Discovery is one good example, yes. There was a particular scene when they introduced a non-binary character and I think the two gay characters used to make the introduction must have said "they" and "them" at least 50 times in about 2 minutes. Non-binary people prefer different pronouns, do you see? The irony is that actually advocating for non-traditional sexual or gender identities being normalised in the future would have looked more like three people turning up for work and doing their jobs without anyone noticing or mentioning how they identify in any non-professional context at all.

Another example of recent unwatchably bad writing is the CBS crime dramas. I don't know what kind of over-woke 20-somethings they've been filling the writers' rooms with since COVID but oh lordy have they hit every cliche in the book on some of those shows. Again the irony is that they could have written all kinds of interesting and creative stories where some of these social issues were a factor in what happened at the start of the episode and/or how things worked out in the end and explored them from different and possibly conflicting perspectives. But mostly it's just regular character X reaching the awkward part in the script where the actor spontaneously gives a 45-second monologue about the injustice of something as regular character Y sagely shakes their head and responds at the end with an affirmation that the bad thing is bad. Yawn.

I'm a Brit so maybe my reaction to a lot of the Americanised gung-ho and identity politics stuff is different, but if I'm watching an action movie or a buddy cop show or a sci-fi or fantasy series, I'm probably doing it to let off some steam and relax. Some of the writing in these genres over the past maybe 5 years has become so horribly in-your-face-preachy that even long-running franchises that I used to enjoy have become unwatchable. It's not making some profound statement and educating society, it's just tedious, bad writing and plots worthy of a five-year-old. Some of the people making these movies and shows need to remember that they're not priests giving sermons, they're entertainers who need to entertain their audience if they want to stay employed.

I did chuckle when I saw an interview with some A-lister talking about how the unions need to force the streaming services to pay writers and actors what they're worth.

I mean, yes, many of the online content providers don't pay on such favourable terms as some of the older distribution models. And that's probably partly because they're taking advantage of their powerful position to keep their costs down. But guess what? It's also partly because people are paying $10/month subscription fees instead of $10/ticket for a single trip to the theatre. There isn't as much money coming into the industry from its customers any more.

And guess what else? That's because for a lot of people the theatre experience sucked, while getting so-so movies with mediocre writing on disc for almost the same price wasn't worth it. Those people would prefer to wait for stuff to be on broadcast TV, where they got it almost for free, or hoist the ol' Jolly Roger and pay nothing at all.

There are people in the movie business who, even if talented, have also lucked out by being in the right place at the right time and making more money from one successful movie than most of us will make in our lifetimes. I suspect both they and their less famous and lower-paid colleagues are about to learn some harsh lessons in the economics of supply and demand. What exactly is the worth, in an objective commercial/economic sense, of a background actor who really could literally be anyone off the street and really could be replaced by a CGI facsimile without viewers noticing? Close to zero, probably. It sucks for the people whose jobs are going to be devalued or disappear entirely, and I'm sympathetic and hope they find other paths to follow, but such is often the price of progress.

There's also the gaping plot hole that we have some heroes who are exceptional for human beings and others who are intergalactic demigod status or above. And they're in the same movie fighting in the same battle against the same bad guy hordes.

I could suspend my disbelief -- if I really tried -- for the original Avengers group movie. I still think it would have been a better movie if they'd found a way to have characters like Black Widow and Hawkeye not used as front line fighters in the big set pieces but instead contributing in ways that used their other skills. At least they kinda figured that out in the later movies. But then you don't get the camera-orbit-slow-motion-group-action-shot for the trailer, I guess.

But it was getting absurd even by Endgame and since then we have heroes with the power to control time and traverse multiple universes and the aforementioned intergalactic demigods fighting alongside an entire country with technology far beyond anything else on Earth... and a kid who got bitten by a spider. Well, in some universes. Don't worry, we'll just collect all them for the next movie. Between them they'll be able to handle all the different C list baddies who are coming too. Or they could just call one of the near-omnipotent heroes they knew last summer who could wipe out the entire threat with a wave of their hand before grabbing a bite for breakfast. Just like they could have done in the first Avengers group movie, if only they'd noticed the special effects over the big fight that would surely have been visible from space...

Exactly. I enjoy a silly superhero movie as much as the next action movie fan. I could probably tell you every MCU film up to Endgame, mostly in the right order and with some recollection of the plot, even though I haven't seen most of them for years. After that point I'm fairly sure I'd miss a few. And I'm not sure whether I've actually seen them and forgotten or just never realised they existed.

The insane number of mediocre TV show spin-offs that Disney+ seems to have generated in franchises like MCU or Star Wars is getting really annoying now. I don't mind a spin-off show if it has a good premise and fits in with the big pictures. But 27 spin-off shows that are mostly contrived excuses to get one or two big screen stars back on the small screen without the epic context and the rest of the ensemble cast their characters belong with? At first I tried to push through them all in case they were setting up something big I'd want to see but then I realised life is too short and entertainment is supposed to be entertaining.

The sad thing is even the big summer blockbuster type films are starting to feel that way now as well.

Ubuntu might have jumped to Wayland a bit too soon. For a long time it was difficult to get screen sharing working properly because the communications applications and the browsers hosting the web app versions didn't support Wayland fully. However, during that same period, I started getting problems in other areas if I shifted back to X, like track pad configuration not working properly any more. So for some time my Ubuntu laptop was not practical to use for WFH. Fortunately the applications and browsers mostly seem to have caught up now. It's clear that Wayland is the future for Linux desktops and hopefully if those applications now use it properly on my Ubuntu machine that means they also support it on other distros and some of the practical barriers to adoption have fallen.

It's unfortunate that the ideas around swapping out batteries on EVs never seem to have gained much traction. A lot of the fundamental problems -- slow charging times, carrying heavy batteries around when you don't need them, battery performance and therefore vehicle range degrading significantly over time -- just go away if your EVs are designed with standard spaces and connectors for batteries and "filling up" means exchanging one or more of your current batteries that are depleted with as many new ones as you need at the "gas station", which can then be charging up your old batteries for someone else to use them when they're ready but without anyone waiting around in the meantime.

There were a lot of reasonable concerns raised, including the risk of being given a bad/damaged battery that could be dangerous and the difficulty of removing and installing heavy items. But some of these have analogous risks with filling up the fuels that we use today and others could surely be overcome if the necessary infrastructure was standardised and automated on a national or even global scale. I'm a bit sad that we seem to have abandoned the possibility so early in what probably needs to become a radical, once in several generations change in how we power our transport. As far as I know, no-one ever found an obvious, show-stopping problem with the basic idea.

Accidentally public S3 buckets have entered the chat

That depends on whether secondary effects are actually worth anything. Is a video with 500k views worth more than a video with 750k views but 250k of them blocking ads? Directly they're the same. But if a channel gets popular in its niche and that attracts more viewers and some of those viewers do watch the ads then maybe it's 750k views but only 150k blocking ads. That's 20% more ad views and ad revenue.

I imagine the real stats for these things are something that ad-supported services like YouTube try very hard to figure out and I imagine any hard data they do have is closely guarded.

If they implement it correctly, the best you can do is block out the ad while still having to wait for it to end.

(a) That's still a significant improvement given how bad a lot of the ads are.

(b) Google still don't get the ad revenue unless they're willing to lie to advertisers about how many people really saw their ad. And by deterring viewers who were never going to watch ads voluntarily anyway they might (might) reduce second order effects that help to promote their best and most profitable content. So it seems like a strategy that can't really win but could really lose.

I doubt there's any way you can beat the blockers sustainably just by trying to detect them. As with piracy, the optimal strategy to make money from video ads might be to acknowledge the reality and try to make doing what you want easier than working around it. Plenty of relatively popular channels on YouTube feature product placements or have the host openly acknowledge their commercial sponsors as an integral part of the presentation. YouTube's problem is that they haven't found a good way to take their cut of those kinds of ad revenue.

This is the way. It annoys me that we still need to fork out real money to license 11 when it's basically a pile of junk we want nothing to do with, but for now we still use enough Windows-only software that is essential our business that we need at least a VM available.

Including recent versions of Windows, sadly. :-(

The EU thing was just a cheap shot at the British government (which isn't even the organisation that made the decision here) out of... spite, I guess? Surely no-one on Microsoft's board really thinks the EU is going to be a particularly welcoming environment for Big Tech any time soon. It has a growing track record of hitting the biggest US tech firms with all kinds of regulations and extra taxes (however you dress them up in legal and accounting terms, that's essentially what's been happening).

Most of Europe simply doesn't have the kind of innovation (sometimes at a very high cost) culture that parts of the US tech sector have. Ironically, the UK was one of the few parts of the EU that even came close to the same spirit, if not the same scale. But that also means the EU has little to lose by making rules that benefit its people at the expense of that innovation, and certainly little to lose by blocking M&A actions that are unlikely to even result in much innovation either.

That doesn't seem to be the ruling here at all. There's nothing wrong with ebooks. You just can't openly and blatantly violate the most basic principle of copyright, which appears to be what IA did based on what I've seen of this case. I don't know how they ever thought their lending model was legal or what chance they thought they had of winning in court. They seem to be relying on a "we did it with good intentions" argument, but that's not how most legal systems work, and for good reason.

So if an author and their family spend several years living in poverty while writing a masterpiece that would have brought them a well-earned reward, and the author is then unlucky enough to fall under a bus the day after publication, you think all the expected economic benefit of writing and publishing that book should immediately disappear for the author's estate? That doesn't seem fair. The idea of publishing books within a copyright-based legal framework is that if a book is successful then you can enjoy the economic rewards. That's the incentive that makes it worth investing the time and taking the risk of creating the work in the first place. If you take away that reward at the worst possible time if an author is unlucky but others who have sacrificed to help the book get created are still with us then you're not living up to your side of the bargain.