It also in more recent years had an update that messed with it’s vcd playback ability. Don’t remember exactly the problem but I had a rip of an old vcd and was pleased that it played it back no trouble, and even from the original disc too but then a couple of years later it changed so I had to do something to extract an mpeg2 stream or something to get it to work and it from then on had audio issues that had never been there before.

Weirdly enough I often find things playing back better in IINA than VLC even though as I understand it they’re basically the same under the hood. I also find the reverse occasionally as well.

It’s amazing how effectively just hearing this from someone who has firsthand insight can put it in perspective.

Further to that third point as well, there’s probably also a question simply of opportunity. You could take the Munich situation as evidence of capability, but it may also have been opportunity plus capability. Intelligence seems like it’s a pretty difficult game and perhaps the successes in operation bayonet had to do with fortunate and unlikely intelligence scoops that they have not luckedh upon this time around and can’t rely upon as a strategy. Also, while I don’t know much about the post-Munich assassinations, it sounds like they went on for over twenty years, didn’t really take out many of the actually important, directly involved individuals and a lot of the people they would have logically wanted to target successfully went in to hiding out of their reach so if the strategic goal is to behead the organisation that carried out attacks as a defensive strategy to weaken their capacity to do it again, 20 years just to take out relatively minor unimportant figures isn’t really going to work.

That said, it also looks, as many have stated, like “taking out Hamas” is more a convenient political smokescreen for a much more sinister goal so a very successful intelligence operation that rapidly took out all their leadership at once would actually run counter to their true objectives in this scenario.

This is not relevant to the story, but like, what the fuck is happening in this video? It looks like someone tried to artificially create a depth of field by rotoscoping Roseanne and adding a blur to everything behind her or… something. There’s definitely a matte around her that’s occasionally flickering and fucking up. It’s hard to say what exactly because it’s so compressed, but there’s also something else about that video as well (besides it’s subject matter) that’s just really weird.

Wow. That was fucked up.

It’s also a pretty common lighting choice in just about any office building or commercial entity. When you’re as big as a giant fast food franchise, I can see the likelihood someone might have done the research necessary to conclude it was worth getting this lighting specifically to avoid sleeping customers and staff but I think it’s also quite likely they’re just cheap.

I think he’s famously at least eaten a lot of McDonalds.

I can’t imagine getting worked up about it either, but then the whole mildly infuriating deliberate oxymoron turn of phrase is that it’s something that should only really be a little annoying but which nonetheless is really quite annoying. It’s a type of silent frustration where you feel it, but you don’t really express it or visibly react.

In terms of what should they have put on these screens? If they felt they absolutely had to do this or really thought it might help make people’s situations feel even a modicum of improvement, then the glib messages could maybe have focussed on something other than gratitude as their common theme. It hardly seems like the appropriate time to bring that up. By their nature, any cheesy and overly broad phrase is probably going to have a sadly ironic and patronising tone to it in the circumstances but maybe something like “hang in there” or just about anything except what they went with has got to better.

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I pass butter.

Gee that Barbara sure does manage to be insightful on a lot of different topics. I try not be presumptuous but sometimes I really do feel surprised that she has so much more depth to her than her modelling career might make you think. Truly a polymath.

I don’t know how to program, but to a very limited extent can sorta kinda almost understand the logic of very short and simplistic code that’s been written for me by someone who can actually code. I tried to get to get chat GPT to write a shell script for me to work as part of an Apple shortcut. It has no idea. It was useless and ridiculously inconsistent and forgetful. It was the first and only time I used chat GPT. Not very impressed.

Given how it is smart enough to produce output that’s kind of in the area of correct, albeit still wrong and logically flawed, I would guess it could eventually be carefully prodded into making one small snippet of something someone might call “good” but at that point I feel like that’s much more an accident in the same way that someone who has memorised a lot of French vocabulary but never actually learned French might accidentally produce a coherent sentence once in a while by trying and failing 50 times before succeeding and then failing again immediately after without ever having even known.

I think it probably still has to be Christmas sandwiches. It’s a whole British style Christmas dinner in a sandwich.

• Slices of freshly roasted turkey
• Stuffing
• Sliced up roasted pork sausages
• Bacon
• Baked ham
• Baby peas
• Bread sauce
• Thick, salty, meaty turkey gravy
• Cranberry sauce

The key is in stacking it high without it all falling over and then squishing it all down to hold it’s shape. Traditionally for my family it’s the most commercial, crappy supermarket white sliced bread you can find, but I have had it with some pretty yummy sourdough. The bread is important because with all the greasy mushy sauces, it needs a tight crumb structure so you don’t get bits of sauce coming through the holes as you bite. You want something soft because you don’t want to be chewing and tearing hard crusts whilst trying to keep the delicate sandwich all together, but if it’s too soft then it tends to fall apart from all the moisture in the gravy and bread sauce. Sometimes toasting just the inner faces of the bread can work, but it has to be lightly toasted to make sure the bread retains some flexibility during the squish down step.

We all like the sandwiches even more than the actual Christmas dinner, which is already awesome.

Cheapest Logitech mouse I could find in the supermarket about 6-7 years ago.

As others have said, it might be more to do with my browser choice, browser settings and extensions. That said I remember when I first started seeing these years ago that sometimes it’d think I was a robot and sometimes it wouldn’t and maybe it was a placebo effect, but I felt fairly confident then that me jiggling the mouse really helped. Now it doesn’t matter what I do. My natural movement, a deliberately wonky but still single and continuous movement or a totally artificial mouse wiggle after the clock, I’ll always have to do captchas.

I think you might be misunderstanding the whole advantage of the fediverse idea in the first place.

The thing is, in a scenario where it’s as big as Reddit in terms of users, most of the content on the fediverse then would be local to them so if they defederated everyone or everyone defederated them, who’d really be cut off from whom? They’d probably only be marginally less appealing to their user base who might not even know how the whole fediverse thing worked anyway.

Definitely. At least the damage could be largely limited to just that instance though. I can’t seriously imagine the people behind it letting their ideals trump profit for an extended period of time, especially with financial imperatives from the costs associated with the infrastructure required if that one instance alone had so much traffic.

Theoretically though, if it started going rancid it’d be much easier to jump ship without losing out on too much, that is unless they defederate with everyone or everyone defederates with them, either of which could be distinct possibilities. In that case, I guess you’d just have another Reddit.

I’ve learned from these that I must definitely move my mouse like a robot since it always asks me to do more puzzles afterwards. This is even if I try jiggling it around after clicking just to try and convince it.

Can attest, did pee in it.