TRiG_Ireland

Currently taking a brief break from the History of Middle-earth series (The Lays of Beleriand is astonishingly beautiful) to read a fascinating book called Fascist Yoga, about how the wellness movement has some surprising links with white supremacism.

X for cross has very old pedigree, dating back at least to Victorian railway stations, such as King's X.

I found a Firefox plugin which does an automatic redirect to XCancel.

His dad is the king's brother, isn't he?

> We cannot attribute any moral judgment to Bieber as a human being; we can only answer the moral question as posed in the song.

As a semi-off-topic little rant, why do we always assume that pop singers are singing about themselves and their own experiences? Can a song, as a work of art, not have an independent existence, much as a novel may? Pop, rap, and maybe country songs are all now assumed to be about the artist themselves.

The Futility Closet website (and, formerly, podcast) is an amazing treasure trove of fascinating facts.

"It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process."

No. Very much no.

Certainly every older house now has one. (It can take a few months, and there's currently a delay, so some newbuilds may not yet have one. I believe the advice is to apply well before the house is finished.) How much they're used varies. One house near me has a plate on the gate giving the name and eircode. I think that most people use them most of the time. I don't know whether there are any stats available on that.

Of course, if you've been subscribed to a monthly magazine for fifty years, you perhaps haven't bothered to update your address on file to add the eircode.

Pick-up artists are not going to behave like decent human beings.

In Ireland, it isn't only rural addresses which have no house numbers. Plenty of houses even in towns had non-unique addresses before the introduction of eircodes. On my road, all the original houses (each standing on an acre plot) have numbers, but all the infill ones don't. You'd think the house built on the corner of 502's land might get 502A, but no. When my parents bought this house, the address was the same as many many others on the same road. They gave the house a name, so it would have a unique address, though the previous residents had managed fine for twenty years without one.

I had friends who rented around the corner. They had to give their address as "care of" the landlord's name, though the landlord didn't live there. That's because An Post knew his name, but wouldn't know the names of tenants.

I got made redundant shortly before the release of LLM code generators, so I've never used one, but I did occasionally do this for short snippets from tutorials and suchlike.

I think that it's often true that Americans don't get British sarcasm. And it's similarly often true that British people don't get American sarcasm.

So you've not heard of Gaelic football?

Hawkeye in GAA games is sponsored by Specsavers.

Here to give you the occasional reminder that Irish people (sauf a few weirdos in Dublin) also call the sport soccer.

That makes sense, then. It is actually a useful feature (especially when you're not sure on the spelling of someone's name, etc.).

My bank (BOFIIE2D) now gives me the option of instant or standard payments. Both cost the same. And in both cases the money leaves my account instantly. I can just choose whether it arrives at the recipient instantly or after a few days. I have no idea why standard is still an option. Why would I want that?

If Iran had the capability to drop a bomb on Mar a Lago, I imagine they'd have done it by now. And the world might be a better place for it.

It seems to be a new crackdown within the terms of the existing law.

The worst is when a friend in the group chat uses ChatGPT to write his comments for him. That's really icky.

Really? Interacting with an LLM feels like stepping on a slug. It's just gross.

I take such a joy in putting words together that I cannot imagine even thinking about doing something like this.

I can see this being a useful feature for some people in some situations. It's a pity it doesn't detect an angled one, which is the variant the Nazis mostly used.

The conversation here is depressingly juvenile.

All attempts to reimagine transport are train but worse, except for the occasional bike but worse.

Every now and then, an especially inventive inventor manages to do both at once. And that's how you get the Shweeb.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7qNOtgrIjO4

If you're relying on HTML forms being filled in to generate queries, the browser will always generate standard query parameters with a question mark and ampersands. But if you're making your own links, you can generate them however you like. Semi-colons should work fine, though you may need to write your one URL parsing functions.

I'm certain I've seen websites which used semi-colons rather than question marks and ampersands for query parameters. The Jehovah's Witnesses website used to, many years ago. I believe that one of the reasons behind this design was that it meant that there were no special characters which needed to be escaped in HTML. This design works fine for links, but not for forms, which will generate normal URLs containing question marks and ampersands. I suppose you can use POST-Redirect-GET forms, and generate your own URLs using semi-colons.

That perhaps explains why I vaguely recall reading it before.

The linguistic, historical, and cultural information is so fascinating, and really well explained.

On seeing just the title, before reading the article, I assumed it was about the Wingdings J.

My primary use for Typst is pretty agendas for my Toastmasters club. https://typst.app/project/rmyyeU17y51rl6ISSqGji9

Typesetting isn't just for science. I like that it looks good; I enjoy the creative step of experimenting with document design; and Typst is just fun to use.