folbec

"A lot of the reason why concrete structures have failed so quickly is that the material was still fairly new when most of the structures failing now were created."

Or the designer can get too creative :

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/15/style/432-park-avenue-sky...

And what about archer companies doing "volley fire" ? As in what looks like 99% of Hollywood movies.

https://acoup.blog/2025/05/02/collections-why-archers-didnt-...

MBAs are mercenaries, that's part of their formation. They fully expect to be working somewhere else when things start looking bad.

They are just doing what mercenaries have been doing for millennia : cost a lot in peace time, loot the population, and run away or cut a deal with the invader when the goings get though.

A good example is the Russian "Africa Corp" in Mali. Expensive, atrocities against the population and cut a deal with the jihadist to run away when they came last month.

I would not be surprised if it was some sort of AI driven mistake.

Some guy somewhere deciding to delegate threat assessment to Copilot or some other automated tool.

It is heavily dependent on the history of your area.

I am near Lyon (12km away), I had 20mb then 100Mb coaxial cable very early because the "département" built a public network and eventually leased it to private companies.

I finally switched to fiber 3 years ago when it became available in my street.

The cell network is fairly bad however (even with 2 cell towers less than 1km from my place).

So geography and history count a lot.

I can confirm this from France.

I think it is also fairly similar to the kind of discourse a manager in pretty much any domain will produce.

He lacks (or lost thru disuse) technical expertise on the subject, so he uses more and more fuzzy words, leaky analogies, buzzwords.

This maybe why AI generated content has so much success among leaders and politicians.

there is a bug in the CSS :

explicit border:2px solid var(--border); on the input which takes priority over the class :

.demo-uv-input:user-invalid { border-color: var(--red-muted); background: rgba(239,68,68,.04); }

YMMV but when corrected it works for me on latest Edge, Chrome, Firefox (Windows versions)

I personally think that the more appropriate quote from 1984 is this one, because the cruelty is the whole point :

“The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.” He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”

Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.

“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?[...]”"

1984.

Exactly, there is no need for nefarious intentions, when time constraint et mild incompetence suffice.

The OOXML format is likely a not very deeply thought out XML serialization of the in memory structure or of the old binary format, done under time pressure (there was legal pressure on Microsoft at the time).

Literally in the title of the article "... in areas of decreasing demographics ...".

So yes if you are willing to live in areas :

- without jobs, - without healthcare - in ghost towns

The author has a VERY dim view of Sparta, and of the people who worship Sparta and of the quality of information the legend of Sparta is based upon (second hand roman information, from Romans, at a time where Sparta had become a sort of theme park for bored senators).

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r...

I have pretty much the same experience, but it is highly dependent on what you were using.

- WCF ? (very enterprisy i know) : you are still mostly screwed

- aspx ? compulsory rewrite

- MVC ? mostly smooth (but most of the pain is in initialization so comes early and can discourage newbies)

- Console ? mostly smooth

- before .Net 6 ? it was a death march, not only many API were lacking, but third party libraries were also missing.

- .Net 6 -> .Net 8 ? very smooth

the technical term in "contingent" :

https://acoup.blog/2021/10/15/fireside-friday-october-15-202...

"(The fancy way of putting the influence of all of those factors, both the big structural ones and the little, subject-to-chance ones, is to say ‘history is contingent’ – that is, the outcomes are not inevitable but are subject to many forces large and small, many of which the lack of evidence render historically invisible.)"

Maybe it's the right time to once again quote this poem :

https://jochenenglish.de/misc/dearest_creature.pdf

The joy of English pronunciation

George Nolst Trenit´e (1870–1946)

1 The text

Dearest creature in creation

Studying English pronunciation,

I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,

Make your head with heat grow dizzy;

Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;

Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,

Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!

Just compare heart, hear and heard,

Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain

(Mind the latter how it’s written).

Made has not the sound of bade,

Say—said, pay—paid, laid but plaid.

Now I surely will not plague you

With such words as vague and ague,

But be careful how you speak,

Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak,

Previous, precious, fuchsia, via,

Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;

Woven, oven, how and low,

Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

Say, expecting fraud and trickery:

1

Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,

Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,

Missiles, similes, reviles.

... (7 pages of pain follow) ...

and the the Oxford and US pronunciation (at the time, it has changed since) in phonetic.

That's the magic of genius marketing

do you know thet firefox for android has extensions, including uBlock Origin, cookie autodelete, tampermonkey (these are only those that I use) ?

Maybe because when Elon Musks walks into a room everybody is a billionaire on average ?

Besides what is the use of inheriting at 60 or 70 ?

The first risk with virtualized setups is DRMs, if your uni use any kind of "professional" software with student or university wide license that makes use of pain in the ass DRM, you will be hung dry. That's the most probable reason. Typical culprits are CAD software, electronic design software, Adobe, etc.

The second risk is if they want to control your setup in some way with some sort of fleet management software. Windows VM inside another OS should be fine with that, but you never know.

Your escape hatch may be a big windows machine 16G+, preferably 24G minimum, and run your linux env in WSL2, android in WSA, or use Hyper-V, etc.

Naaaah. Musk is a G.E.N.I.U.S (tm) He clearly identified that Tesla owners want a "Rat's Style" custom car.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Rat%E2%80%99s+Style+cars&at...

here it's more like the Bing team.

It's all about targeted ads.

"- merchant checks if debit or credit card is accepted by their payment processor —> if not accepted, tell buyer present diff card or “get bent”"

This is america, in France (and more generally in Europe) all credit / payments cards are standardized thru governmental intervention. Vendors are allowed to say cash only and refuse cards in general but this is getting real rare. In some countries (Norway), you can have a real hard time paying cash in big cities, vendors refuse it.

"One-Half the Money I Spend for Advertising Is Wasted, But I Have Never Been Able To Decide Which Half"

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/

Reading the various comments on this article, I get the feeling that drugs are russian roulette with a random number of bullets in the barrel.

Some people enjoy that. Not me.

So this makes you a candidate for the ultimate retro-computing challenge :

"¹ If you’re one of those retro-computing archivists, I guess this poses an extraordinary challenge even greater than possessing a Tandy Video Information System: Can you track down one of the three remaining copies of OS/2 for Mach 20?"

Artificial Inanity ?

https://englishwotd.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/artificial-inan...

Don't count your chickens yet :

https://www.thespl.it/p/apples-sleeping-advertising-business

" For the past five years, Apple has been setting up for what will soon be its most profitable product line. It's not a new phone or computer: it's advertising. "

As some C-suite suit bonus will depend on that, you can be sure that the various protections will evaporate over the years.

Games were among the worst offender in terms of writing on the disk outside of user space (including Program Files and the registry).

Old games were also quite often doing direct access to graphic cards outside of official APIs

And games are not business software. An old game that stops working is "too bad, move long", accounting software that stops working has real life consequences.

for those who can read french :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_sulpicien

Appropriately soppy and generic.