With Arabic they use a different pen nib that makes pushing easier, so they can rest their hand further down. That doesn't help with top to bottom languages though, and for them as they first adopted European stationary and were influenced by European languages, it made more sense to go left to right.

Brexit and the fact that LR vehicles are very easy to steal due to a botched keyless entry system probably did more harm. COVID too of course.

Some keywords can get your video demonetized or hidden from searches. The rules keep changing and are not clear. At the moment mentioning Epstein in the first 10 minutes seems guaranteed to get your video hidden.

Right. You are at the border. Tired from your long flight. Agent asks for a cheek swab. Your choices are to refuse and at best get turned away and have to go back to where you came from, at worst they arrest and detain you for weeks or months, steal your stuff, trying to break into your phone and computer, and eventually deport you.

From the sound of it they are having issues with under-performance causing lag, and/or bad wireless interfaces. The CPU and the wireless chip are probably soldered to the PCB and not replaceable, so easiest thing will be to just replace the whole computer.

They may also have run into component reliability or software premature ageing issues. Tesla had that with early model computers, where excessive logging would wear the flash memory out in a few years and brick the car. They were very difficult about out-of-warranty replacements, but in the UK if it's a design flaw like that they can't really avoid it.

Geely is fine. Their other brands have decent reliability records, like Zeekr, Polestar, other Volvo models, even Lotus (as far as luxury sports cars go). They aren't on the level of BYD or SAIC, but they are also not the reason why Volvo is having issues. Volvo is mostly antonymous, they just use Geely parts where possible, and the computer doesn't seem to have anything to do with them.

BYD just set a record for the fastest production car ever. In the video the driver lets go of the steering wheel at 350kph. Must seem slow when you were doing 500kph a few moments earlier.

I don't mind short seasons if that's what the story needs, like with Andor or Chernobyl. But they also can't really expect me to subscribe for more than a month or two when there is so little decent content. Often they remove the only reasons I have to come back, e.g. Star Trek Prodigy is gone now, luckily I have it on disc and cracked the DRM.

It sounds like the normal kind of politeness that most cultures have. In the UK we often do thinks like thank the cashier when they take our money, or apologize when making a request that is really a complaint.

In Japan it's customary to ask questions in the negative, so that the person answering can avoid outright refusing or saying no. Like if you were asking about someone doing you a favour, you would probably say "can you NOT do this for me?" And if they wanted to refuse, instead of saying "no" they would probably reply "it's very difficult", by which they mean impossible.

Most cultures are not so abrupt and direct.

The left to right writing thing is more to do with the introduction of pencils and pens. Japan had the same thing.

With a brush you can write top to bottom, right to left, because your hand doesn't rest on the page. With a pen, you are going to smudge what you just wrote. With a pencil, you will get the lead on your hands.

Interestingly one of the reasons why Japanese computers were often more powerful than Western ones was that they needed to have better graphics to show complex characters, and so the standard design was to have separate CPU and video memories. Western machines usually had a unified architecture where CPU and video shared a single bank of RAM, limiting the bandwidth available to both.

They are going to fly around the moon to test the systems out, like Apollo 10 did. Also like Apollo 10, the lander isn't ready yet.

Blue Origin is supposed to be supplying the first one. They will need to do a robotic mission to land it and take off again before a crewed one goes, so this isn't as close to the goal as Apollo 10 was. SpaceX is also supposed to be producing a lander, a modified Starship, but again, years away from getting to the moon and being man rated.

It looks like the race with China is heating up.

MLB should have zero-tolerance for umpiring errors. To that end they should use roboump for every pitch.

Human umpires add zero value to a ball game. If they get every call correct they have not made the game better. So all they can do is make a game worse with their mistakes.

MLB needs to remove the flawed humans from these decisions as much as possible.