Patch

@Patch@feddit.uk

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Patch ,

See, now I'm fine with that. I pay for Netflix and I want what I pay for to stay ad-free. Having an ad-supported tier with no fee in addition to that means that there are options for other people without enshittifying my experience.

That's a world of difference to what Amazon have done where they've shoved ads into the service that I thought I was paying for, and then offered to charge me even more to get my original ad-free service back.

Patch ,

could have been interpreted as an alien abduction (or Satanic ritual abuse).

Why not both?

Patch ,

It always seemed weird to me that most companies just discontinued their traditional sugary variety and went diet only, instead of having a diet version and the sugary version just at a higher price.

The death of original Irn Bru is a bit of a tragedy, and I'm not even sure what the point of low sugar Lucozade is supposed to be.

Patch ,

To send things in the post?

Why is Matrix mentioned more often than XMPP in self hosted forums?

I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?...

Patch ,

I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?

Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone's tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.

GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).

Patch ,

The Government has abdicated its duties; for the they who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains themselves and anxiously hopes for just two things: meat and crumpets.

  • Juvenal, 100 AD (mostly)
Patch ,

The barristers the CPS employs to bring prosecutions are the same barristers used by the Post Office, using the same courts and the same judges.

That's actually not entirely true. Although the CPS does engage "free" barristers via chambers for some cases, most CPS prosecutions are handled "in house" by salaried barristers working directly for the CPS.

CPS's in-house barristers are (as a rough rule) extremely experienced at prosecuting common-or-garden cases, but lack the specialist experience of barristers available to hire via chambers, who they will usually bring in for the more complex prosecutions (or ones involving a specialist area of expertise).

All barristers are only as good as the evidence given to them, though, and one of the real strengths of the CPS barristers is experience in working with the police- both in terms of knowing how to get the best evidence out of them, and knowing a police wild goose chase when they see one. This is the part that really breaks down in cases like the Post Office, where it's private corporate investigators throwing complex technical evidence over the fence at random barristers who have mostly not worked with them before.

Patch ,

You know, I don't think I've ever heard an American say "Gen Z" before, and it literally never occured to me that they were pronouncing it "Gen Zee". Obvious now you mention it, but I've just been assuming that every time I see it written down it's "Gen Zed" by default.

Patch , (edited )

What I hate about "eggplant" is that none of the varieties that anybody actually eats look even remotely like an egg. It's a massive purple banana-shape. They also don't taste like eggs, smell like eggs, or get used like eggs.

It'd be like calling cucumbers "cheesefruit" or something. It's just destined to baffle.

Patch ,

You can say rapeseed on the internet, friend.

Patch ,

Scotch is whisky from Scotland (shockingly).

That's not an Americanism really; people call it Scotch in British English too. It's just that because 99% of the whisky in the UK is Scotch anyway you don't really need to specify. Whereas because most whisky consumed in the US is bourbon, they tend to specify when they mean Scotch.

The same is presumably true in reverse, i.e. Brits using "bourbon" more than Americans because of the need to specify.

Personally I'm not bothered by the whisky/whiskey distinction. Whisky was traditionally Scottish and whiskey Irish, with the Americans going the Irish way and other countries (like Japan) going the Scottish way. But it's a bit of a meme to nitpick at this point; they're indisputably just two spellings of the same thing.

Patch ,

Sure. But it's a normal word, and censoring a few letters makes it look ruder than it is. Like writing "cockerel" as "c***erel". Just draws attention to the offensive bit.

Patch ,

Once you've got your eye in, scotch and bourbon are quite different. Many (although not all) scotch whiskies have peat in their flavour profile (a kind of smoky, salty, earthy flavour which is very distinctive), while bourbons never do. Bourbon is almost always quite a lot sweeter than scotch.

They're also made quite differently. Bourbon is mostly corn, and often has lots of rye and wheat in the mix, whereas scotch is mostly made of barley. Bourbon is always aged in new oak barrels, whereas scotch is mostly aged in second-fill barrels (which might previously have been used for bourbon, wine, sherry, port, cider etc.).

Patch ,

Britain and Australia are two distant cousins separated by a planet but united in their love of that bitter black goop.

Patch ,

That reads oddly like the Dr Evil's Childhood monologue.

Patch ,

Having data means nothing if you can't monetize it.

As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.

And they've been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.

Patch ,

What a bizarre coincidence; that's exactly what I came on to post!

Finished Red Mars a few weeks ago, started Green Mars a couple of days ago. I'd never read any Kim Stanley Robinson before, and I'm enjoying it so far.

Any other recommendations from your award-winners reading list?

Patch ,

Oh yeah, because courts have never made a mistake, new evidence never comes to light, and we don't even have a word for "miscarriage of justice".

Use work laptop as personal device by dual booting on a separate internal drive?

I currently have a Dell laptop that runs Windows for work. I use an external SSD via the Thunderbolt port to boot Linux allowing me to use the laptop as a personal device on a completely separate drive. All I have to do is F12 at boot, then select boot from USB drive....

Patch ,

Simple question: what would your employer say if you asked them?

My contract has a standard "no using company computers for personal business" clause. However I feel entirely confident that my employer doesn't mind me using it to do personal errands using the web browser (on my own time). And I know they have no problem with me using Zoom or Teams to join meetings for non-work things in the evening. How do I know this? Because I asked them...

I've never asked them "can I install a new hard drive in my laptop, install an OS I downloaded off the internet, and boot into that OS to do things which I'd rather you not be able to track like you could on the main OS". But I'm completely confident I'd know what the answer would be if I did ask.

If you think installing a new SSD etc. is acceptable, ask them. If you're not asking them because you're worried they'd say "no", then don't do it.

Try asking them instead if you can use your laptop to look up directions to the dentist on Google Maps. See if you get the same answer.

Patch ,

Oatly brand oat milk is generally the best milk alternative for me. I prefer Oatly Semi in tea, as I find the Oatly Barista too rich for a standard cuppa (although it is excellent for sweet masala chai or for coffee).

Patch ,

Being of conventional English extraction, I drink vast quantities of tea in the usual style: black tea and milk. These days it's usually oat milk, and sugar is occasionally involved (but not usually). I like an Assam-heavy malty blend of black tea (and the Twinings pure Assam is particularly good too). Clipper is probably my favourite of the mainstream brands for a standard black blend (although I'm not above a cup of cheap Typhoo).

I do drink reasonable quantities of Earl Grey too. Twinings brand for that, usually. I also drink this with milk, which (contrary to the deep insistence of internet blog spam everywhere) is actually very common. I've had it the other way (black with lemon) many times, but it's no improvement in my opinion.

I'm quite partial to a rooibos too, which I appreciate isn't actually tea, but you know. I'm not fussy on rooibos brand though; so far I've found that every brand I've tried had been perfectly decent, so I'm usually just led by price (or by pretty packaging...).

Patch ,

Literally the first paragraph:

The Budgie desktop team announced today the release and general availability of Budgie 10.9 as the latest version of this modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

If you need more than "modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions" to figure out what the project is, then you're probably not the target audience for 9to5Linux.

Patch ,

It's a fair point. Curiosity has "only" travelled about 20 miles over its 12 year life so far. And while it weighs some 900 kilos, Martian gravity is only 38% that of Earth.

Obviously it's absurd to compare the wear and tear on something rumbling around the Martian tundra cut off from any support or maintenance for a decade, but it is a very different use case to your average Earthly car or lorry. What lasts a decade going at 0.1mph for 20 miles in an alien desert is not necessarily going to last a week going at 70mph down an asphalt highway.

Patch , (edited )

  1. You don't fill a whole kettle, you just put in the water you need.

  2. British kettles legitimately boil faster than ones stateside because of our higher mains electricity voltage. A quick boil kettle in the UK is far quicker than a standard domestic microwave.

Edit: I just timed my kettle (I was craving a cuppa anyway); one cup of water, 53 seconds. I bet your microwave can't top that (mine certainly can't).

Patch ,

"Unfounded fears about spooky microwaves makes using them unhealthy. But take my advice and add extra salt into your diet in new and inventive ways because it might make things taste marginally, subjectively better."

They warned you: Someone allegedly used a politician's cloned voice to interfere with an election | It will most assuredly not be the last time this happens ( www.techspot.com )

They warned you: Someone allegedly used a politician's cloned voice to interfere with an election | It will most assuredly not be the last time this happens::undefined

Patch ,

Desecrates could think that if he has an idea it has to be true

That's not what Descartes said, by the way.

"I think therefore I am" was all about "I know I must exist, because I'm here to think about it". It wasn't about "if I think something it must be true".

In Discourse he sets about trying to establish what things you can know for sure, vs which things are subjective (and could just be a trick of the mind or an illusion). He establishes the first principle that the one thing he knows is definitely true is that he is an entity that is capable of thought (because otherwise, who else is doing all this thinking?) and therefore at the very least he must exist, even if nothing else does.

If you're of the position that truth isn't subjective, "Cartesian doubt" should be right up your alley. Trust nothing until you can prove it! Not a bad position for a philosopher to take.

Patch , (edited )

but isn't your national post serving an important competitive function, keeping other (fully private) mailing and courrier services in the pricing ballpark?

private companies would fill the void - at the consumer's expense, no?

Royal Mail is fully private; no part of it is nationally owned.

It was sold off on the cheap a decade ago (while it was still profitable) with a major "caveat emptor" stipulation that the universal service obligation would remain as it was.

The private owners have since hived off the profitable parcel delivery arm (GLS) into a legally distinct entity, and have started whinging that the now isolated letter delivery business is unprofitable without degrading the service obligation.

It's a cynical move.

Patch ,

The Firefox snap is published directly by Mozilla too; it's not a third party snap.

Patch ,

If you want to announce your disapproval or approval of a certain post, there's this great mechanism built right in to do so. There are a couple of little arrow buttons; just click the down arrow on anything that you don't enjoy.

Personally I find it dead easy just to not click on any posts that don't pique my interest, and it's not like this community has so much content that "high quality" posts are getting buried under the sheer volume.

If you want to start a new community which is just Linux news aggregation, you go right ahead though.

Patch ,

How dare you question Ming-Chi Kuo 😤

Patch ,

Some of them were actually pretty good artists; occasionally you'd see them do other stuff and it'd be genuinely good on an artistic level.

The whole stick man, lumpy face, primitivist thing was just an "in" aesthetic (while also being conveniently really quick to produce).

Patch ,

It's also worse because it completely undermines the point by using a horrendous fixed width typeface and dark green on black colours for the text.

Patch ,

What do you need vim for when Emacs has everything (including vim)?

(jk, I don't care about Emacs or vim; I'm a nano peasant)

Patch ,

It’s not hard to see how this could be used maliciously. Someone could say something, be corrected and put in their place, only for them to delete their top comment and spoil the conversation.

Someone did that to me once; it was very frustrating. They posted a wrong thing, got corrected by me and others, their post got downvoted and the corrections got upvoted. So they delete their comment (and ours) and repost the same thing again. Get corrected again, votes pan out again...so they do it again. Basically repeated the trick until the others in the conversation gave up and left them to it.

Glad to hear it's fixed.

Patch ,

Keep your filthy Cex parties to yourself, you degenerate.

Patch ,

I also usually buy cod in Tesco. But probably not in quite the same way.

Patch ,

He's already refused an OBE.

I was under the impression that he refused it because Vennells had one. As she's now handed hers back in disgrace, presumably that objection is resolved.

Patch ,

I'm a big 6'1" man, and generally a lover of dogs, but I'm exactly the same. I once had a massive German shepherd barrel up to me at full tilt, no owner in sight, and launch itself into my belly. It was being friendly, as it happens, but that's hardly much comfort when a 30kg bundle of muscle and claws hurls itself at you at a full sprint.

The owner, when they materialised a few moments later, was a middle aged woman who chuckled about how "he's a big softy, he just wants attention". Like, sure, but it would have been small comfort if I'd been a 10 year old child or something. Keep that "lovable scamp" on a fucking lead if you can't keep them to heel...

Patch ,

I read that as "incineration", and my reaction was "a bit harsh, but fair".

Incarceration works too though.

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