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The basic sets are still there; look up the Lego Classic line. And for creativity at a good price the Creator 3in1 sets are gold.
Don't be misled by all the franchised stuff (Star Wars, etc.). That stuff sells well and has its fanbase, but Lego is much more than that. Lego currently has good sets (including the user submitted Ideas range).
LeoCAD is really nice and smooth to work with, and on Linux a much better experience than Lego's own Bricklink Studio. Unfortunately, for instructions you can't really get away from Studio, and while importing the model made in LeoCAD works for 99% of the bricks, you tend to end up with one or two types of brick misaligned, flipped, rotated, or missing.
It's a skill, but it's not too hard to get decently good at it. It's mostly a matter of actually building your model in the real world and iteratively improving your digital model and instructions from there, and changing the camera angle for steps that need it.
Most of the time is spent fighting with Stud.io (the software) and dealing with its bugs (it runs OK in Bottles (i.e., managed Wine environments), but stupid rendering bugs mean you may have to do the final export step on a device with a different GPU).
When you also want to print a booklet of instructions, getting the generated steps neatly out of Stud.io's instruction maker and into a sane pipeline for making the print-ready PDFs takes some work (as well as CMYK conversions), but that is mostly a matter of setting up some scripts to wire up pdftk and ImageMagick and friends.
Or 'drone accident scapegoat'.
I could only find 4 names:
They haven't published the full list of the 34 researchers accepted so far:
Namen van de 34 bursalen maakt NWO niet bekend, aldus een woordvoerder, omdat de aanstellingsprocedures nog lopen en sommige onderzoekers geen publiciteit willen.
(NRC July 7th, https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/07/07/tulp-fonds-voor-academi...)
So you'll only find the names of those who are now in a position to speak out about this issue.
I don't really think it's primarily the CoMaps devs and contributors warning others about OrganicMaps. It's mostly OpenStreetMap contributors (e.g., mappers) like myself who followed the relevant discussions and events and decided that the community is better off routing around the problem.
OrganicMaps could be the best app there is in terms of functionality (it isn't), but if there are significant issues with their governance they are harmful to the broader OpenStreetMap community.
So we recommend CoMaps and OsmAnd, and carry on mapping.
Quite. At least Google delivers some value to society, despite being mostly evil. Klarna is exclusively parasitic, getting people needlessly into debt and pushing a buy now pay later mentality for luxury products.
How did these people live through COVID and never encounter a QR code they had to scan with a phone?
Was that a requirement? I got through it without scanning a single QR code. I had my vaccination status available as a QR code (on paper when travelling in order not to depend on just a smartphone), but not the other way around.
We just ignored restaurants without paper menus, as we always do. It wasn't the time to eat out in any case.
It definitely reads as a 'fuck you' to me. Is there a group of people that responds well to that last sentence?
Why refuse Adolf Hitler, but allow Vladimir Putin? I mean, it's not a race, but if you're going to draw a line in the sand (labelled 'no admittance to utter cockwombles' or something like that) I know where Putin would end up. Are those models refusing one and allowing the other? Why do they even refuse one?
[…] but then we'd have to make sure we get every single saved game for all the various games moved over […]
Every single game save? Why? I get it if you are deep into a month long Factorio game or have a huge Minecraft world, but on the whole games are ephemeral entertainment. If it's not worth backing up, it's usually fine to just start a new game.
Does it say 'don't bother with a regex beyond checking it contains an @ surrounded by arbitrary pieces of text?' This still sounds like it is leading developers to conclude that they should use a too complex regex and then send a confirmation email.
Claude Sonnet says:
A practical email regex that covers the vast majority of real-world addresses: > ^[a-zA-Z0-9._%+\-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.\-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$
Which is still way more complex than needed (and takes effort to read), and buggy according to years of blog posts written about this topic.
Of course the problem is the developer asking for a regex at all, but the must-regex-email instinct seems heavily engrained in our collective psyche.
I have no idea what other pay-to-play models say.
This all old hat, unfortunately, and also a thing which will be gotten wrong by developers for years to come. Just shouting 'give me a regex for validating email addresses' will make an LLM like ChatGPT happily output bullshit suggesting some overlong regex which is flawed precisely as outlined by the linked article, even though no one is arguing for those long unmaintainable regexes once they've seen the light.
Ah well.
Where there is still room for improvement is in how email addresses are often made a little bit anonymous by a lot of websites. Did you ever see something like 'j*h@gmail.com'? Oh wow, that neatly leaves out John Smith's full name! Like showing only the last four numbers of an IBAN or credit card.
Except for us edge cases with a personal domain, where I then get 'm*l@myfullname.nl'. So stop that. Store it next to the bit of knowledge about validating email addresses — the bits of knowledge you use to correct junior developers and senior idiots.
The classic 'those guys did something bad, so I am going to go with the guys who are absolute assholes doing several orders of magnitude more bad things now instead' response.
That usually means that whoever utters it was just looking for a sycophantic excuse to go with the bigger threat because it is more convenient to them (for now).
Outsourced stuff is late and expensive too, just not directly the responsibility of the minister or secretary of state because of the magic piece of paper in between.
IT is hardly something we need to do occasionally, so build up a department that can do it (not just write up huge reports about what it should do and outsource, like Logius) and invest in the people that will work there (retaining them as much as possible). Give a big middle finger to consultants, and listen to the tech experts. Build boring stuff that works instead of a new app every month.
It's not impossible in theory, and cheaper in the long run. It's impossible because asshats who would actually benefit from left and centre politics keep voting right-wing parties in to power.
“This year's Eurovision winner: Tommy, Käärijä, and Joost, the Euroboys!”
“Huh. Israel hardly got any votes this year.”
It's an unfortunate Dutch way of doing things. The firm believe that the market will solve it if you have a contract that says thing will be solved. Write a tender, pick the cheapest party, trust in contracts, hope it won't break before you (the external contractor pushing for it) move on in a few months time.
The people who pointed out that none of the moving parts of DigiD should have been outsourced were ignored until the tide shifted this year.
I'm honestly surprised the government decided to intervene. The usual method is to keep on believing in the signed piece of paper until the shit hits the fan (like with the Fyra high speed trains) — never mind that the US (where the buyer is from) is not likely to give a toss about those pieces of paper if they need something from our data.
(Leiden being the town in the Netherlands where Leiden University is.)
Infinite email masks. Doesn't help much once your real email address is out there though.
Sending those thousands of requests is something your mail client does for you. Deleting 5000 emails takes a few minutes, but how often do you do that? I can select a bunch of emails in Thunderbird and just do stuff with it just fine.
For server side filters I just set them up in Fastmail using the web UI. That's the type of action I do once or twice a year, so totally OK to hop on over to the web app for just that.
I have no idea what you mean by 'push notifications'. I have Thunderbird open on my desktop, and it shows me when there is email. I have K9 on my smartphone, and it shows me when there is email (I don't have it set up to display notifications, but that seems possible). That's basically all I need to do email.
I'm fine with the static ads in the digitised print edition and the paper edition I get on Sataruday (even though I find some objectionable), but I block any and all digital ads with uBlock Origin, whether I'm a subscriber or not. I pay for a good national newspaper; they either make do with that or lose me as a long-time subscriber.
Who are those people? Those perpetually amused folk who feel not a bit of rage when a dickover is slapped in their face, and for whom entering their e-mail address in the dickover is actually a thing they would seriously consider?
They do. Those are designed to make you click 'Oh for fuck's sake. Just set the fucking cookies.'
It's all fun and games until your neighbour in a terraced house or apartment building unwittingly starts an uncontrollable battery fire. Electric scooters and those 'hoover boards' from a few years ago are notorious when it comes to that, but plenty of underspecced small electronics will fail spectacularly.
So many posters here going on about cheap IKEA tables. Did they ever visit IKEA? I have an IKEA wooden dinner table with the top made from sturdy panels of solid wood bars glued together for eternity. We've only had it for twenty years of course, so who can tell if it is any good…
Sure, the LACK coffee table is recycled honeycombed cardboard. That's on purpose, and totally fine. I hope people don't eat their dinner of those outside of student life though.
The DreamLand bit seems off:
DreamLand: another toy store chain with venerable Belgian roots owned by Colruyt group that briefly had a fancy underground store near a new parking lot not even five years ago. Of course it had to go. […] The bigger store about 30 km away from us recently also closed down. The store chain is still alive as is their webshop, but for how long… There’s still a DreamLand nearby but no longer in the centre.
DreamLand actually grew significantly in terms of physical stores due to their merger with ToyChamp, and is present in both the Netherlands and Belgium now. Of course, these huge (for European standards) stores tend to be located in malls and such; not in the historic city centres where toy stores used to be.
So why are us southpaws a rarity? The article and the linked research paper both point to bipedalism and bigger brains as the cause, and the paper vaguely seems to hint at selective pressures leading to the right hand getting favoured by the majority of the population, but why?
The question from the headline is excellent, if only it was actually answered.
'Everyone' is treated as singular (aside from 'everyone are' sounding completely wrong).
You can. It just means that the customer has to do the proper analyses and risk evaluation for their own SOC2 (or ISO 27001 or whatever) certification.
Just focus on providing a good value application and be frank about what you do, why you can't get certification for something like that, but that you can answer any questions they might have for their own certification process.
If the potential customer makes 'has SOC2' a requirement, than that is not a customer for you, in the same way that 'has more than 20 employees' rules you out.
Two posters above found that the signal was more like “get ready for a gen-AI article filled with vague woolly sentences”.
Wasn't there anything relevant available? Screenshots of the new tools in a before/after collage perhaps?