This is only tangentially related to your story, but you reminded me of an old maths teacher who had a PhD in maths and once upon a time, had applied to work at an accounting firm. As part of the interview, he was told that he would have to sit a numeracy assessment. He responded “you do know I have a PhD in maths, right?”. They sympathised with his point but told him that everyone had to sit the test, as a matter of course.

So my maths teacher goes and sits their silly test, and he scores so well that they accuse him of cheating! I can only assume that this debacle broke him in some way, because it wasn’t long after this that he started teaching. It’s a particular kind of weirdo who has a PhD in a subject and decides to teach teenagers. He was probably one of the best teachers I ever had (I wonder if I can find contact information for him to tell him that)

I agree. I learned a lot of bioinformatics stuff from the ground up, because I was learning python at the time, and found it super useful as practice. Years later, I discovered https://rosalind.info/ and cursed the fact that I hadn’t had access to that when I was learning.

Oooh, give me some of the words on your words list. I have one of my own, and accordingly, will share a random selection of recent entries: “that”; “nuisance”;“apotheosis”; “knobbly”; “vehement”; “perfidious”; “befitting”; “timid”; “verisimilitude”; “knack”.

When the UK switched to using plastic for the denominations of money that come as notes (£5, £10, £20, £50), people who use cocaine found that the new, plastic notes had a tendency to cut or scratch their nose. Because the £5 notes were the first ones to be switched to plastic, and they have Winston Churchill on them, apparently this phenomenon was termed “being Winstoned”. E.g. “careful with that, you don’t want to be Winstoned”.

I have no other point to make, I just think that this is hilarious.

I appreciate that your title makes it clear that this is an old article. Certainly it’s still relevant, but going into the article with knowledge of its age calibrates my mindset

I’m not saying that leeks are onions (though they are alliums, i.e. of the same family). To me, whilst they do taste quite different to onions, there is still a flavour that I would describe as onion-y

Related: Daniel Gritzer of Serious Eats explored different ways to mince garlic, finding that some methods significantly increased garlic’s pungency/strength (and also that long cooking methods negate much of this difference)

I’m curious about how far your onion dislike goes. For example, I recently cooked lohiketto, a Finnish salmon soup. It feels like a rare meal that doesn’t use onions (it’s basically leek, carrot, potatoes, cream, salmon and dill), but the leek sort of fills the role that onions usually would, albeit more delicately.

This quiz was stressful. Like, there were so many times when I knew I was being cued up for a trick question, but I still fell for it.

The most fucked up thing is that Grok does seem to have guardrails — except they’re geared towards preventing it from being “too woke”

I think that Linus becoming less of an abusive asshole over the years has been a positive development, but I wouldn’t mind the return of the old for this event

This is not the kind of person that the meme is poking at, but my late best friend was one of the best people I have known, and I talk shit about him all the time. It feels like being honest about his depth and complexity is a part of how I honour him; I’m firmly of the belief that if you have to lie about something in order to love it, then your love is shallow and false.

It’s unclear, because the relevant official bodies insist that things are fine

How long have you been biking for you to see these changes? I.e. what is ‘lately’?

There are probably games or other media that you love that the average Stardew Valley fan wouldn’t click with. You’re not missing out, you’ve just got other stuff you enjoy.

"The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit. "

I don’t know as much as I’d like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.

I think that’s part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn’t going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.

When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it’s shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.

It seems like the relevant section in the Ubisoft EULA says

“Upon termination for any reason, You must immediately uninstall the Product and destroy all copies of the Product in Your possession.”

I read this wording of this to be stricter than the BG3 example you shared, because the BG3 one seems to be saying “if you don’t agree to this EULA (or if you agree, but later terminate that agreement), then you must uninstall the game”. Whereas the Ubisoft one seems to include Ubisoft terminating the agreement, rather than just the user. That’s just my interpretation of these snippets though, as someone who is not a lawyer. It’s possible that the BG3 EULA also includes other parts that would mean similar to what people are unhappy about on the Ubisoft EULA

“A torrent is never dead, it’s just waiting for seeders”

What’s really stupid about this cycle is that some of these fail-upward executives genuinely believe the crap they’re spewing. Weirdly, I think I respect the grifting executives more

Edit: by grifting executives, I mean the ones who participate in that cycle you describe, and are aware of the harms they cause in their wake, but don’t care because they’ve gotten good at knowing when to skip out