The good news is that Roku has also introduced a recommended content row, that will compile picks from across various streaming services and use AI to point customers toward new shows and movies they might like.

How the fuck does this merit the description "good news?" Here, let me translate this for you:

"We're going to take away the channel selection menu that you put together and prioritized according to your own wishes, and replace it with paid placements and whatever our half-baked Mechanical Turk chundered up. And replace the lower-third of the main screen with video ads."

While you're at it, why not dump dogshit on my plate and call it chocolate cake?

John Oliver on Last Week Tonight did a whole show on McKinsey. The service they actually provide, as has been noted earlier in these comments, is a way for management to deflect responsibility for what they were always planning to do, anyway, which is usually budget cuts and layoffs, and/or massive boosts to executive pay packages.

Here's the show.

Cheap reliable oil bad.

Read up on the term "external cost", then actually think about the implications for more than 750ms.

You should then realize that oil is not, and never has been, cheap, but rather has been monstrously costly, and all those costs are coming due.

This (*cough*) game was essentially invented almost fourteen years ago by Alex Steacy of LoadingReadyRun -- as a joke.

And then someone actually wrote it.

Google's geniuses decided that switching tabs is something one needs to do with a mouse.

CTRL-PgDown / CTRL-PgUp. Geez...

And before you ask: Reposition the current tab using CTRL-SHIFT-PgDn / CTRL-SHIFT-PgUp.

"...Although I am unable to go into specifics, we had to evaluate our priorities and had to make the difficult decision to discontinue the service."

"Sensors detect Microsoft OneDrive contract, Captain..."

Narrator: "It was not, in fact, cheaper to host their files in The Cloud."

Someone smart with an RPi and a bit of code can intercept NNTP queries.

"Um, Actually..."

You meant NTP, the Network Time Protocol. NNTP is Network News Transfer Protocol, used to pass around USENET posts.

You'd have to take in a fair bit of formaldehyde for it to be a problem.

Define "fair bit."

Does the outgassing from petrochemical foam, force-fed through your nasal cavities and into your lungs for eight hours every night, constitute a "fair bit?"

Incidentally, a circle with a radius of 60 miles centered around the VMWare campus in Palo Alto includes: Monterey, most of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Salinas, Hollister, Manteca, a fair chunk of Stockton, Fairfield, Rocktram (Napa just barely escapes), Novato, Point Reyes Station, and the Farallon Islands.

"Tell me you don't live around here, without saying you don't live around here..."

On December 1, there was a story on SFGate -- the online component to the San Francisco Chronicle -- covering an email Broadcom management sent to all employees announcing:

• They're going to lay off 1267 workers,
• A mandatory return-to-office policy.

Said Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, "Remote work does not exist at Broadcom," but then clarified that sales workers and employees living more than 60 miles away from a Broadcom office would be able to stay remote. "Any other exception, you better learn how to walk on water, I'm serious."

The mandatory return-to-office reportedly went in to effect December 4. Now it seems his latest Genius Plan is to squeeze his customers, thinking he's got them over a barrel.

You'll forgive me if I'm not the least bit motivated to apply to work for the guy.

Earlier this year, I saw a string-based pin setter for the first time (Lucky Strike, San Francisco), and was appalled such a thing existed. Based on what I could see from my end, I initially thought the design's appeal was that it consumed less physical depth than free-standing pin setters -- a potentially desirable characteristic where square footage is at premium prices. It does make sense that it would consume less electricity, as there's no pin lifter that has to run continuously, but it never occurred to me that maintenance costs were lower (although I'd like to see numbers on this).

Yes, European bowling alleys have used string-based setters for a long time, but bear in mind that most European bowling is of the nine-pin variety, which uses much smaller balls and pins. Ten-pin alleys in Europe still use the free-standing pin setters.

And yes, the pin action is very different. The movement of the tethers against each other can pull down pins that otherwise would have been left standing. I witnessed this at least twice. And I can't imagine anyone picking up a 7-10 split with one of these things.

And maybe it's just me (and it probably is), but there seems a certain inauthenticity -- a certain chintziness -- to a string-based pin setter, like I'm playing with a cheap replica for kids rather than the real thing for grown-ups. ("Hey! Are you calling European nine-pins chintzy?" No, just... Unfamiliar. I'm sure there are whole schools of thought on how best to use the tethers to your advantage, and which tether materials are "better" than others. It clearly works for them.)