The thing I find particularly annoying about W is that they could have just forked BlueSky and set up the first serious AtProtocol federation.

Can we be like the Beneluxians or Scandinavians instead?

Yeah, that’s not a straw, though. It’s like a redwood. A forest of redwoods.

I’m from the North of England and we say “aye! t’was onna night most un’nartual, when good folk did pull down the shutters and bring their children reet close and 'uddle themselves away, for they couldn’t rightly say if they wus hearing the howling of t’wind, the shrieking orra newborn, or the wailin of the beast, in this very valley [x] years/moons ago” and I think that’s beautiful.

See also: Dubai chocolate, affogato, “two best buds running a burger shack” tall burgers… all were amazing, until they became a marketable meme, as you said. And now they’re shit.

Yeah, and some people insist on steaming or, worse, boiling broccoli for far, far too long.

“with cheese”? Yeah, okay.

Just “cheese”? No, bullshit. That’s like saying “meat” or “fruit”.

Bigger burgers should be wider, not taller. End of conversation.

I hate to break your heart but Paint.NET isn’t open source any more.

OMG! THIS popular Microsoft program will VANISH from MILLIONS of people’s computers SOON, potentially leaving long-term users STRANDED in an UNFATHOMABLY DEEP pit of RELENTLESS DESPAIR and users are SEETHING. Click NOW to find out how YOU are impacted.

When I was, I guess, about ten I saw some demented old fart drive straight into a level railway crossing. The barriers were down, the lights were flashing, the sirens were wailing. I know this, because I’d just had to walk over the footbridge to avoid the crossing. His car got caught and couldn’t move. A passer-by literally had to drag him out of his car and he was livid - fucking incandescent - that the whole world was conspiring against him like this. I was the one who called 999 from an adjacent payphone and the train was stopped before it could make the situation worse. I left before the emergency services arrived but I seriously hope he was on the receiving end of some of that police brutality I hear so much about.

Actually, while I’m here - and at no additional cost to you - here’s a similar story I posted in another thread where the question was about assholes on public transit:

I bumped into a friend who is cop in the British Transport Police at a station while he was working. While I was there somehow a happy-drunk guy fell between a train and the platform and got stuck. That’s not the crazy part.

The crazy part is the four separate people who all ended up getting arrested because they attacked my friend and the other responders trying to free the stuck man - physically kicking and trying to drag them away - because he/they wouldn’t order the train to leave the station and it was making them late. Four separate people, all apparently sober, all absolute psychopaths who would happily see someone mangled by a train so they wouldn’t be inconvenienced, and so utterly convinced of their righteousness that they were prepared to physically attack police officers and paramedics.

I was later told this is pretty normal when there’s a “one under”: aside from the person who fell getting injured or dying, the biggest immediate problem is a handful of narcissistic cunts who interpret the whole thing as some kind of personal insult. It really shook me that anyone could be like that.

Kinda weird how you started by asking an interesting question but then spend the last two-thirds of your post going full-on tin foil hat.

+1 for Home Assistant, and then with Add Ons it can also do other useful home network stuff (network ad blocker, VPN, *arr, etc).

Paradise City from Burnout was pretty amazing, especially given you were supposed to navigate it at 250km/h. Lots of three-dimensionality about it too, with tunnels, overpasses, rooftops, etc.

It’s actually even wilder than that.

The earliest know pyramids date back to around 2600BCE, and Cleopatra reigned around 50-30BCE, so her reign is closer to the modern day than to the first pyramids by about 600 years. One of the earliest surviving pyramids, Djoser, was built by Imhotep (with help, I assume) during a period called the Third Egyptian Dynasty meaning, as it’s name suggests, the unified Kingdom of Egypt was already well-established by the time it was built. The First Dynasty started about 3100BCE so even ignoring the proto-Dynasty period of Egypt, that’s pretty humbling: if you drew a timeline with the founding of Ancient Egypt on the left and the founding of OnlyFans to the right, Cleopatra would be three-fifths of the way along it.

Look on eBay for USFF PCs. They’re mini computers the size of paperback books that are designed for use in large organisations, and they’re made by the usual suspects - HP and Dell mostly. Because they get replaced regularly they’re cheap but they’re just regular desktop PC hardware. A ten year old i5 can handle being a 4K media centre no problem and can be had for €/£/$70.

UK here. English, obviously. That’s it. Modern languages - either French or Spanish - were optional. It’s honestly embarrassing.

We had a bunch of laptops at work with ARC GPUs in them. The vendor supplied one of them as test units saying they were ideal as portable 8K video editing machines, to which I replied - in exactly these words - “oh, fuck off”. But then we tested them and they’re honestly excellent and run a lot cooIer and longer than the AMD/Intel+Nvidia equivalents. I had to apologise. I got to test the Claw side-by-side with the Steam Deck playing RDR2 and Forza Horizon 5 and that sealed the deal. And when the ARC GPU does start groaning then, like I said, it’s eGPU time. The ARC is probably never going to bother the top-tier GPUs from AMD and Nvidia, but for portable and, I dare say, midrange desktop gaming it’s ideal.

USB-C docking station mater race.

I completely agree. I passed over the Steam Deck and went for the MSI Claw 8 instead. I was willing to pay the extra for a waaaay better CPU/GPU combo and - the killer feature IMHO - not one, but two Thunderbolt ports. Long term, this means I can expect a longer life out of my MSI than the Steam Deck is likely to get, but also means when the GPU does start to chug I can connect an eGPU to it’s dock.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean I don’t rate the Steam Deck - I really, really do - and it’s level of capability and price-point will act as a stabalising point for the wider industry, but I paid more for a better device and got my money’s worth.