I’d rather smell like a rose than smell like shit.

Science isn’t a belief, it’s a method.

What’s the difference between an application and a program?

I wonder if someone could make an ADA or CVAA complaint on that basis? Technically the dub isn’t matching the captions, and as a result, someone who is hard of hearing isn’t getting the same experience. Someone who is completely deaf won’t have a bad experience, but someone who has a disability where they can’t hear very well, or have problems comprehending spoken words might have a problem.

Adriana Smith, a registered nurse at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital, was about 9 weeks pregnant when she started having bad headaches in February. The 30-year-old went to Northside Hospital for help but was released after being given medication, according to her mother, April Newkirk.

From the headline I thought it was a situation where she was brain dead and it was 6 months in and the foetus only needed a little while longer to become viable and, so long as she wanted the child, they could maybe have kept it going until they could prepare for all the necessary care a severely premature baby would need. 9 weeks though?! That’s absurd. That’s just pigheaded stupidity!

Someone should sneak in and pull the plug, or the family should withdraw consent to treatment or something (I don’t know the laws).

Trees take ages to grow, and their root systems damage buildings and pavements.

Or when you’ve finished about 80% of your task, but the remaining 20% might as well be millions of miles away because it’s almost impossible to finish anything.

I will actively go and do other people’s work for them, just to avoid the remaining 20% of the work I need to do. It isn’t even hard work! I could get it done in an hour if I put my mind to it! My brain will simply not turn towards what needs doing!

Sensitivity and fellowship, yet my (former) friend who is a big stoner has gone all-in on conspiracy theories and is championing the Reform party in the UK because Labour are apparently race traitors. Guess weed can’t do all the lifting.

You’re hiring junior programmers for $145k a year? Americans have too much money, I swear. The rest of the world has juniors on less than a third of that if they’re in Europe.

You’d think you could have doubled down on the joke and revealed that the person on the other end of the phone wasn’t actually a person at all, it was an AI.

Yeah but Ælfwine got there by accident, and wasn’t escorted by elves.

It’s neither, it’s the Will of Eru Illuvatar that determines whether you can travel the Straight Road or not. Ælfwine travelled the Straight Road and landed at Tol Eressëa in 869AD after fleeing the Danes, and he was a Man, not an Elf.

What’s recreational about it?

“Oh boy! I feel amazing! I can get out of bed in the night without falling over my floordrobe!”

Yeah, sure… Super fun.

How the fuck can a faucet be smart? It’s a valve! It turns one way, or it turns the other way! It is only slightly less dumb than the counter top!

Why would you want to though? I can understand the retro market because there is software like games that either won’t run very well, or won’t run at all on modern hardware. I’m in the market for a ‘powerful’ machine circa 2003-2005 for that exact reason.

When it comes to machines made in 2015? I’m not sure there’s a lot you can run on those machines that you couldn’t on modern hardware, apart from Windows 11.

I guess you could use them for things like media servers, but it would have to be phenomenally cheap, as in cheaper than cheap modern hardware.

Personally, my rule is a 10 year gap is old, a 20 year gap is retro.

Trade it in to who? Who’s buying PCs that can’t be used? I mean there’s the retro market, but AFAIK they aren’t buying anything after Windows XP.

I wouldn’t call that a particularly insightful observation. Ever since humanity settled down in agricultural societies there have been governments, and with governments come a monopoly on force, so obviously governments have killed more people than anything else. Any organisation of humans is gonna have at least some threat of lethal force backing it.