Agreed - I haven't been to a library or held a physical book in my hand in probably over a decade. Does that make me an illiterate prole because I haven't been to a library in that long?
Why should I need one when I have much more information on my computer? We are living in the 1950's science fiction age almost, where everybody has a "terminal" - and on mine I read Charles Babbages' "Passages from the Life of a Philosopher" - I would be suprised if my local library carried such a book.

Nobody needs to physically turn up at a building to read words on little scraps of paper bound up together any more. Every child over 5 in the first world has a terminal with practically any book they may want on it. The problem lies somewhere else - Tik Tok, or perhaps in the past the "Jocks" would be out playing football now the "Jock" types are posing on Instagram - or perhaps even illiteracy.

I work at a school and I think we may rely on spellcheck too often - if you read an average, to lower ability, 13 year old's work when done in pen and paper, they now spell just by choosing phonemes they think match how the word is spelled - they are so used to approximating words and having spellcheck do the rest. So perhaps Idiocracy really was correct with "Entrans 12" on the Costco.

But a library wouldn't fix this unless we forced students to go there, we try that with school already.

Damn, I pity you being bedridden, at least 3 or so years ago there was Youtube as an escape from the lame "mainstream" content; but even now Youtube is being filled with low effort, AI voiced clickbait nonsense! 5 Years ago I thought the concept of spending your time watching somebody else online playing a video game was the lamest thing ever; now it seems it is some of the most entertaining content out there!

As for TV, my favourite TV show is probably still Star Trek - TNG - nothing has beaten it in over 30 years. Part of that might be grouchy old man syndrome, but it's not like my favourite music is from that era - there is still plenty of great new music from the 2020's being made that I love - what is it with TV and film that has gone so terribly wrong?

It looks like the AI distinguishes individual characters, it's not an LLM so it has no understanding of language itself - so it wouldn't hallucinate "Circenses" as "Circumference" - rather you may get "Circenscs" if the latter e is malformed. I'd imagine any human proofreader could sort out any hallucinations / misreadings of characters. Looking forward to seeing what they recover!

Every Helldesk I've either worked at or heard of operates to these principles; I worked tech support for a large DSL ISP just over 10 years ago; the training was abysmal, showing you basic Windows principles. They would hire any normie off of the streets as the pay was minimum wage.

You had to sign in on your phone, being 1 second or more late resulted in a warning. This phone did all the timekeeping, and calls came automatically through to you - you had to take them and could not cancel. As soon as one call ended, you had 20 seconds of downtime before the next one. You were also expected to write a detailed report on that call into the system.

You had 10 minutes of "personal" time, but to take your 30 minute lunch you had to phone up and ask permission from the front desk. They'd refuse probably 50% of the time depending on call volumes.
I remember my first call; a couple phoned up asking for help changing their router password. I'd never seen the router interface before and fumbled around blindly. There was a 20 minute call length, when I hit 20 minutes I had to tell the couple "sorry, phone back up". This interface was a custom ISP one that was just awful.
The team managers were useless of course; you were told to phone them up for help. If you actually dared to do this they would yell at you for being useless.

This is par for the course for a lot of level 1 helpdesk. If you think this Facebook environment is outrageous or somehow an outlier, it is not. I was just amazed people had put up with 10+ years of working in that horrible environment. I lasted 8 months and had to quit. I now run the IT for a local school, I work 10 weeks less for 10K a year more.
They ended up relocating over 100 miles away, telling the employees they'd have to commute or quit (if you quit, no redundancy). The managers weren't smiling then.

The problem I have found with DMARC, is that a lot of spammers get round this by trying to make the FROM: name something a victim will fall for - as a lot of e-mail clients, Apples in particular, do not automatically show the e-mail address.

A spam campaign targetted my company. The e-mails sent out were forged Mr CEO ceo@mycompany.com. As they were forged, from a non DMARC IP address, these were all rejected, job done, DMARC worked great.
So the spammers simply just changed to Mr CEO comp@account.ug - no any normal person would dismiss this as fake immediately, but now a lot of e-mail clients do not bother to show the e-mail address. So, it shows up as e-mail from "Mr CEO" and the user assumes the e-mail is legit. Nothing DMARC can do.

So, once again, the UIX retards have caused a massive problem because of their very poor UI design, for the sake of streamlining out an e-mail address?

People in the UK now tend to "need" a big SUV for their two children. Strange as I remember my family getting by just fine with 3 children in a 3 door Peugeot hatchback.
In reality it's all about status and having a nice big car in the drive. Plus of course a lot of families now are just plain fat - fat cars, for fat families.

SUV's and other high vehicles are dangerous IMHO, especially for families, as they are so prone to rolling over at motorway/dual carriage speeds.

This truck IMO is too outlandish to be a status symbol, which is what trucks are. It looks like that weird solar wagon that Rick Morianis drove in those "Honey I shrunk the kids" movies. Only hardcore geeks would have something like this

It looks like he had the LOD setting on his 3D renderer set at maximum distance.
Or that he stole the model from one of the units from Total Annihilation.

Actual video that has been shot in 60fps looks lovely; although for high fantasy movies there are complaints that it looks "too real" - actors on a set. This should be improved with better sets as people get used to working in 60fps.

24fps or 30fps video that has been "upscaled" or interpolated to 60fps looks utter garbage. To me, it looks like those old videos shot in the 1920's with handcranked cameras - what was smooth motion now seems to change speed randomly, slightly speeding up then slowing down. It just looks uncanny, I can't believe anyone ever thought this nonsense was ever a good idea?

What? Why?

I do grant that Switzerland and the USA do have different populations; but I wouldn't argue it is the size of the population. I would argue that it is the general ignorance, childishness, and selfishness of the average American that is the main difference.
It is such a shame that the USA rules the world. If they were just some po'dunk country like NK, the civilized world could just point and laugh. At the moment though, millions have to suffer due to the USA's braindead (and often outright illegal) policies.

His comment was a little rambling so I found it hard to understand, but I got the impression that he is talking about "Pay to Win" attracting psychopaths; whereas a fair fight (say games like Quake 3 where every player is equal, or indeed Chess) which is PvP, attracts normal people looking for a challenge.
Same thing with cheaters = psychopaths enjoy going on, cheating and beating other people over and over again - whereas normal people would find this fun for a few matches then deeply boring. Of course whether any of this is true or not...

I enjoy a good game of Quake 3 and I'd hope I'm not a psychopath, indeed I work at a school and occasionally we'll have a game of Quake with the students. I've never been into the PubG / Battle Royale kind of games as every game seemed to be 15 minutes of wandering around picking up loot only to die to an unseen sniper in 5 seconds.

Of course as others pointed out, the real reason behind this ban is probably censorship. Either old people fearing what they don't understand, or they don't want the poor lower caste individuals knowing too much "truth" outside their village. I wonder if they'll start censoring websites critical of the State, Caste and Hinduism next - then we will know for sure.

Why is it that a lot of rich old men seem to be unnaturally interested in the fluids of young teenage boys?
Especially those on the Religious Right. The more they preach Jesus and Moral Values, the more likely they are to have an interest in these young boys. Injecting their blood is one of the least perverse things these guys are doing.

In 50 years time American workers will go back to living in Company barracks, and being paid with company scrip. They will be working 6am - 9pm, monday to saturday, with a half day on Sunday generously provided. Any sick days will not get paid, and there will be no vacation pay.
There will be vacations allowed, but due to the cost of living in the company barracks nobody will take any off, as nobody will have a bank balance over $1000 USD.
A handful of cartels will control all of this, and any upstarts will get squashed immediately. e.g. New guy has idea for a new car? Well he cannot buy rubber, steel etc because only the Big Cartel can buy from the rubber suppliers (if they disobey, they no longer get any Cartel orders) - and the State will allow this as long as the campaign contributions flow in.

And the Americans will still rant on about how great their system is, and how the free market cures everything.
I like it when they say - those fancy Euros and their 5 weeks vacation and 40 hour workweeks, what pussies, Our US GDP is twice theirs! How does that high GDP serve them when they are sleeping at the office most nights?

It is sad really, I feel for the US workers but they are all so selfish and so ignorant they will never organise or vote differently. A guy bullied them back in high school? Well we need the free market so he can work like a slave in a crap job, and I can feel superior than him for being paid $4 an hour more than him

tldr = Google are becoming the new Microsoft.

Ultimately, you hire people from Microsoft and other large companies (plus MBA's etc), and you act surprised when your company behaves like these large companies? What happened to the community of enthusiastic developers like "the old days"?
Remember when Microsoft were being praised for being a "little startup" that took down IBM? look what they became..
Someone should come up with a name for the cycle of - company produces good product and grows; "management" get brought in to improve profits; product suffers. users jump to a new product developed by a different company. this company grows and brings in "management" to improve profits.....

You can tell Google have been infiltrated by morons because a) They have hired ex-Microsoft employees; b) they listen to these idiotic UX "experts" and have gotten rid of vertical scrollbars; because everyone needs to know gestures now as gestures are so much more intuitive than something you can see on a screen...

A personal rant about Google here (tl;dr Google software is becoming as much as a pain as MS software) - I do the IT for a School and Google are getting just as user hostile as MS ever were. Their attitude is now "what we want matters more than what the users want" (Google got big by providing what users wanted, and Microsoft is getting smaller for ignoring this - e.g. MS browser share is now 3%. 3%! can you imagine that 15 years ago?).

I ended up recommending Bing to my users a few months ago because Google kept prompting users to fill in a Captcha every time they did a search - which sounds fair enough but a Captcha involving picking street signs, 10 - 15 times, for each page of search results? Is that the best they can come up with?

Our Proxy IP address was showing "Bot-like activity" - I have checked our logs for evidence of malware or other bogus searches (found none) - I can see how a thousand searches an hour for "Fortnite Skins" seems like bot activity, so I can't criticise them for this too much - but why isn't there any human support where I can inform them that we are a school and our search profile might be different? our IP address is even on an educational-only ISP.
Instead you just get to an FAQ telling you to run a virus scan because their algorithms are never wrong, never mismatch search patterns; basically they do not care.

Ultimately it is their software, their servers and they can do what they want. Such it is that I can also switch our default search provider over to Bing, and inform my users that Google software is basically just as bad as Microsoft software.

I think the only thing that isn't dying is this story; I've read an article talking about how Death itself will be cured "any day now" for the past 20 years, and we are still nowhere near closer to a cure than when Indiana Jones set out looking for the Holy Grail.
We can't even cure Male Pattern Baldness, where the cure has been 5 years away for 50 years.

One other thing, if a cure does come out I'll be glad to take it; if only to find out what discoveries they make out in the Universe. It is strange to see that the average Slashdot poster has such a bad life that they would welcome Death; is the stereotype about the average Slashdot user true? or is it simply because the average Slashdot user comes from the USA and so would only be working for that 300 years anyway?

What is it with these websites pushing through terrible "redesigns"?

They get pages and pages of user hatred, and yet these CEO's seem to blindly trust these UI "Experts" anyway? Here's a hint - if your UI Expert says "Users don't know what they want; they will stick with it - they did with Youtube" - fire them. Users stuck with Youtube despite the UI changes (Youtube was heavily entrenched) - not because of them.
Reddit is going through a similar thing now - redesigns that appear to have been implemented by people who have no idea what the site is about, who it is for, and how it is used - it is almost as if they are designing to a hipster tablet template (oh right, it is because that is what they are doing).

At least Slashdot had the brains to dump Beta (at least I haven't seen it in years despite almost never logging in)

Or - and it just occured to me - is it some kind of monetization experiment all of these sites are pushing through? (it all makes sense)