A small set-top box (essentially a Steam Deck with the screen, controls and batteries removed, and with components that don’t have the space restrictions that come with a mobile device) would still be an interesting proposition. Particularly if they partnered with the main video streaming services to port their apps across, and implemented Chromecast/AirPlay support.

I can see a market for it, as a “Chromecast and Apple TV competitor that also plays all your games”.

I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?

Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone’s tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.

GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).

Once you’ve got your eye in, scotch and bourbon are quite different. Many (although not all) scotch whiskies have peat in their flavour profile (a kind of smoky, salty, earthy flavour which is very distinctive), while bourbons never do. Bourbon is almost always quite a lot sweeter than scotch.

They’re also made quite differently. Bourbon is mostly corn, and often has lots of rye and wheat in the mix, whereas scotch is mostly made of barley. Bourbon is always aged in new oak barrels, whereas scotch is mostly aged in second-fill barrels (which might previously have been used for bourbon, wine, sherry, port, cider etc.).

Sure. But it’s a normal word, and censoring a few letters makes it look ruder than it is. Like writing “cockerel” as “c***erel”. Just draws attention to the offensive bit.

Scotch is whisky from Scotland (shockingly).

That’s not an Americanism really; people call it Scotch in British English too. It’s just that because 99% of the whisky in the UK is Scotch anyway you don’t really need to specify. Whereas because most whisky consumed in the US is bourbon, they tend to specify when they mean Scotch.

The same is presumably true in reverse, i.e. Brits using “bourbon” more than Americans because of the need to specify.

Personally I’m not bothered by the whisky/whiskey distinction. Whisky was traditionally Scottish and whiskey Irish, with the Americans going the Irish way and other countries (like Japan) going the Scottish way. But it’s a bit of a meme to nitpick at this point; they’re indisputably just two spellings of the same thing.

You can say rapeseed on the internet, friend.

What I hate about “eggplant” is that none of the varieties that anybody actually eats look even remotely like an egg. It’s a massive purple banana-shape. They also don’t taste like eggs, smell like eggs, or get used like eggs.

It’d be like calling cucumbers “cheesefruit” or something. It’s just destined to baffle.

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard an American say “Gen Z” before, and it literally never occured to me that they were pronouncing it “Gen Zee”. Obvious now you mention it, but I’ve just been assuming that every time I see it written down it’s “Gen Zed” by default.

Having data means nothing if you can’t monetize it.

As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.

And they’ve been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.

Oh yeah, because courts have never made a mistake, new evidence never comes to light, and we don’t even have a word for “miscarriage of justice”.

Simple question: what would your employer say if you asked them?

My contract has a standard “no using company computers for personal business” clause. However I feel entirely confident that my employer doesn’t mind me using it to do personal errands using the web browser (on my own time). And I know they have no problem with me using Zoom or Teams to join meetings for non-work things in the evening. How do I know this? Because I asked them…

I’ve never asked them “can I install a new hard drive in my laptop, install an OS I downloaded off the internet, and boot into that OS to do things which I’d rather you not be able to track like you could on the main OS”. But I’m completely confident I’d know what the answer would be if I did ask.

If you think installing a new SSD etc. is acceptable, ask them. If you’re not asking them because you’re worried they’d say “no”, then don’t do it.

Try asking them instead if you can use your laptop to look up directions to the dentist on Google Maps. See if you get the same answer.

It doesn’t really mean anything anymore. The transistors are not 5nm either. It’s just marketing.

Quoth Wikipedia:

The term “5 nm” has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors being 5 nanometers in size. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a “5 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 51 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 30 nanometers”. However, in real world commercial practice, “5 nm” is used primarily as a marketing term by individual microchip manufacturers to refer to a new, improved generation of silicon semiconductor chips in terms of increased transistor density (i.e. a higher degree of miniaturization), increased speed and reduced power consumption compared to the previous 7 nm process.

No shit that it’s easy to live with marginally slower (but still really pretty fast) shipping and access to a second-tier streaming service.

It’s pretty much the definition of a luxury purchase.

Or read Renée Descartes.

Autopilot could kill the engine and lock the brakes without turning itself off. By turning itself off and giving control to a human mere instants before a crash it’s effectively ensuring the engine isn’t turned off (as there’ll be no time to do it before the crash, and the human may not be in a fit state to do it afterwards).

But more to the point, regardless of whether there’s a good reason for it to do that or not, it shouldn’t be used to claim on a “technicality” that autopilot wasn’t active “at the time of the crash”, as clearly it meaningfully was at all points leading up to it.

Maybe I’m a lone voice here, but my Skoda has QNX and it’s…not very good? It takes an age to start up, and an age to load navigation mode to a point where it’s ready to start being used. Bluetooth integration is rudimentary (in the context of the age of the vehicle) and unpredictable. The touch UI is spongy and easy to make mistakes, even if you’re the passenger giving it your full undivided attention. The voice command system is almost unusable.

It’s not terrible, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t understand why anyone would be writing any lovesongs about it.

Literally the first paragraph:

The Budgie desktop team announced today the release and general availability of Budgie 10.9 as the latest version of this modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

If you need more than “modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions” to figure out what the project is, then you’re probably not the target audience for 9to5Linux.

It’s a fair point. Curiosity has “only” travelled about 20 miles over its 12 year life so far. And while it weighs some 900 kilos, Martian gravity is only 38% that of Earth.

Obviously it’s absurd to compare the wear and tear on something rumbling around the Martian tundra cut off from any support or maintenance for a decade, but it is a very different use case to your average Earthly car or lorry. What lasts a decade going at 0.1mph for 20 miles in an alien desert is not necessarily going to last a week going at 70mph down an asphalt highway.

At some point we’re just getting bogged down in semantics. Someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the earliest versions ran on gaseous fuels. Somebody else “invented” versions that than on liquid fuels. Engines that ran on petrol (gas) and diesel were “invented” by separate people. Engines based on turbine, reciprocating pistons, and rotary mechanisms were all “invented” by separate people.

The degree to which you consider any of those independent “inventions” versus simply modifying and improving existing inventions is essentially arbitrary.

In an earlier iteration of the script, the machines were using connected humans as a distributed computer network rather than a power source. Which makes much more sense, but apparently they deemed it too difficult a concept for audiences to grasp so we ended up with the power source thing instead.

Not only does that make more sense in the sense of “humans don’t make a great power source” (why not just use cows, or wind power, or geothermal, or nuclear?), but it also explains why the simulated world of the Matrix is so intertwined with the machine world itself, why The One is so important etc.

My head canon is that the distributed computing thing is in fact what was going on, and the humans of Zion have just gotten the wrong end of the stick.