright?”

“Oh yeah not so bad. You?”

“Yeah not bad.”

You can deviate slightly (“can’t complain”) but under no circumstances must you discuss whether you’re actually alright or not. I’ve genuinely seen this exchange happen at a funeral, with the widower being like “Yeah not so bad…”

The word ‘dog’ is interesting because it essentially has no etymology. It has no known cognates in English/Germanic/other Indo-European languages. It first showed up in Old English as dogca, referring to some sort of mastiff, but other than that nobody really has any idea at all where it came from.

It’s such a shame because I really like Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor, but yeah her whole era was so badly written. She’s doing Big Finish now though so hopefully she’ll get some good stuff to work with there.

The 15th Doctor era is… odd. No spoilers but RTD is back as lead writer but he makes some… decisions lol. Including putting one of the worst episodes the show has ever had right at the start of 15’s run. You’ll probably know it when it happens! But then inbetween the oddness there are some genuinely really good single episodes too IMO.

I live in Canada and about once a year Trump remembers we exist and talks about invading us. Quebec and Alberta both keep talking about separating. I don’t know where Canada will be in five years time, let alone myself.

The compensation thing drives me nuts too. It’s like if nothing in the store had a price on it and when you went up to the checkout they were like “What would you expect to pay for a can of peas?” Just tell me the number and I’ll either agree or not!

Doctor Who has a bunch of them!

One of the big recent ones was the Timeless Child plotline. For people unfamiliar with the show, the basic premise is that the main character, the Doctor, is an alien who’s species can regenerate themselves when they’re about to die which saves them but they become a physically different person. This was invented back in the 60s so they could change out the lead actor, William Hartnell, when he got too old to continue in the role and it’s become a core part of the show. We’re now on about the 15-16th Doctor, although that number is a bit contentious too for reasons I won’t go into here because that’s a whole other thing.

A few years back there was a plotline where it was revealed that the Doctor isn’t just a regular alien, they’re something called the Timeless Child that just appeared in our universe from somewhere unknown, and was the one that gave their whole species the ability to regenerate themselves. This was widely hated, as it not only changed the Doctor from a sort of wandering hobo into a Super Special Chosen One, but it also directly showed that William Hartnell wasn’t the first Doctor, there had been probably dozens of other ones before him that had just never been mentioned until now.

The internal debates that I’ve seen usually aren’t people debating whether this was a good idea or not, they’re mostly about the best way to retcon it away and never speak of it again lol.