This is eerily similar to the marching soldiers' bridge collapse - Broughton Bridge in 1831, often misattributed to Napoleon but happened after his reign.

Lessons weren't learned 180 years later either, for the Milllennium Suspension Bridge, which I happened to work next to at the time and watched the construction and failure unfold. People tend to walk in sync. When things happen in sync, a resonant pattern emerges. It's true for people crossing bridges. It's true for people synchronising machines to exact clocks and nice rounded-off times as well.

It happened in classic Who as well. To Tom Baker I believe, though I might be misremembering the "why don't you follow me up these stairs?" scene. Could have been McCoy. Either way - the line was..."Elevate!".

Yes.

Whether I especially want this however, that's a different matter. But for those that do - yes, support efforts have been stepped up recently.

Productivity Consultants sounds like something straight out of Office Space.

"We notice you've been missing a lot of work lately?"

"I wouldn't say I've been missing it..."

Hah - used one for a while quite some time ago. With enough willpower and sufficient hatred of the task at hand, a Corby Trouser Press can also be made to double as a shirt ironer.

How much has your government money grown in that time?

For me the robotics vs laundry issue is ironing, not folding. It might be different in the US but I don't do a lot of laundry folding here in the UK - I just hang them up in the wardrobe or put them in drawers. Towels and spare sheets maybe? Not much.

But an ironing robot - yes, that one I would interested in. It needn't be some humanoid thing that stands by an ironing board and moves a traditional steam iron up and down - could be a static cupboard for all I care. There was a spate of announcements about 10 years ago but nothing came of them, only these blow-up air pressure ones that don't really work at all on work-style clothing. Ironing robots please.

I remember getting my first 9600 baud modem and using macros in procomm plus to spam middle finger ansi art on dialup BBS in the late 80s knowing most users were stuck on 1200 or 2400 bauds still. I thought it was so funny at the time.

I used to be such an asshole. I mean, I'm still an asshole. But I used to be one too.

Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.

Neither is erudite language. Grow up.

Point me to the 'same grade' CPU equivalent of the M5 Pro and M6?

I mean, they literally show the use case for it on some of their the videos. It's not a general purpose one by any means, but this one is an actual Pro box, not a "I'm a consumer and just want the name Pro on my device" box.

The current use case is music production. Logic Pro. I have an Akai MPC Gen 2, with a touch screen for moving around the DAW and manipulating the virtual instruments. Logic Pro with the same level of interactivity would be fantastic, and no the iPad version doesn't cut it. I'm actually very interested in it for this specific reason.

Price? Well, I paid around £4k for my Intel 4Tb beast in 2019 to store all the sample-based instrument libraries I have. It's not a "let's buy this to look cool at the coffee shop" machine, although I'm sure some people will. I'm actually very interested in it for a serious step up in the way music production works.

"I'll tell you the experience. It's pissing me off!"

I log in to read, but I regularly open threads by right-clicking and open in a different tab. Since I mostly use private browsing (Safari or Firefox) to stop advert tracking, this means that one tab is logged in but most of the ones I open to read later are not logged in. So now that pattern is dead? Then there's the "site:reddit.com" searches I do on topics that I just need an answer for rather than ever wanting to participate in. Again, same pattern - I use private browsing and I usually right click and open multiple tabs on several likely looking search results before then starting to read each tab to see if anything useful turned up. That pattern gone as well?

The summary touches on this next bit too - I'm wondering what will happen when I send a link to someone else, some of whom don't have and will likely never have Reddit accounts. Are they now simply unable to see it? Even Facebook isn't that harsh, and it's the perfect example too. I do not have nor will I ever have a Facebook account, but I'm sent the odd link now and again which I do open and look at without needing an account. A world where Facebook is more open than Reddit is just...odd.

I get their dilemma, but this seems a bit too far to me.

Well, not necessarily. There's a difference between a CEO vibe coding and a developer vibe coding. Anyone can write shitty code, AI included. It takes a dev to properly keep the AI in check.

I have account number 13,802 here, which I've never been able to persuade the admins to recover for me. Notice how there's no activity on it. That's because when I created it and saw that user number come up I thought "huh - no point in carrying on here then, how could anyone possible read or make sense of anything with nearly fourteen thousand people on it?".

Since then, the chorus on various sites has become rather larger than merely fourteen thousand. The background noise is incredible. I'm amazed any signal gets through at all vs the constant noise to be honest.