toyg

Not sure if the couple had made trips to Tuscany before

Dude, they were the royal family of Tuscany. They lived there. Which is why this test is not conclusive: sure, they had malaria, but at the time it was pretty common in the region and they likely had it for a long time.

A meeting space to discuss business services, and a terminal for people who insist on depositing cash. They are definitely not a customer support terminal.

This is the same in urban Europe, eh. But over here, particularly in Northern countries, basketball playgrounds are mostly used for football. In the end, if you want to play football you just need a ball and goals, which are typically simulated with a few (school) backpacks or jumpers standing for posts. It's the most popular sport in Africa for a reason...

I think the main reasons football is still lagging in the US (despite the undeniable recent growth) continue to be the same: the main sports (basketball, baseball, and gridiron) are culturally rooted in the mainstream in a way that nothing else can match.

Where do you buy reliable SD cards without overpaying? At the moment it feels like I can waste a little money on AliExpress, waste more money on Amazon, or be taxed to finance the existence of some outdated brick&mortar chain...

It's a bit of a paradox: burial rites are among the earliest and most fundamental elements of any society we know of; but long-term maintenance of burial sites has always been a challenge. That's probably because, after all the fanfare to honour the dead (which is mostly a way to minimize immediate social disruption), everyone eventually moves on.

FIFA pays federations on a result basis. It's then up to the individual federations to redistribute that money as you see fit. As you can imagine, a lot of that does not end up in the athletes' pockets... I believe clubs get some (low) compensation for injuries, but it's also common knowledge that players who play deep into summer will end up performing poorly the following season.

World Cups have to alternate with continental competitions (Copa America, Asian Cup, European Cup, Africa Cup of Nations) which are on similar cycles. They could technically be held every two years (and current FIFA leadership is pushing towards that), but federations and clubs are resistant (because every summer tournament places even more stress on an already-long club season, and it would likely devalue other competitions).

They need to be updated anyway, and always have been: somewhere in the world, someone changes time rules basically every year, or even every few months. All current OSes already have support for stating "locale X will not use daylight savings / will always use daylight saving, starting from day yyyymmdd at hhmm" through simple updates.

I understand your point, but it's slightly exaggerated. At least in Europe, any decently-sized city will have at least one of any of those. Not as many as there used to be, sure, but at least one.

Yeah, the issues of political critique that were key to early cyberpunk have largely been lost. It's partially the fault of the first Blade Runner movie, which exploded the genre while also sanitizing it of the harshest elements.

Even without reaching for fantasy, the real world has plenty of examples of "regulated crime" with various degrees of officialdom. From the Japanese Yakuza of the Showa era, to the mafia of postwar Italy, governments will often prefer to deal with organised crime by striking deals and agreeing to shared rules of engagement.

Until someone will figure out that, according to some spreadsheet, outsourcing it all would result in Big Savings That Would Help The Share Price, and the carousel will start again.

Capitalism will capitalism.

Surrendering to an aggressor will let the aggressor get what they want, hence making war more appealing. So it's coherent for anti-war people to resist and make it as hard as possible for an aggressor. Even Gandhi justified defensive war.

I suspect the latter will come way before the former...

Strong for crime, strong for the causes of crime.

Compulsory Apple-defending post is compulsory.

Non-replaceable batteries are worse for consumers and worse for the environment. The fact that you "do not miss" a better world, does not mean it is not better.

The layoffs are irrelevant to the discourse. It's typically considered by management to be good, for mature companies, to periodically fire as many employees as they can sustain without visibly impacting operations, and then re-hire cheaper workers only where strictly necessary. This allows them to keep costs down, reduce risks of excessive worker entrenchment, and overcome the drawbacks of contingent hiring-sprees.

Excuses for these exercises will vary, AI is just the latest; but it's fundamentally just a labor-containment/efficiency-seeking strategy.

That's by design. It's like asking cable companies to only have this or that channel, or netflix to let you pay just for standup comedy specials. The bundle is the bundle, the hits subsidize the misses.

Some are more exposed than others.

It's not even just science. Anyone producing anything digital is now heavily incentivized to keep their wares away from the public internet, in a way we've not seen before. Drop any sample of your unique production online, and the AIs will obsolete you in days. That is a massive loss for people looking for inspiration and guidance.

Qwen 3.6 and 3.5...

I tried using Zed but with local models it constantly breaks on tool calls. I wanted to like it but the smell of vibing is just too much.

Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached

This is what some Europeans governments are effectively trying to achieve, although hamfistedly (as governments typically do).

We definitely need a replacement for Twitter/X for mainstream journalists, politicians, and other leaders, to interact in.

yeah, the worst that could happen was some IRC shenanigans and getting a bunch of unexpected pizza deliveries. SWATing and doxxing were very rare, and nobody would try to get you fired or ostracized for saying the wrong thing.

Codenames are meant to tickle the pride of this or that manager, not be useful to customers.

Because he's now a Traitor, an Un-person, so every sin can be safely attributed to him without losing faith in the glorious Party.

Such is the world of Apple fans.

In some ways I would say it could even increase trust: if the guy is a privacy absolutist, ultra-libertarian, "my business is not the state's business" type, his VPN products are likely to be pretty good.

On the other hand, he might have other strong right-wing views that users don't agree with, and which might take precedence in one's set of priorities. If I like football and they like football, but they also want to kill me because of <other reason>, I don't think I'd want to give them my money.

Yeah, freudian slip.

In many ways, that's how a lot of people feel in modern Britain: everywhere you see signs of XIX century grandeur, but "on the streets" life can feel depressingly backwards.

It's not only July and August; January, May, June, and Mars, are named after Roman gods; February and April after Roman rituals; and September to December after Roman numerals (7 to 10th month, as they were when the calendar first started).