BananaTrifleViolin

I think a lot of it comes from schools, and in particular physical education and competitive sports. There is nothing wrong with competitive sports but the attitudes around it in schools can be so toxic, and in particular it can be used to create hierarchies. The idea of being good at sports and that being masculine was something I certainly experienced a lot at school. Also people who weren’t as academic but thrived in sports were lauded.

My school had various sports teams and clubs, and fuck all academic activities. Sports aren’t toxic but the attitudes around them can be, and particularly adults who feed in toxic attitudes and values around it.

The BBC article that this article is a bizarre summary of is far better (the Gizmodo article even links directly to the BBC article). It give a far better overview of the issues; the main crux is they cost most than anticipated through both theft and cost of the machines themselves. The consumer’s disliking it is a less point and more naunced essentially “customer’s want the technology to work but it isn’t” which is also what you’ve said.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240111-it-hasnt-delivered-the-spectacular-failure-of-self-checkout-technology

Personally I preferred the self checkouts because I don’t want to interact with someone, but th they fail so much (because of the weighing which is to stop me being a supposed thieving scumbag, not to benefit me) and you end up standing around waving at a random stranger to come and fix the machine awkwardly while a massive queue waits impatiently for a machine. I’ve recently switched back to the manned checkouts for bigger shopping trips.

You can use PowerPoint in a web browser with office 365. Really don’t need windows to run it anymore.

This is an interesting concept but doesn’t seem like it has long term legs.

It depends on what you mean by open source and also even eBook reader (I’m assuming eInk), but if people want open source e-readers I would say flashing existing reader hardware with open source operating systems would be the way to go. However I’m not sure if there is much motivation to do that.

There are Android based eink ereaders available with more freedom than Kindle devices (Boox is an example) and you can side load free or open source reader software onto Kobo (maybe not Android Kindles though?), and you can load free books onto e-readers via software like Calibre. So you can read books in privacy outside the vendors ecosystem - it kinda reduces the imputus to build an open source ereader (hardware or OS).

I’d love to see a truly open source Eink device - particularly software wise. But I doubt the demand is enough. And this Open Source hardware solution seems a bit too cut back to fit the bill.

And the commanding officer only tried to stop them when they heard the last victim asking for help and realised it was in hebrew.

Seems the IDF shoots first and asks questions later. This is what’s happened to unarmed jewish hostages, who were shirtless, holding a white shirt on a stick which is the universal sign of surrender. What about the million people living in gaza coming up against this? Holy fuck.

Not strictly correct. Spotify pays out from its net revenues (revenues when billing costs and tax are removed) and it pays to the various industry rights holders who then distribute the money. There are lots of complex deals in place and big rights holders are likely to have better deals than ad hoc users, plus it’s different in different countries.

The 70% figure is a PR thing Spotify pushes about as part of its constant battles with rights holders on exactly how much it will pay them. It’s trying to claim most of the money goes to artists but it’s opaque how much goes where.

Yeah the GUI is horrible with Gimp but it is very powerful software. I’m used to it’s idiosyncrasities but it really needs a GUI refresh. It’s powerful software held back from it’s full potential.

The safety angle may be overplayed but it is not the only element of this kind of change. Better and safer infrastructure for walking and cycling encourages walking and cycling.

So there are a whole host of benefits: reduced pollution, better citizen health and wellbeing, encouraging use of local walkable businesses, etc.

Also a reduction in deaths and injuries on a background of increased pedestrian and cycling is also noteworthy. I.e. not just reduced the existing injuries but also less injuries despite more people.at risk.

This may also be about trying to take control of OpenAI. Despite owning 49% of OpenAI, the company is seemingly set up so the 5 board members have control and they’re seemingly not under the control of investors.

Could this actually be about Altman and his allies trying to take the company fully for-profit so they could benefit? It also seems Altman is very close to Microsoft, so rather than product roadmap this might actually about trying to take control of the company.

Microsoft hiring the staff and forming an AI unit is a boon to them if it happens, but OpenAI still own and controls everything they’ve worked on up to date, and it seems the Investors don’t control that judging by the boards independance.

Meanwhile Altman is tweeting very concillatory OpenAI but pro Microsoft position. This may be a battle for the whole company, not just a personality thing.

It’s not immovable, it’s just locked so you don’t accidentally move it by clicking and dragging. Try right locking on the bar in a blank area lower down - the right click menu should have an option for moving it.

Yeah I was surprised they took it down. I think it’s a foolish knee jerk reaction and is patronising towards readers.

Ironically there is know nothing to put the current spike of interest in context as you can’t read the letter on the guardian website.

I’m actually really unimpressed with the guardians action - they don’t respect their readers and clearly no longer believe in freedom of speech. They could have modified the article to put the letter in context themselves rather than link to a 20 year old article criticising it. It also makes it hard for those who want to push back against the letter and answer those who are pushing it.

While it’s a factor it probably isn’t the root of the problem. The problem is car manufacturers are building the cars faster than the market is growing and at high price points than consumers want in a time of economic difficulty and inflation.

We’re still seeing build out of electric infrastructure, expensive cars vs petrol cars, and a relatively small second hand market (which also drives infrastructure expansion). It also doesn’t help that countries are pushing back promises to ban non-EV car sales. Dealership monopolies certainly exacerbate all those problems.

This story headline is nonsense though. EVs are working and are growing. The story is actually that car companies have made expensive attempts at grabbing market share which haven’t worked and are now counting the costs. They’re delaying the rate of growth in production, not reducing production - significant difference.

No it depends on how you interpret it. Apple may have legitimate reasons for technical differences between the different versions of Safari. The issue would be if Apple is claiming they are more different than they really are to say they don’t count as one when calculating market share.to.determine whether regulation applies.

Mozilla Forefpx has different versions for Android, and Desktop. So does Chrome. But in terms of marketshare generally people class them as one browser.

Out of interest what part of the UI don’t you like? You can drag and drop pretty much any button and component where ever you want and you can use the Firefox colours website to apply any colour scheme you want. This is all core browser features so no performance affects.

What is it that a theme is then adding?

I think your second half is bang on the nail for the missing part of this story. It is not just to drive search directly, it is also to control the browser market long term.

That’s what Microsoft did very successfully with Internet Explorer too. They have it away for free and bundled it with Windows, killing all competition and then used that to leverage MSN. They also didn’t follow standards and through market dominance shaped the internet.

Google sort of follows standards but they have also forced through proprietary standards or have broken code which is why some websites don’t work well in Firefox or Safari even now.

Chromium may be open source but it is a tool used by Google to control and dominate the internet.

Apple is exactly the same with WebKit - they talk about privacy and security but the real motivation is surpressong alternate routes to the internet from their devices whic then keeps iron control over payment methods particularly in iOS. Yet people in the apple eco system buy into the narrative that the one piece of software you’re not allowed in iOS is a non apple web browser, as if that is an acceptable approach. It’s just another manifestation of anti competitive behaviour and the power and money you can get by “free” software.

It’s good users are now aware that Brave includes redundant features that you have to pay extra for to activate. Users browser will update everytime the browser or the VPN software needs an update.

For example Firefox VPN from Mozilla is separate software. They don’t force millions of users to download it even if they don’t want it.

This is yet another example why people should not be using Brave and should be skeptical of its intentions.

Not sure exactly what you meant about the fonts but I do routinely install the Microsoft Fonts from my Linux repo whatever system I’m on. It used to be very important when browsing the net as Arial and Times New Roman were ubiquitous. That is less true now, and many sites use their own fonts.

But in office Times New Roman and Arial are still there. Microsoft has moved to newer fonts now like Calibri and Cambrea but this is proprietary. You could try and get your hands on copies of these (relatively easy if you already have windows).

When creating documents you can embed the fonts you used in Libre Office in it to ensure if you send it to someone else it renders as you intended. When you open someone else’s documents you can see what fonts were used and try and install those or ask libre office to substitute fonts you do have for the missing ones. A metric font is a font with the exact same size of characters in terms of character width and height (even if it looks different) - this preserves the layout so if you’re missing a font and have a metric equivalent you can subsitute that font and the document layout should then be preserved.

For Calibri there is a freely licensed Google metric alternative called Carlito. I believe that usually comes with Libre Office but double check. Also Cambria is another common Microsoft font with a free metric equivalent called Caladea that should come with Libre office.

The Liberation fonts commonly found on Linux and Libre office are metric equivalents of the Times New Roman, Arial and Courier fonts if you want to avoid Microsoft proprietary fonts all together.

Finally if you are sending documents to be read and not edited or just to print at another location, then save/export them as PDFs. PDFs will look the same on any device and OS and will print the same from anywhere.

Lastly I would suggest you use a sync service to keep your documents and keep your school docs in folders that sync. Something like DropBox. Microsoft Office uses OneDrive and it is fully integrated which was a game changer when it comes to accessing documents from anywhere but you can do the same with DropBox and Libre Office on other devices to ensure you can get your documents wherever you are and edit them in whatever is available (e.g. a school PC if you don’t have your laptop to hand or your mobile device). Lots you can do with synced documents but you don’t need Microsoft to do it.

In Australian slang a mob can just mean any grouping of people, not necessarily a criminal group or a group of rioters. It’s not uncommon for people to refer to their own ethnic or political grouping as a mob; at least from what I’ve seen when reading Australian websites.

And by local government I think they are referring to the states and territories governments.

Yeah as someone outside Australia I’ve been surprised at how biased and simplified the reporting has been. A complex constitutional issue is being painted as a simple “good people, bad people”.

When I read about the changes myself (after having to go hunting for some actual detail - the reporting is pretty poor on this) it honestly seems more like virtue signalling rather than useful or meaningful reform.

This is a link aggregator website and he’s posting links, I don’t understand the issue? The links are to legitimate news sites.

Everyone has a selection bias in what they post, but maybe you need to think about your own biases of you find it so offensive?

As for this specific link, it’s a legitimate news source and this is an actual news story which has not happened in isolation. There are multiple news stories about the social media claim and that Biden seems to have confirmed them just now seems to be walking back from that claim.