Candy bar wrapper from the counter top after the owner forgot to put it in the garbage. Forbidden chocolate flavour with very little danger of poisoning.

Which is not to say the dog knows this. It would have had the candy bar too given half a chance.

I still think Win2K was the true peak. Everything since has been clown shoes and bloat.

… but I have to admit that my Mint Cinnamon customisation looks a whole lot more 7 than it does 2K.

Mimi, I hate to tell you, but this is a sign of getting old.

As far as I know, from all the way over here on the other side of the planet, it’s not actually the large ones you have to be afraid of.

Huntsmans, like the pictured spider, are relatively harmless, maybe a little bit stupid, and the biggest danger is the chaos you’ll cause freaking out about the size of the thing and then trying to relocate it elsewhere.

It’s the small ones like the redback that you have to watch out for. I have heard that they like hiding under toilet seats and in shoes.

That sounds more like a protection racket than good advice.

… which will be fed into the next generation of LLMs in order to stop sounding quite so much like LLMs.

That’s a tricky one. I’m a big fan of Bourbons, but since they’re not restricted by copyright or branding, every UK supermarket and many other confectionery companies each make their own and the quality can vary quite a bit.

There are also two common form factors. The original is roughly 2:1 (as pictured in the above article) and the other, which is less common, is closer to 3:2 to match the common form factor of the Custard cream.

The supermarket own-brand I usually get (2:1) has the bonus of being dairy-free, which is not always the case.

Sometimes I catch myself involuntarily doing a little happy dance on biting into one, so the quality of that particular brand has yet to drop beyond that threshold for me.

“Be nice to your mother. It’s bad enough being a wereunderbedmonster without all the insults.”

I once worked on a project where a third party-parser had a bug that effectively made it sensitive to the order it loaded files.

This wasn’t a syntactic or a semantic problem. There was a stack processing issue that could be avoided by simply loading the files in a different order. This might have changed the final semantics if one file contradicted another, but that generally didn’t happen. Each file had a specific purpose and it would still break without any contradictions.

The default load order was whatever order the file system had the files stored, but knowing that wouldn’t necessarily help because changing the size or contents of a file in such a way that it retained the same position might trigger the same issue. Therefore you could force by-Unicode load ordering and still have it choke.

It was very hard to track down and I very much did not like editing those files for fear of triggering the parser bug. When I had to would be where the regret kicks in.

The other regret, and maybe a little more relevant, was renaming all the files to a different filename format that didn’t make any difference in the end, but it was uglier than the original and it stuck.

I believe a later version of that parser fixed the bug(s), but I moved on.

Some have aged like wine. Others, milk.

Some are still in use that ought to have been dropped years ago. Others have been forgotten and need to make a comeback, or at least get a remake.

And in a large number of cases, people will disagree about which memes fall into which category.

Also a lot of the newer memes have completely passed me by or else are so niche I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to have seen them or not. This revelation largely stems from a recent visit to KnowYourMeme to look for an old meme and all the recent posts were completely opaque and bewildering to me.

I guess this means I’m old, but I already knew that.

Some of these people are so out of touch that they’d have to spend a decade in the trenches before they might even begin to get an inkling that something is up.

Case in point: Bezos went to space and wasn’t humbled by the overviewer effect because his ego is literally larger than the planet he lives on.

Chances are that they didn’t have anywhere near enough space to give everyone the full terabyte and they were gambling on not everyone needing all their allocated space.

I mean, it’s not hard to throw 64TB of drives into a server, set up RAID with some level of redundancy (let’s say something that gives 16TB apparent) and get it hosted in a data centre somewhere. If you’ve a thousand users all taking up no more than a few gigabytes each, you might not even fill it.

And if they bought those drives prior to the recent price hikes on all things storage, it might not even have cost them much. (I mean, the initial outlay even now wouldn’t break $10k.)

This is all catastrophically bad planning, yes, but businesses do this sort of thing all the time, even long after the start-up period where something so basic might make sense.

(And thus we see a likely reason why they’ve suddenly shrunk the free tier to a slightly more sensible value.)

Insufficient demand means insufficient return on investment, so of course prices need to go up to make up the shortfall.

And in another story on my feed, we have a trillionaire with the opposite problem, where there’s too much demand, so of course, prices need to go up to reduce demand.

I was going to say “at least it’s not wasps”, but then, the wasps would survive and be able to sting over and over, and the bees would each likely die horribly after their first attempt. If I’m going to die by being stung by a swarm of something, maybe I wouldn’t want the deaths of hundreds of bees on my conscience.

On the other hand, the secret panel would likely involve something less nice if it had been wasps.

Local historical societies and any locations that still exist from those photos maybe ought to be given the option to save them if you don’t want to keep them.

If you can identify people and locations all the better. Since you have scans you can provide a physical thumbnail sheet with what’s going on in each one. Or do what they did in the old days and write on the back of them.

It is a reference to a certain 20th Century leader who went deep into politics after his art wasn’t considered good enough to get him accolades or qualifications at it.

(You’ll have heard of him. Shouty and German. Funny little moustache.)

The password manager I use lets me create a hierarchy so I can subcategorise. Reading the other comments here suggests that it’s not a unique feature and so I’ll hazard a guess that most of them can do the same thing.

It also supports different databases if you really want to go that route, but since that means you’ll need a different password for each one, you’re undoing some of the work of having a password database in the first place… unless you intend to have a master password database with a master master password. That just hurts my head to think about.

Altavista circa 1999. Google stole the crown and was good for a long while after that, but it’s intentionally worse now than Altavista was back then.

If someone like DuckDuckGo could get their heads out of their cloacas long enough to fix the + and - features for “must contain” and “must not contain”, they could easily steal that crown.

I don’t think articles, definite or indefinite are the weirdest things about English, if only because other languages have the same features.

There have to be weirder things that are specific to this one language, but it’s hard to find something that isn’t shared by any other language, especially not the closely related ones. German goes one step further with the whole capitalisation thing, for example, where all nouns are capitalised, not just those that are names.

Perhaps we could go for how vowels all become, or at least move towards schwa in unstressed positions. That’s the vowel at the end of “the” when unstressed and before a consonant. (German has some of this with final -e (and to some extent, the same with older French pronunciation), but it’s not necessarily the same thing going on there.)

Consonant aspiration might be another oddity. Aspiration depends on position in a word in English and doesn’t hold any semantic or grammatical meaning, but in other languages, an aspirated consonant can completely change the meaning of a word. I think Korean is one such language. They even have different letters for the different sounds.

If you don’t know what aspiration is, it’s the burst of air that follows some consonants. English speakers generally don’t even know they’re doing it. The often-used example is “pin” versus “spin”, where the leading “p” of “pin” has far more air after it than it does in “spin”.

Distrowatch may still rank by number of clicks on a distro on their site. I have been convinced for a number of years that MX Linux has maintained its top position there because people click on it wondering what the heck it is, keeping it at the top in a self-perpetuating loop.

This is neither an endorsement nor a criticism of MX Linux, by the way. Maybe it’s awesome. I’ve just never used it, and probably never will.