Patch

Why not?

My washing machine has wi-fi. I didn't buy it for that reason, but it just happens to. Using the app, I have some programme options that aren't possible to select using the hardware dials. I can do things like change the detergent dosage and the number of additional rinse cycles. It has some "special" programmes for various specific fabrics. And it has things like maintenance diagnostics and the ability to run a specific self-cleaning cycle.

That's all pretty useful.

And what's the actual danger of connecting it to wi-fi? Will Big Data know how often I wash my towels? Do I need to worry about the government spying on my fabric softener usage? Will hackers seize control of my machine and ransom my ability to get clean underwear?

I just can't see the big downside here (other than the fact that the machine is more complicated than it needs to be, but that ship has already sailed seeing as I already own it).

One of many different "third party frontends" for YouTube which, amongst other things, cut out ads and avoid performance throttling.

Personally I use one called NewPipe, and previously one called LibreTube. There are others too.

I've just had a look on the Play Store, and they notably don't use the word "buy" anywhere that I can see. The button to "buy" the app is just a button with the price on it, and clicking through that it uses the language of "install".

Can't help but think that that's deliberate.

"Oh, and 2/3 of our content is only available via 'channels' which require an additional monthly subscription almost as much as the subscription you're already paying for."

Amazon, you literally own MGM. No I am not paying you even more money to watch MGM content, you greedy fucks.

They're concept cars. Concept cars always look weird. The actual production models won't look anything like them; they never do.

Anyone with access to the NYT can also just copy paste the text and plagiarize it directly. At the point where you're deliberately inputting copyrighted text and asking the same to be printed as an output, ChatGPT is scarcely being any more sophisticated than MS Word.

The issue with plagiarism in LLMs is where they are outputting copyrighted material as a response to legitimate prompts, effectively causing the user to unwittingly commit plagiarism themselves if they attempt to use that output in their own works. This issue isn't really in play in situations where the user is deliberately attempting to use the tool to commit plagiarism.

We don't have a monopoly on one class of device, we have monopolies on five different classes of device. That's definitely different and better!

I only got on Bluesky a couple of months ago after a long wait, and honestly I don't think I've been on there once since setting up the account. A trickle of my Twitter contacts seemed to move over there in the early days but the trickle dried up and it doesn't look like many people are on there.

I hope it still finds a niche for itself, but the ridiculous invite rationing thing really does seem to have killed the momentum for them.

I've also lost interest in Mastodon, although again I'm willing to give it another go if it continues to grow. Mostly I've just found that I don't really need to replace Twitter in my life; I'm just fine without it...

I don't take selfies, and certainly don't post them to social media, but I still use my front facing camera all the time. Zoom/Teams/WhatsApp video calls are a big part of modern life. That's what the camera's actually for, in the context of being a "phone".

Realistically they never would, and wouldn't have even when the UK was in the EU due to the wider prevalence of other socket types.

But if you want an answer as to why they should, it's because it's an excellent socket design; just about as safe as it's possible to make a mains electricity connection, and practically indestructible to boot.

Yeah, it can do that. There are Android and iOS apps (as well as desktop). It has list creation in one click. General notes are technically formatted in markdown behind the scenes, and some users like to write the notes directly in markdown, but Joplin's default view is a "rich text editor" mode which hides all that stuff away and uses familiar word processor type controls.

Depending on your chosen cloud host (you can pick any you like) it can sometimes be a little fiddly to do the initial setup, but I think the default "Joplin Cloud" option is pretty straightforward.

I use Joplin, and can heartily recommend it, although there are plenty of alternative options out there too.

Which is somewhat ironic, to say the least, for a website whose sole means of driving traffic is by getting people to ask questions.

The admins have been letting mods undermine the entire point of the site for literally a decade at this point, and have never shown much real enthusiasm for fixing it. Back in "the day", Stack Overflow used to be the place where you went to find answers to programming questions; that stopped being the case a very long time ago. Most of the legitimate Q&A interactions ended up on Reddit instead.