Small correction... the renaming happened in 2024, not 2025.

Yes, it's related. Worldcoin was renamed to World last October.

Good question, that probably should be addressed in TFA, but isn't. Have a cookie, assuming you're not blocking them. :)

The Earth was exiting a period of relative geological and climatic stability and entering a cooling phase, which would have helped strengthen the AMOC. This process was then enhanced by a large scale volcanic eruption, thought to be in North America, with the ejecta from that and a series of subsequent eruptions leading to a significant deviation from the trendline, a mini-iceage known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LILIA) similar to the Maunder Minimum, a multi-decade period of cooler than statistically expected temperatures (up to 2.7C cooler than average in European summers). This is reflected in tree-ring records which show highly stunted growth for the time, ice cores from polar ice cores, and some of the remaining writings from the period that describe widespread crop failures.

The issue here might be that the hotel is legit, but their internal reservation system has been compromised. They get the booking.com confirmation, enter it into their system to assign you the relevant room, and the scammers use that info to try and stiff you. The scammer has your details, and combined with the fact that it's a fresh booking, a made up request for some clarity/additional confirmation followed by a request for money is going to press all the buttons for an almost perfect phish.

It apparently happens a lot, and it's outside of booking.com's control (although the hack in TFS is obviously on them), so all booking.com can do it advise you that they don't reach out view email or WhatsApp, and all you can do it pay attention to the booking details on the main booking.com site and only interact through that. Or use a different hotel booking site.

Don't try and report these to booking.com, btw, as you found out, they clearly give zero fucks. I had that kind of scam happen with one booking out of four on a trip (obvious scammer reached out on WhatsApp) and ended up going around and around in circles on booking.com to try and find a way to flag the fact that there was a compromise, probably on the hotel's side. After 3 laps I gave up, cancelled all four bookings, blocked the spammer on WhatsApp, and rebooked using a different agent swapping out the compromised hotel for another one. I can only assume that booking.com is definitely doing their part to ensure the enshittification of the Internet.

Totally agree with the rationale for the blocking; no sane company is going to willingly publish info that could harm them. Can't really argue with that at all; their site, their rules, and all that. What the First Amendment says about free speech is regarding the Government, not public entitiies like Meta, so they absolutely have the right to decline to provide these lawyers with an online megaphone and soapbox to stand on.

On your question though, it's quite likely no one authorized them. Assuming you're not blocking ads outright, then any ads you do see are basically the result of an in-browser bidding war to see which company is willing to pay the most (still tiny fractions of a cent) to get you to look at their ad instead of someone else's based on the info Meta has on your demographics and interests. Meta has a demonstrably loose grasp of ethics, so if you are thinking they are vetting every ad's contents before it gets accepted into the auction mill rather than just relying on companies to comply with the conditions Meta set and dealing with any that don't if any complaints get sufficient traction, then you have a radically different take on Meta than I do.

At best, they've probably just changed the Ts&Cs to put a clause in preventing ads of this type, or blacklisted the companies that were pushing them.

I find I can do everything I need with old and OWA, and OWA is only really needed for some SP/group stuff that will probably never make it into "old". I'd switch to Thunderbird, but that's coming up short in some areas too and OWA alone won't make up the shortfall there, so my current approach is the least painful for getting stuff done, no matter how much that chafes. I find "New" to be a confusing and broken mess that is missing several key features needed to interact with other Microsoft systems (FFS!), and have fed that back to Microsoft in no uncertain terms every single time I've found myself switched to it and have immediately switched back using the feedback form they give you. No real idea on the Store version as I've only tried it once in the hope it might do everything I need (it didn't), but I hear that's awful too.

So, yeah, GP listed three products, which are the "local" versions, then there is the OWA version, so Microsoft has four totally different products that use the "Outlook" name by my count. Maybe they employed a former cola exec to lead the product development, or something; throw flavours at the wall and see what sticks? Store seems to be the "Diet" version, so maybe next up will "Cherry Outlook" and "Lime Outlook"... Personally, I really want "Outlook Zero", which will be me uninstalling it for good once I can switch to anything else.

There's also Outlook Web Access (OWA) that you use through a browser. All are borked in various ways, but the cherry on the cake is that most of them have some functionality that at least some of the others do not, especially if you are in an Exchange/Sharepoint/Teams environment where you may need to switch between different Outlooks depending on what you want to do.

Even allowing for the fact they wanted to rebuild "classic" in a more modern framework and shipped before it had anywhere near feature parity, I honestly can't even begin imagine what kind of decision process, or lack thereof, must have gone on in Microsoft to get them to this point...

Lets say you have a trendline for the expected impacts of the changing climate. It has error bars to cover the expected deviations caused by short term weather patterns and, since the variables become less certain the further you go into the future, those error bars get further and further from the central trend line as you go. Typical trend prediction graph for any number of fields, in otherwords.

Now, lets say your worst case error bars for 2026 allowed for a deviation of upto 5%, but when the data lands it's actually closer 10% (not the actual numbers, BTW). I think your comments would pretty much align with those quoted in TFA, and especially so since this is only one year out from last year's known data and the margin of error on the trend line is at its smallest. For those that can't figure it out for themselves, and assuming this isn't just an extreme outlier, what that implies is that the models that many sceptics dismiss as "alarmist" might actually be too conservative and the future trajectory could be *far* worse than even the most vocal of the climate change advocates are saying it will be.

Similar concerns here, both for F-droid apps and DJI's - which require installing from an APK downloaded directly from DJI to get the latest version. I only have a handful of apps I sideload, and when I'm not updating those I tend to have the ability to sideload turned off for the modicum of additional security afforded against inadvertant user error. If I either need to go through this 24-hour process every time I update the apps, or leave sideloading permanantly enabled (which I'd be more likely to do, I think), then this is yet another user-unfriendly move by Google that is almost certainly more about being self-serving than anything else.

If I wanted a walled garden, I'd have bought an iPhone.

International travel. You can get one of these, put a limited set of files you need on it, travel with it, and if it gets damaged, lost, or analyzed by customs, then it's no big deal. When you get home, you can wipe it and then it's ready for the next trip.

While OpenAI may have modified their contract to remove mass surveillance on US citizens, there is curiously no mention of the other reason Anthropic was dropped by the Pentagon - using AI for autonomous lethal weapons. So it looks like they're still going to do that part. What could possibly go wrong?

This concept has been around for a while...

It would need to be as close to like-for-like as possible or people are going to reject the results, so presumably if they've grown rump steak, say, then they'd need to not just compare it with some actual rump steak, but prepare and cook the two cuts at the same time in the same way. The ideal result here for them here is either "lab grown is better" or "can't tell them apart", after which buying decisions should come down to bang-per-buck, and that might even hold if lab-grown isn't quite as tasty, but is sufficiently cheaper to keep it in consideration.

Sure, they could - and probably will - try and stack the deck in their favour. It is marketing after all. But that can only go so far; if they try and compare a premium lab-grown cut with born-and-bred offal, they're going to get called on that and for many people that will mean that they won't get a second chance, ever. Pepsi was a mostly a pure taste test of two otherwise identical fizzy liquids, but food is really about all of the senses so if they really want to sell this and overcome the ick factor, they'll have precut bite-size pieces of meat ready that look the same, cook them on that stand, and let you compare the appearance, smell, texture, and hear the sizzle while cooking as well as taste the samples.

Supposedly, pork. "Long pig" is the literal translation of the word that was used in many South Pacific cannibal cultures and was used by European explorers to refer to the practice.

It needs a version of the "Pepsi challange" blind taste test from yesteryear. I'd certainly take that if given the opportunity, but have yet to find anywhere with the stuff to try in the first place, let alone to do so in a blind test. If it's equally as good as they claim (and the science says it *is* the same, right down to the cellular level), then they shouldn't have any problem convincing people that it's a viable option to regular farmed meat, and if they can do that, then the cheapest option should win in many cases.

I suspect there may be some legitimate corner cases about "free range", "corn fed", and similar dietry or lifestyle things that will have at least some effect on the texture of the meat (e.g. buff animals vs. couch potato animals), but maybe there are ways to replicate at least some of that in the lab too?