I suppose the TV licence in the UK is a sort of paywall, even if it is made of swiss cheese and enforced by folk with all the legal standing of Larry the Head Mouser or whatever moggy it is now.

I pay it, but I’m loathed to now. Not because I watch any live TV or BBC programming, but because I use the BBC News site a metric fucktonne and I suppose I justify it to myself as funding the BBC News department rather than Graham Norton’s salary.

Maybe I’ll fuck it off though. I do fancy a letter war with Capita or whoever managed the enforcement these days.

I’m guessing you’ve got a study that backs that assertion up as well?

Thank you for your public service announcement!

I know this a gross oversimplification, but:

“Remote working benefit those with a reason to stay home, but doesn’t for those who don’t have a reason to stay home” seems to be the general idea of the headline.

edit: I think this is the study they’re talking about, please double check the source before quoting: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36718392/

ain’t no harm skibidi ohio guy, don’t got time fo the low-rizz crowd, no cap

If I could have crowbarred “moist” in there somewhere too, I’d have set the lexical tiktok on fire.

…if there is even one, don’t come at me TNETENNBA fans!

Yeah it’s a shame that Musk is so inextricably linked with the brand. I’m quite sure SpaceX and Tesla are full of top tier talent and engineering wizards… but have a direct link to a toxic cockwomble that bankrolls them. Shame.

I haven’t, no - and you’re probably right, yes.

I worry that if I start playing KSP then my other half and kids won’t see me again for six months because it does sound fucking awesome and highly rewarding.

Nope, I’m a simple man. I play through a couple of Doom WADs each summer in the academic off-season and that’s my gaming appetite satiated.

I’m surprised I strung so many together coherently to be honest!

Speaking as a layman, I just think it’s fuckin’ awesome how a big chonky boi can be propelled upwards at Mach Yeet and get casually dropped off in orbit.

Even though Musk is a cunt, I still love watching SpaceX streams to see big bits of metal get put upwards by lots of fire and noise, and then fuckin’ land where they started seven or eight minutes later.

Science is fuckin mint, man.

Computerphile did a wonderful feature worth ten minutes of your time - going into surface level detail of how some AI models put ethics to one side to achieve results.

It’s not just AI and it’s something humans can do too, but it is a bit unsettling (from both parties, in retrospect).

I fucking love AI.

I’ll qualify that with a small personal story on it: I have a colleague in a nearby office the other side of the city, who steps into supervise his team when the actual manager isn’t there. Nice bloke, not much banter, but pleasant enough.

You can fucking guarantee though that when a division-wide email has gone out, or a change of plan comes in… he’s right on the phone to me asking what to do.

The first few times it was cute. A guy must really love his job or hate himself to go into junior management, so walking him through routine tasks he may not have been exposed to may be beneficial to him in the long run.

The problem is, it’s near constant. Every single time something changes, he calls - not for advice, not for opinion, but “can you do this for my team too?”. What really pulls a hair out of my arse is that there’s a 50/50 chance of it being something I’ve already showed him. I’ve spoken to his actual manager at exasperated length but it’s just a can kicked down the road with a “well he’s still learning, isn’t he?”

I suppose he is, and I’m no teacher. When he phones now, I just tell him “mate our org has access to that fancy new Microsoft Copilot, it’s fuckin’ mint bro, solves all your problems”, knowing fine well the disaster that’s about to happen - partly to expose him to new technologies, but mainly to be a smug cunt.

Invariably, he gets solutions that don’t quite work, or ideas that don’t quite fit the brief… and it’s satisfying as fuck getting the follow-up call and saying “sorry bruv, Copilot is smarter than me, which isn’t hard” or “nah sorry dude, it gives you a personalised response so that’ll be outside of my domain, making my suggestions worthless”.

Fucking love it. It has reduced my workload immensely.

The HAMBOTVER of the 2000s!

Or worse, the US telecom franchise 😭

e: obligatory Sinclaaaaaaaiiiirrrr

2009 just called and Armani Code is still a banger.

Jean Paul Gaultier is subjectively top quality too. His Fleur de Male is perhaps the best fragrance I’ve ever had.

That said, I’m still happy with Davidoff Cool Water so I’m hardly a modern fragrance critic.

Yeah I’ve still got my headsets from boxes with Skype For Business branding that have “Compatible with Microsoft Lync” stickers on them.

It’s probably closer in UI to Skype from the 2000s that the “real” Skype never really recaptured. Not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

My org used Skype For Business and it worked remarkably well. Much more lightweight, though somehow still a little less responsive than it should have been.

It has that “it just works” factor for video calling, whereas Teams almost needs a fucking checklist to rattle through if someone’s audio or video feed isn’t working.

I’m not sure if you’re taking the piss or not but I’m going to choose to believe you’re asking in good faith!

The code just feels… messy, unfamiliar, almost chaotic - but the semicolons and curly brackets in a neat little row, formatted in a satisfying way, is like an island of calm and order in the middle of a formatting clusterfuck.

A moment of serenity in the middle of a riot, one may think.

I hate it with every fibre of my being but also secretly calmed by that column of statement terminators and brackets.

It’s like the code representation of the Vancouver riots kiss photo.

“maybe if I hit ‘compile’ really fast, then the bug might not have time to manifest itself this time”