What would happen if someone were to detain a group of marines (with the minimal force necessary), in the wrong assumption - honest mistake - that they were about to execute illegal orders?

Never read one completely nor watched a full movie, but it always felt cheap and written from the unenlightened perspective of a simple mind to me.

The fantasy books of my generation, such as The Neverending Story, Momo, The Hobbit, Jim Knopf were a whole different level. Life experience and a touch of wisdom in a great story for children.

But I also think that it might be just my perspective, since my mind has been imprinted like that. I’m not judging anyone for being a Harry Potter fan and try to think of it as different, not worse.

LA is also a good opportunity to say: This and this and this high ranking officer failed and will be replaced (by a loyalist).

Table top dishwashers usually have a window. My kid considered it a major disadvantage when we got a real dishwasher that the window was missing.

One insanity in the following years was how they thought people still wanted their next generation diesel.

I’ve been working for them in the 2010s with the department to organise the staff car fleet. We ordered many electric vehicles years ahead from production and planned it all around electric vehicles: Charging stations, operating distance, some hybrids for long distance, software to calculate trips etc.

Then a few months before we needed them, they said: We overproduced on the latest diesel generation and can’t keep up with the demand for electric vehicles, so we have to sell the ones you ordered. You can either go with a Tesla (for official Volkswagen business trips!) or have the diesel for free.

It felt like there was a hysteria: Decision makers got it in their heads that the “hype” for electric vehicles was ideology-driven and not something people with buying power actually wanted today or in the near future. Bit like the republican administration thinking that “woke” is our main problem. Meanwhile, huge research and development departments did come up with the electric vehicles they sell today (and fully working hydrogen prototypes you won’t see in a store, just to be safe) and must have been quite frustrated that so few were produced.

Finally someone who appreciates him! I always noticed how his contribution is pretty impressive.

When she finds out about this she can do an ama and be a superstar for one day

I tried Gemini before. The problem was reliability.

E. g. I say “add an event to my calendar: tomorrow 2 p.m., doctor visit”, and it parses the voice perfectly. The regular assistant would then just create the entry.

But Gemini sometimes goes like: “Adding an entry to your calendar is easy! Do you have an iPhone? Then these are the steps: …”

It is not expensive and has good reviews. Let’s get it!

My initial understanding was that it’s the cat that really got to go but the human did shenanigans with the toilet paper

I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.

At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)

I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.

In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.

I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.

IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.

Just my last two orders:

• expensive quality Covid test -> get the cheapest, which stopped working properly at Alpha / Beta
• 3M respirators for $ 4 a piece -> a literal fake, hard to see, but it breaks already when putting on. 1 hour in support chat to convince them that something is wrong, but only got my money back, no investigation into the seller or product

I will stay there for now though, because it’s still a great software, easy to use

Covid has already been proven to be a contributor as well: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.16966