I had so many good times on forums back in the day.

The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.

When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It’s like living in a small village versus living in a city.

The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn’t as VPNs were barely a thing) you’d lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.

There’s multiple ways to take that

You nailed it

If a tree falls in the woods…

Yes Daddy uwu

So, Calyx or Graphene to ensure this AI garbage can be disabled, I suppose.

This is great, honestly.

If you go back to antiquity, education was about philosophy. It was about learning how to observe, and think critically, and see the world for what it is.

And then in modern times, education became about memorisation - learning facts and figures and how to do this and that. And that way of teaching and learning just doesn’t fit any longer with what our digital age has become.

In my opinion, we are heavily overdue for a revamp of what education should be, and what skills are most important to society in this post-truth world. Critical thinking is an important foundation to real knowledge that we don’t teach enough.

My grandmother was into collecting thimbles, when she was still alive.

As a child, whenever I went away somewhere on a trip with my parents and we saw a souvenir thimble, I’d always want to get it for her.

Looking back as an adult, I’m quite sure now that she didn’t really care that much about the thimbles at all, especially towards the end. What she really cared about was the connection it created, and the relationship with her grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

It’s nice to know what someone likes, and to think of them when you see it. And every time I saw thimbles I thought of her.

In a modern context I have a friend who likes frogs, and every time I see a random frog plush or weird frog toothbrush holder or whatever it is I always think of him and want to get it for him.

Fads change but I think the reason for having them stays the same. It’s nice to be into something, and for other people to know you’re into it, too :)

The teaser trailer looks like a high energy superhero romp that’s closer to Guardians of the Galaxy, than it is anything Star Trek.

And I just don’t like the idea that section 31 is made up of a bunch of oddballs and misfits with no discipline. Makes the movie more ‘exciting’ I guess, but really? Section 31 should move quietly in the shadows, not all brash and ballsy.

I’m sure they are hoping this style will boost revenue by appealing to a younger demographic, but it’s just totally the opposite of what I want from Star Trek.

I couldn’t give two hoots about this, but it’s probably a good thing for ‘normal’ people.

My dad for example can never find a file once it’s disappeared from the notifications, so he always just goes back and downloads the file again whenever he needs it, duplicating it over and over because he has no idea “where it went”

It was weird to me too.

In fairness to the author, I can find a way to speak those two words aloud in a way that works, and sounds like something someone could genuinely say, but that requires a pretty specific stress and pitch.

You’re already!

But the first time you read the words it’s just not going to come out like that.

And that’s the problem. As a writer you can’t just put words on the page the same way you yourself might speak them, and expect people to read it that way. The spoken word does not translate perfectly to writing.

You need to have an awareness of how people are likely to parse the words on the page, and choose wording that doesn’t cause people to trip or stumble, even if it isn’t the exact phrasing you’d use in organic speech.

The comic fails on that at the final line.

I am cat

The findings here seem like a real stretch.

Saying that people can “Accurately” identify names for adults but not children feels tenuous when they only answered correctly less than 25% of the time for children and slightly more than 25% for adults, among four options. That’s barely better than random chance.

If there really even is any correlation between name and appearance, then as other people have said, this is likely due to factors of age, and popularity of different names at different times. The child group used children only from a narrow range of 9-12 whereas the adult group was broader, so it would be easier to see the influence of age in the adult group.

I assumed those conducting the study would be very familiar with that bias and try to eliminate it by only using names that were equally popular at the same time as the person’s actual age for each question, but I couldn’t find that information.

If we assume they DID try to eliminate generational popularity as a factor, there are still more plausible explanations IMO.

For example, different names are going to be popular among different socioeconomic backgrounds - wealth, education, political leaning, geographic location of the parents will all affect name choice!

So if there is any correlation at all, my personal conclusion would not be that the name determines who people grow up to be, but that someone’s physical appearance is influenced by their socioeconomic background, and that name also correlates with that background.

So name is simply a predictor for what background someone grew up with, nothing more!

Right, and what I’m saying is there’s basically zero incentive for corporations to ever take action, because SAYING you will be doing it has all the image, PR and revenue benefits, but without needing to even ACTUALLY do it. And then later you just quietly forget about it, like this.

The only way companies will ever take action is if governments legally mandate them to (and even then maybe not!)

Yep. Any promised future targets are just marketing hype.

Then: “Eco-friendly is really trending now, we’ll base our image around that”

Now: “It’s more profitable to drop the eco targets, so were dropping them”

Google absolutely made a calculated decision when they decided to allow device manufacturers to fork AOSP and introduce closed-source modifications. If it wasn’t for that, I can’t imagine OEMs would have wanted to get on board, and so we wouldn’t have seen the huge adoption that happened, and Android might have become just another failed operating system.

I do truly wish for a fully open-source “Linux on the phone” type experience, but what always kills that is apps, because companies just don’t make them unless the market share is there. Even Microsoft had to pull out after pumping so much money into Windows phone, and I think most of the reason was because they couldn’t incentivise developers to make apps enough.

So I’m glad at least I can run Calyx, and have just a tiny bit more freedom while still keeping the apps I need, even if it’s nowhere near perfect.

Plus all the accoutrements that invariably went along with The Computer.

A printer and a scanner

A filing cabinet for all the things you liked to print and scan

A rack full of CD-ROM disks like Encarta 95 and Ecco The Dolphin and CorelDRAW 4

A beige container with clear plastic lid for storing floppy disks, that for some reason had a lock on it as if floppy disks were the Crown Jewels

Haha yep. Not the support process you want. Glad you managed to let them eat some humble pie at least.

The support process you want is this: “We’ll make you a channel on our Slack, if you’ve got any issues you can talk with our devs direct!” - yes please!

Any company that hides their documentation has an awful product that they are actually embarrassed about, from a tech perspective. They are hiding it because they are afraid to show it.

I’ve seen this so many times, and it’s a big red flag.

These companies work on the basis of selling their product the old-fashioned way, directly to management with sales-people and business presentations and firm handshakes, and then once you’re sold then developers (which management doesn’t care about by the way) have to do the odious task of getting everything working against their terrible and illogical API. And when you need help implementing, then your single point of contact is one grumpy-ass old dev working in a basement somewhere (because they don’t care about their own devs either) and he’s terribly overstretched due to the number of other customers he’s also trying to help, because their implementation is so shitty.

Conversely, public documentation is a great sign that companies took a developer-led approach to designing their solution, that it will be easy to implement, that they respect the devs within their own company, and they will also respect yours.

When I am asked to evaluate potential solutions for a problem, Public docs is like the number one thing I care about! It’s just that significant.

Side story - I once worked with one of these shitty vendors, and learned from a tech guy I’d made friends with that the whole company was basically out of office on a company-paid beach holiday - EXCEPT for the dev team. Management, sales, marketing, finance, they all got a company trip, but the tech peeps had to stay at home. Tells you everything you need to know about their management attitude towards tech.

Ah, awesome. I just read through your comment and that makes a lot of sense.

I stand by my ideology, but your comment helps me appreciate the reality of that situation, and that if you are smoking or doing other non-alcohol things, you should probably keep that very much to yourself.

From the perspective of an attendee who is going completely ‘cold turkey’ on everything, I can see how even the idea of someone else using different substances could be offensive, because it could feel like it undermines the effort they are putting in, and is confrontational that you get to have this other vice, while they are doing it ‘the hard way’

I dont really agree with that perspective, and in some ways it seems toxic in its own right, but I can understand why people would feel that way.