A rust-bearded robot driver sits on a barstool, sipping nonalcoholic syntha-fuel. "They're replacing me with a human!"

It occurs to me that I had an advantage over kids today, in that there were different forces at play, such that I had to take tests in classrooms, so it was either learn shit or get a bad grade. I don't think of the forces that put me into classrooms as all that exceptional, but I think the young 'uns really do have one really unusual one, that I (as well as my parents' generation, now that I think of) just, somehow, skipped right over.

You see, back in my day, we did a lot less of this ..

Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine

.. and instead we just let the ever-pending horror of nuclear war terrify us. And the neat thing about nuclear war, is that someone is going to hatefully and gruesomely murder you no matter where you where you are, so a classroom isn't really all that different than home.

I'm wondering, what can we do to help younger people be terrified out of their minds all the time instead of just in common-sense situations like crowds? We need to help them understand that they're safe nowhere, so they're not-particularly-unsafe anywhere, so they can show the fuck up and take exams.

ZFS :-)

Notepad++ just takes the best features of Kate and rolls them into a free Notepad replacement for Windows users so they don't suffer from its eternal failings. We don't need it in Linux, we already have all of its features. Windows users do need a functioning text editor out of the box, which Notepad++ provides as a free add-on instead.

That could well be a chicken-and-egg problem. Are the buyers buying what's available because it's available, or are the manufacturers making it because the buyers actually asked for it? I'm not aware of any Equinox driver anywhere who ever complained about it not being tall enough (or it being short enough to make it unnecessarily difficult to run over small people) yet Chevy raised the hood anyways.

The other problem is that the auto manufacturers see a distorted picture of car buyers. New cars are too expensive for a large fraction of all drivers; many drivers won't ever buy a brand new car. New car dealers are selling to people with more money, and making decisions around what those more affluent people might want in their cars - or more so are telling such people what they should want.

One does not negate the other.

That said, my own current work car is a 2025 Chevy Equinox. I previously had a 2021 Equinox. The 2025 pushed the top of the hood up a good 3-4 inches compared to the previous, and changed a few other functional angles as well. The goal was evidently the "truckification" of a small crossover SUV. The result was terrible. Sight lines are dramatically worse out of the front of the vehicle. Short people can disappear in front of the hood now that it is that much taller. This is even worse on actual trucks; Chevy Silverado full-sized pickups are leaving dealer lots with hoods that are 5 feet off the ground for no functional reason.

It is fair to point out that such collisions shouldn't happen often at normal driving speed. However you're overlooking other places where collisions do happen often between vehicles and pedestrians; namely parking lots and driveways. While the new cars have far more mandatory cameras to help drivers spot obstacles, they don't prevent every situation. Car manufacturers should be taken to the woodshed over this awful decision, and it's not just the American auto makers.

Ever wonder why so many new pickups pull backwards into parking spots? I had a new Silverado recently as a rental and I believe I discovered why. Those new trucks don't have forward facing cameras, but they do have backup cameras. They sit so high the driver can't easily see the lines or obstacles in front while attempting to park but when backing up the camera shows what's coming up behind. Terrible, terrible decisions.

typo, more decentralisation not centralisation

Ok, but propaganda is basically the problem and has been for over a hundred years. And it's everyone. Not just far right or Russia or today's bogeyman. It's everyone doing it.

The antidote can't really be "curated information" because all the propagandists want to then be the curators. And that's what they do.

The only real antidote is more dissemination, more distribution, more centralisation, more alternatives, and people just being exposed to all this stuff having to get smarter about integrating and comparing and contrasting what they read.

That implies that the software was actually good to begin with. Outlook never had that characteristic, unless your criteria for "good" includes good for passing viruses.

My work phone is an iPhone, and we're required to use Outlook for work email. On average outlook gets patched twice a week for iPhone. The biggest flaw in it though has been there for years and clearly won't get patched.

Namely, Outlook for iPhone always defaults to reply all for emails with multiple recipients. It doesn't matter how long the list is, it will reply all unless you go out of your way to reply only to the sender. This has catastrophic consequences at large companies.

It is not uncommon to have email threads at my employer with dozens, or even over 100, recipients. When one goes out with any ambiguity we quickly see who on the list is reading it on their iPhone (vs their laptop) as they inevitably will end up doing a reply all without meaning to.

Apparently Microsoft sees this as a feature, even though they don't force this feature upon us in Windows.

Yes, makes sense.

What I mean about the floor level is that, if you look at the outside of the door on the central module, and you take that door's floor height line and follow it right the way through the craft, then when you get to the front, inside the command module, in order for the pilots to be able to see out the top window, their chairs would have to be higher not lower. I gather it's the only place where the inside doesn't match the outside.

There were the four pods, two at the front and two at the rear, above the landing struts, though. But in any case, whatever fuel source they were using must have been extremely compact. Something nuclear-based, perhaps.

I love the design. I just wish they'd worked out the floor level in the interior into the command module, because it doesn't line up.

Thanks, yes I enjoyed The Expanse tv show. I'll look at the books.