Maybe I'm just a weirdo but I am very annoyed at them for trying to take away the option of local-only accounts. Why do I need to let them be a third party to everything I do starting with logging in? Nobody asked for this.

At this stage, the best way forward is to apply the "Debian" patch to your system to restore local accounts, and strip out the all the daft AI guff

Now US manufacturers can go even more all-on on the stupidly-large vehicles they sell domestically (because of higher profit margins.)

Of course, it means they won't be able to sell anything in Europe or Asia.

If you can get your AI-powered robots to commit your war crimes for you, I think you get out of jail free?

I am lucky enough to live a 10-minute walk from my nearest public library branch. I can borrow books, CDs, DVDs, video games, jigsaw puzzles and even musical instruments. They even have a maker space with 3-D printers you can use for just the cost of the filament. They also have a couple of passes to get into various local museums and galleries for free. (Those are popular, so you have to book them way in advance to have any chance of getting them.)

It's a fantastic resource.

The Chinese-made cars being sold in Australia by brands like BTD and MG and GWMHaval are not "unreliable junk".

That's actually a good question. Inks have changed somewhat over the past 5,000 years, and there's no particular reason to think that tattoo inks have been equally mobile across this timeframe.

But now we come to a deeper point. Basically, tattoos (as I've always understand it) are surgically-engineered scars, with the scar tissue supposedly locking the ink in place. It's quite probable that my understanding is wrong - this isn't exactly an area I've really looked into in any depth, so the probability of me being right is rather slim. Nonetheless, if I had been correct, then you might well expect the stuff to stay there. Skin is highly permeable, but scar tissue less so. As long as the molecules exceed the size that can migrate, then you'd think it would be fine.

That it isn't fine shows that one or more of these ideas must be wrong.

So are scars, but people still skateboard or rock climb or whatever. If you care that much about what you might think about it in 10 years then a tattoo is probably not for you. It's an imprint left by a decision that past you made on current you. It's just a little more intentional than that time you decided to dive for a fly ball and landed on a broken bottle or whatever.

Yeah, current you might not align 100% with past you's choices, but that's life. You integrate them into your identity as best you can and mostly you don't think about it, and when you do it's a nice reminder of where you were in a certain point in your life. Or it's just a pretty decoration that you got because you like the art.

With scars they happened because the person getting them were enjoying the activity that generated them. If you enjoy rock climbing, and you get scars from it, it's a mark you got doing something you enjoy.

Meanwhile, getting a tattoo of say, your girlfriend might seem like a good idea now, but in 5 years when you break up not so much. Unlike a scar, which you might consider a battle wound from when you enjoyed rock climbing but no longer do so, the tattoo now gives you bad memories and removing it is expensive and painful.

So yes, I don't have a tattoo, because there's nothing I can think of that I'd want forever.

Not with a tattoo gun, but yes, microneedle delivery is a new experimental way to deliver vaccines. It's less like a tattoo gun and more like a nicotine patch or a bandaid, though.

Can you let Tim Cook know that?

I'm an Apple fan, but the money they charge for internal storage is ridiculous, especially given that I can buy an external SSD with 2 TB for like $150 if I shop around a bit.

The cynic in me wants to say that they see "intelligence" and go "great, it has something I don't, let's just 100% trust it".

The social critic in me wants to say that it's due to the gigantic hype about AI and how it'll revolutionize everything, replace everyone and solve all problems.

And the tech/security guy in me wants to say "doh, people do dumb shit. What else is new?"

All true, but it should be added this isn't a recent thing.

Oh, the AI buzz is recent, but MS has had quality control problems in flagship software for decades. How many control panels are there? How many "kinda" work? How many versions are we going on with that kind of nonsense? And instead of fixing this, they focus on AI and...notepad...for some fucking reason.

There weren't even that many good ones for Latin languages, until Google started releasing some under free licences.

Microsoft actually released a set of "Core Fonts for the Web" back in 1996, which while proprietary was available for free distribution with certain caveats.

Linux systems all had a way to get them - they often consist of a script to download the original font packages and then extracted them for use on Linux desktops. This greatly improved the typography so it was popular on Linux systems to install them. But you had to do it as the end user and the license restricted providers from pre-installing them.

They're not longer readily available but have been archived so many times there are many sites still hosting them. Apple licensed the fonts from Microsoft so Macs have them installed by default.

Google however was the first to make a bunch of open-source fonts.

It's only recently did tattoos go from underground shame to acceptance by most of the public. Probably started around the 90s, and from there the popularity of them took off.

Before that, usually a person with a tattoo was someone mixed up in bad dealings you wanted to avoid.

But since general perception has changed, they've gotten a lot more accepted and more people get them in places that are a lot more visible (people who got them usually had them hidden under clothing). In more conservative circles, this is still the norm and most hide it under clothing for work.

The real problem with tattoos is they're permanent, and I can't really tell you anything I liked 10 years ago I still like today, which means "forever" is kind of reserved for something I'm not quite sure what yet. Sure you can get tattoos removed, but that's often far more painful and far less effective than not getting it in the first place.

Then there's the body issue - well, a Navy sailor who get a ship tattooed on their body puts on a few pounds and the tattoo they got when they were young and fit looks gross and distorted once they are in their 40s and has a beer belly. Or as someone wrote, "A ship with a bulbous bow, now has only grown more bulbous over the years".

It's just something I haven't gotten because "forever" is a long time. And I'm sure tattoo artists have lots of stories of girlfriends now enemies they had to alter.