Anthony-G

Given the huge environmental cost involved in manufacturing a car, 20 years seems fair.

I’m still driving a 26-year old Nissan Micra – though it’s now on its last legs: the Irish climate isn’t kind to steel and we’ve had to have the under-carriage re-welded three times in the past five years. :(

The complainants are missing the wood for the trees. The AI employee being depicted as feminine is incidental and the accusations of sexism – never mind misogyny – are a distraction from the bigger issue: this is an attack on all workers. The ad is trying to convince other capitalists that human labour (regardless of sex/gender) can be replaced with machines. Even if that’s not (yet) true, it’ll still reduce the inherent power of the working class. It’s disappointing that union officials see the problem as being primarily that of “a few men at the top” being sexist instead of having a class analysis. I’m very skeptical of the idea that having more women in the upper echelons will make things better for ordinary workers (see Margaret Thatcher, Paula Vennells, Liz Truss, etc.).

That would be the fabulous stage, screen and voice actor, Stephen Rea.

As you say, Irish law is a “fork” of the jurisprudence system established by British rule. However, both Norwich Pharmacal and Anton Pillar orders are much more recent than Irish independence so it seems that we have since adopted both of these orders into our legal system (I am not a lawyer and only just learned of their existence today).

The Wikipedia article on Anton Piller orders¹ has this to say about their use in Ireland:

> Anton Piller orders have been granted by the High Court in William A. Grogan (copyright owner of RAMDIS) v. Monaghan Electrical Ltd & Michael Traynor (1998) related to an unlicensed copy of the RAMDIS software system, Joblin-Purser v. Jackman and Microsoft v. Brightpoint, but the issue has not come before the Supreme Court and, owing to the civil nature of the order and the strong protection given to the family home in the constitution, it currently exists in something of a grey area.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Piller_order#Ireland

True. The PSNI have had an excellent record – particularly given the difficult context they work in.

I guess the above poster is thinking of the shoot-to-kill era of the 80s (still well within living memory): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-to-kill_policy_in_Northe...

Occam’s razor would suggest that it’s the same group of active natalists who subsidise the teenagers’ housing, education and healthcare – none of which are any cheaper than lawyers.

I assumed it was an American thing. I've never heard anyone on this side of the Atlantic say it – even though Americanisms are being adopted more by the younger generations who are more influenced by online culture.

I make my own butter every now and again. The churning part is easy. The time-consuming part is squeezing out all the buttermilk from the butter. This isn’t mentioned at all in the article.

Your proposal makes complete sense and would allow artists the creative freedom to use samples in unusual and novel ways that the original artist might never have envisioned – or agreed to.

I’m a big fan of the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) and when the artist says “no”, I’m always reminded of this funny, surreal story about the KLF physically destroying their music: http://klf.de/home/the-abba-incident/

Huh! I didn’t know any of that. I presumed that Stormont elections had always been FPTP and that gerrymandering – particularly in Derry – was the worst abuse of the democratic process in Northern Ireland.

That’s really interesting that the British promoted STV within their sphere of influence and had intended to use it for elections to Westminster. Thanks for the informative comment and useful historical context.

Also, one of the reasons for choosing proportional representation with a single transferable vote (PR-STV) was to ensure that the substantial unionist minority (who wanted to maintain the link with the UK/Britain) would still have have their views represented in the new parliament. This system works for other minority views and provides new political parties with a chance to grow in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a first-past-the-post system.

Ah, OK. That’s very cool. I hadn’t realise that was possible. I might have to borrow that technique. Thanks!

One of the reasons I like mutt is that I can easily edit the “From:” header (I have Postfix configured with multiple email aliases for my primary email account).

In my experience, most mail user agents allow editing the Subject header. Even Outlook Web Application that I have to use in work allows me to change the Subject line when a conversation thread has veered off-topic, e.g., “Server replacement [was: Windows 11 upgrades of client PCs in Accounts]“

I’m still waiting for Netflix to start streaming Les Cousins Dangereux, the classic (2003?) and critically lauded masterpiece of French eroticism: https://www.netflix.com/title/70261973

If only Nestflix was available in my region: https://nestflix.fun/les-cousins-dangereux/

Thanks for that bit of background. That make sense.

I used to think that MS were probably happy with a certain amount of “piracy” (students, voluntary groups, people starting off as self-employed contractors, etc.) because it kept people in their ecosystem (using MS Office and other Windows-only software), helped reinforce the perception of Windows as being the OS for getting stuff done (either work or games) and some of these “pirates” would become future (paying) customers.

I find it interesting to go back in time so I read the accompanying article and came across this snippet:

> despite the computing apocalypse that Windows XP's Product Activation features were supposed to ignite, I've never had the first problem with it

At the time, I remember a lot of scare stories about how the Product Activation system in Windows XP would result in the death of user freedom. It didn’t effect me because I was using GNU/Linux (probably Mandrake or Mandriva Linux). When I later got a job in an office that ran Windows XP, I don’t remember XP causing any more headaches than any of its predecessors. If anything, it was even more stable than 2000 which itself was superior to 95, 98 or 98SE.

I also fully agree with the last sentence:

> I do think it's clear that the way we use our computers totally pisses off gigantic, wealthy companies of all stripes, and it was only a matter of time until they tried to do something about it.

I already take psyllium husk to mitigate problems with hard stools but I dislike the taste and consistency. It’s much more palatable if I add it to natural (I tend to prefer “live”) yoghurt with some soft fruit, e.g., bananas, strawberries.

This was one of the most depressing articles I’ve read online in a long time. As a middle-aged man who has never used Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok or any other social media, I was shocked to find out this is what young women have to deal with. Reading this article upset me more than the Epstein revelations or any other bad news stories that have been in the press this year.

Other than the one year I worked on a building site, I’ve been lucky that I only encountered mild sexism among male colleagues but never outright misogyny as described in this article. Same goes for my experience in an all-boys secondary school and my college experience in a mostly male engineering course during the 90s.

Until recently, I really thought things were getting better for women and that they would be valued and respected more for their accomplishments than their looks. I remember being a teenager in rural Ireland in the 80s with very little money (and very little exposure to the outside world) was difficult enough but now I think I was lucky to have been born at that time. My heart goes out to anyone who is trying to learn about and navigate the world when they are being constantly bombarded with such negative and hateful messaging. Also, to all parents out there who have to try and prepare their children to deal with this.

As an advocate of free speech, I’m now less certain of my opposition to laws that restrict such hateful speech and I would support a ban on social media usage for under-16s. I’d actually like to see such a ban extended to smart-phone devices. Fuck all those ad-tech companies that “hack” human psychology to make their money.

The Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century but the Eastern half continued for another thousand years until the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople in 1453.

A sibling commentator points out that the Catholic church still uses the term “Pontifex Maximus” to refer to their pope. However, this was a title used by the dominant high priest of pre-Christian Rome and the Catholic church only started doing this after Constantine XI (last Roman emperor) died when Constantinople fell to the Turks.

The Catholic church was just one of many entities that appropriated the titles and symbols of classical Rome as a way to confer themselves with the prestige and historical legacy of the Roman Empire. For example, the words “Tsar” (Slavic), “Kaiser” (German) and “Keizer” (Dutch) are all derivations of Caesar (as a synonym for emperor). Western European rulers adopted the Roman eagle for their royal and national coat of arms; Eastern Europeans tend to prefer the double-headed variant. The most egregious example is the Holy Roman Empire which famously was neither holy nor Roman. Arguably, in its latter days, it was more a federation than an empire.

This comment reminds me of one of my favourite scenes from The Wire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgrO_rAaiq0

“Americans are stupid people, by and large. We pretty much believe whatever we’re told”.

“The bigger the lie, the more they believe”.

Jobs might have had a good eye for typography but he seems to have had a blind spot when it came to grocers’ apostrophes. :)

On my side of the Atlantic using en-dashes with spaces on either side of the dash is acceptable writing style so that’s what I use (instead of em-dashes). However, many people can’t tell the difference between the two so some might confuse my writing from that of an LLM. But I’m not going to let that dictate my writing style.

For the past 15 years, I’ve used the Unicycle Vim plugin¹ which makes it very easy to add proper typographic quotes and dashes in Insert mode. As something of a typography nerd, I’ve extended it to include other Unicode characters, e.g., prime and double-prime characters to represent minutes and seconds.

At the same time, I’ve always used a Firefox extension that launches GVim when editing a text box; currently, I’m using Tridactyl for this purpose.

¹ https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1384

I hadn’t heard of Grokipedia so based on the positive comments in this thread, I thought I’d try it out – only to discover that its search feature sucks.

I’ve just finished watching a HBO TV show on Blu-Ray called “The Night of” so I tried searching for it on Grokipedia. It failed to find an article about the TV series in the first 60 search results (regardless of whether I used double quotes or appended the words “TV” or “series”). After multiple attempts, I gave up.

On the other hand, when I typed the three words into Wikipedia’s search, the TV show was the second search result.

Logitech are my go-to example of a company that does the right thing and deserves recognition for it. They kept their squeezebox.com servers going for a decade after they discontinued their Squeezebox hardware audio players. At the same time, they funded a maintainer to keep improving the open source server software that users can self-host on multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS, Raspberry Pi). Two years ago, they finally shut down the squeezebox.com servers that they were running but the server software is still being actively maintained: https://lyrion.org/

I’m fairly certain that the “odd” behaviour is that of the extremists who hijacked the original concept to promote the idea that being fat is good.

I’d consider calling it “odd” to be an understatement. I always thought such extreme positions were a bizarre denial of the negative impacts that obesity can have on personal well-being and quality of life. Having said that, I only ever encountered such views on the Internet; never in real life.

As a life-long hater of ads (before the Internet, I would mute the TV during ad breaks), I must agree. Before AdSense, animated GIFs for advertising were obnoxious. When the “Don’t be evil” Google started doing advertising, I was so impressed with them. Even their advertising is tasteful - and relevant! They really seemed to have the Midas touch.

But I feel that their choice of advertising revenue as their predominant income stream set them on a trajectory that gradually and inexorably led them further away from their original principles.

A friend’s daughter (young adult) told me about five years ago that cassette tapes are “cool” again. I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. I still have the cassette deck that I bought in the 90s for my hi-fi separate system but I haven’t listened to it in years. In the mid-2000s, I gave away most of my cassettes to a friend who had bought an old car that only had a tape deck. I only held on to recordings that were only released on cassette: demo tapes, bootlegs of live concerts that I had attended and some DIY releases from 90s’ punk bands that didn’t have (nor want) a record label.

Ethereal, Ephemeral?

I know what you mean but I can't think of any word that describes the concept (without requiring further elaboration).

I'm more a fan of atmospheric black metal, 80's thrash and prog metal, myself but the psychological effects of listening to death metal have been researched. As previously discussed on Hacker News:

Dissecting the Bloodthirsty Bliss of Death Metal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18335308

Death metal music inspires joy not violence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19383699

Thanks for that. I hadn’t come across Jim Lill before. For someone who’s “just a performer”, he knows a lot (about circuits). I found the comparisons of different order of Equalisation and Distortion to be interesting and I loved his Tacklebox. I’ll definitely check some of his other videos.