The Gordon Ramsay anecdote is actually really good, in that in my experience VC’s get a LOT of say in what your business ultimately becomes.

I worked with someone that was, in all fairness, absolutely clueless about what they wanted, and wanted some VC alongside their rich parents money. The VC took a huge chunk of the business, and ultimately their business launched as something that was completely different to what they thought it would be - because that’s what the VC believed would give them some return. The business went bust in less than a year and launched for maybe 2 months?

Much like how Ramsay says “your Jamaican restaurant is shit, I’ve remade it into an Italian restaurant because there aren’t any nearby”, taking a lot of VC money almost certainly means they’ll want an equivalent say in your business. It’s not free money, and it absolutely fucks a lot of people up when they take that money and realise that their dream isn’t theirs any more.

This is sadly quite common, and I think by design in many places.

Rather than long, open roads having a 30mph speed and smaller residential roads at 20, the opposite is chosen, purely because councils know that they can put speed cameras there to make some money. Making roads safer through design costs money, and many roads where accidents are common are largely ignored.

It’s these tactics that feed into the hysteria that these measures are an attack on motorists. While I largely agree with the rules, many councils really take the piss. I was caught doing 24mph in a 20, but was able to overturn it because the camera was placed in the middle of a hill with a sharp enough decline to not make it legal to police.

They probably made a ton from that camera, all while the top of the hill is a small junction where people regularly crash - which is 30 and is only repaired when someone crashes into the traffic lights (not a rare occurrence).

You will never be able to block them from viewing stuff they want to see. They’ll either do it through their friends devices, on other WiFi connections, or at school where networks are hilariously open or easy to bypass.

The best thing, and frankly the only thing you can do as a parent is to be engaged with them. Make them think critically on subjects, and if something they parrot back is nonsense, call them out on it. Cast that seed of doubt in their mind. If they choose to continue to watch stupid shit, that’s their choice, and it’s only worth stepping in if it’s actively dangerous.

Don’t just get a second opinion. Call your doctor and tell them that you do not want to see that doctor any more.

Doctors don’t care if someone gets a second opinion. They do care if someone opts out of their care because their co-workers or doctors elsewhere provide better care.

I put Franks Red Hot on pizza all the time. It’s no problem.

Pizza isn’t owned by the Italians anyway. Many variants are decidedly American anyway, so it would be like a French person complaining about how the British cook a roast dinner.

Another reason is because it’s easier to close/change bus routes as opposed to doing the same on roads, so it’s a bigger job for Google to keep on top of. They struggle enough with roads, so closed bridges, paths, and parks can be a total nightmare - especially when councils or towns “forget” to update.

Chrono Trigger, without question.

One thing I truly miss from the Winamp days of piracy was the live feeds. Anime, porn, music, some great adventures discovered from just browsing. It’s how I discovered Deftones, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Sindee Coxx.

IMO more people should be critical of the systems and tools that they use instead of shitting on the tools that others choose to use.

We do assume too much of our tools, but many people here are guilty of assuming that other OS’s are broken in ways that do not reflect the average customer experience.

Global Gladiators

It’s basically capitalism as a game, but for the Genesis/Mega Drive era it was a surprisingly fun game. When I was a kid I played this before I even knew what McDonalds was, and many people I know thought I was crazy when I talked about a game I played where you collected the Golden Arches while being guided by Ronald McDonald on an environmental quest.

I had a chat with someone that is a Senior Staff Engineer at a huge company a while ago, on what I’d say is a pretty big service that millions use.

They don’t write much code any more, but they debug a lot of issues. The way they described the workflow to mastery is:

• If you know nothing, ask someone that knows something
• If you know something, Google, and there will be answer from an expert
• If you’re an expert and Google doesn’t work, read the docs and specs from the masters
• If you’re a master, start writing the specs, and offer addendums for when the spec needs to change.

IMO, Googling gets you 99% of the way there in many situations, but if you know nothing the answer might be in front of you and you wouldn’t know it.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World.

Such a great game, and so fucking hard!

My kingdom for the ability to play this on the Switch or PS5…

I switched from .local to .honk and I’m never looking back.

Yes, although for a good reason.

I ate at a fairly well-known cafe where I live, and had a sandwich and side salad. I finished the salad, and near the end I felt a weird crunch in my mouth. Suddenly I could taste blood near my gums, and when I looked at what was left of the salad I could see broken glass.

Obviously, I was a little panicked, and my wife quickly called someone over to say that there was glass in my food. One person stayed with me while the manager went to the back, and found out that one of the chefs had broken a glass on the table, but had just washed the salad clean rather than throwing it. By this point I was really embarrassed because around 30 people were staring to see what was happening, given that I had blood coming out of my mouth

I said that this was probably in other people’s food, so they should probably tell others, but instead of responding they handed me cash to cover our meal, apologised, and walked away. I shouted at them to say that they shouldn’t ignore it because others were eating the same salad. My wife chimed in and told everyone that we had found glass in the salad and that they shouldn’t eat it.

I’ve never gone back, but a few years later I had told someone that story and they said that they’d heard a rumour about it from locals, so it seems that people remembered that story and stayed away.

You’ve just made your first post regarding Arch. The cycle is complete.

They absolutely deserve the blame, but the point is that these people have always existed, and probably in much larger numbers than we’d like to believe.

A lot of people seemingly believe that the UK went from a country that loves all immigrants to a hate-filled country in just over a decade of Tory rule, but all that has happened is the government and the media have informed the public that extreme views are welcome in society.

IMO what needs to happen is a swift push from the government to say “no, violent protest will result in prison” AND actually fucking stopping them. The police know ahead of time where people are protesting, and the second so much as a can is thrown at a building the police should be making arrests - hundreds of them. Doing anything else sends a message that peaceful protest results in jail time, whereas torching an immigration law firm or hotel is fine.

The UK that I grew up in was multicultural, and proud of it. And now this.

Was it?

I fully support multiculturalism, but these cunts have existed for decades, whether it’s the national front, Britain first, EDL, BNP, etc.

The only difference between then and now is that back in the early 2000’s we treated these cunts like nutters and didn’t entertain their delusions. They were treated like you’d treat anyone with extreme views - with caution and distance.

That is a wild assumption with two key flaws

1. Windows in many workplaces has updates locked down too, except in circumstances where critical security or vulnerability patches are pushed through.

2. The same is true for many servers that run Linux.

As someone that works on tier1 services for arguably the biggest tech company right now, that’s how it works in most of FAANG. Updates are gated, sure, but like with many things there’s a vetting process where some things that look super important and safe just slip through.

In regards to your edit, I guess most cases are different from others, but if your entire business requires you to be able to use a machine 100% of the time then you should have the means to either use a different machine to continue transactions (ideally one with a known state that won’t change, or has been tested in the last few months). If you need to log transactions and process 24-48 hours later do that on something that’s locked down hard, with printed/hard backups if necessary.

Ultimately, risk is always something you factor in. If you don’t care about 48 hours of downtime over several years, it’s not a huge concern. I’d probably argue that many companies lost more money during these days than they would have spent in both money and people-hours training them on a contingency system to use in case of downtime.

No. If everyone were on Linux and there was a breaking change introduced by a third-party there would be similar problems.

The problem is that critical infrastructure isn’t treated like critical infrastructure. If something you rely on can go down due to a single point of failure, maybe don’t fucking use it?! Have backups, have systems that can replace those systems, have contingency! Slapping Windows on to a small machine and running some shitty Chromium app to work as a cash register is a fucking stupid idea when you consider that it is responsible for your whole income.

The problem was never Windows. It was companies that were too cheap to have contingency, because an event like this was considered extraordinary and not worth investing in.