So glad I switched from Fitbit to Garmin. Google has done everything possible to lose me as a customer.

Speaking as a motorcycle rider, ebikes are dangerous. Not because of the bike but because of the riders. They often don't wear safety gear, they don't follow traffic laws, and many bikes top out at 70-80kph. It took considerable effort to get my Class M. A bike going that fast should require licensing and safety courses and helmet laws. Most people don't realize they can squid out on the road on an ebike just like you will on a motorcycle without proper gear.

I just installed Fedora 44 on my old Win10 laptop. Because Microsoft made sure this perfectly good laptop with 16gb RAM could not run Win11. And Affinity Suite runs great on wine now. And no obnoxious telemetry tracking. Oh yeah, for games: steam and lutris too.

Yeah yeah yeah, linux linux linux

still, Microsoft is in self-destruct mode.

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

I started lurking in 4K enthusiast groups to see if they were all cracked up to be. The arguments about relative quality of various BD/4K releases isn't even the most interesting part.

It turns out that there are a lot of issues with set top boxes playing particular disks. The disks themselves also seem terribly fussy.

This app is vibe codin'

Don't know what it does

It's vibe codin'

It works just because

And they say that vibe codin'

Is misunderstood

But really, vibe codin'

It just ain't no good

You want to stop AI disruption of society and replacement of humans jobs, and stop it cold? Give it rights. That takes away the entire motive most researchers and companies have to develop and use it.

Speaking as an old graybeard UI guy.... we have just come up with more and more complex solutions to the same old internet "one weird trick" of putting your information on someone else's computer.

Yeah, I remember "Server Side Rendering"... we called Java Servlets or JSPs or PHP or ASP. There were clear divisions of labors and boundaries were respected.

Even when we had to go to make everything feel like an app, at least RESTful stuff still had those boundaries.

Now that everyone needs the same code running front and back, and JS (I'm not a hater of JS by any means but still) stuff like this is bound to have happened.

Proprietary service drops support for proprietary protocol..

Educational standards have been declining for a long time. It hasn't just recently gotten bad because of Corona. Both math and English instruction have declined to the point that people like you are making excuses for remedial instruction in college.

The sabotage is intentional even if those doing it don't think they are engaging in sabotage. This is painfully obvious if you interact with the K12 education system.

Parents these days have to more to repair the damage done by professionals.

As early as the 1950s, critics of the establishment's public education system said its main purpose was to produce a contented and functional workforce. And they were right. They were so right that even they themselves did not understand the full implications: they were so right that it ultimately made them wrong. And then they won, and we are facing the consequences. Not just since 2013: Arne Duncan was indeed an unmitigated disaster for American education, but much of the problem is older than him. And no one is willing to admit that what came before worked better.

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

The kinds of foods that trash your LDL predate the FDA and the United States.