Yes well done, it’s the “if it pays for them” aspect that the news sites were unhappy about, and that the French government said Google should be doing. But Google doesn’t pay websites for summaries it publishes on its search results, and likewise they didn’t pay the news sites to summarise their articles. So for a while, Google News was unavailable in France.

err in Europe we use bricks to build houses. A house made out of wood is not a house, it is a shed.

I spent a thousand dollars replacing the cheap compressor in my fridge

So was it worth it? How long ago did you do it and what are the differences you’ve noticed so far?

After rapidly falling behind in the global rush to artificial intelligence, Brussels has a fresh chance at an economic success story in the emerging field of quantum technology. But in a new strategy to be released Wednesday, the EU will warn that promising homegrown quantum tech risks being snatched up to make money abroad as the bloc continues to lag in turning research into “real-market opportunities,” To many, it’s déjà vu. Europe is generally best in class in the research that precedes revolutionary technologies, as it was in artificial intelligence. But the U.S. and China leapfrogged the continent in building the companies to deploy mass-market applications.

My feeling is that the EU has often taken a protectionist approach to the challenges from new tech. That is, the EU will pass legislation to protect existing dominant businesses, even if that is not necessarily in the best interests of Joe Public. I’m thinking of how France banned Google from scraping news sites to show in its news summaries, and also how roadblocks were put in the way of Google maps in order to protect the business models of existing satnav companies such as Garmin and TomTom (namely selling “map packs” for download rather than distributing always-up-to-date map data online).

Those attempts to protect the old guard, the status quo, were unsuccessful, and if anything, encouraged EU companies to stick with old and out-dated business models longer than they should have. So has the EU now learnt that it is a mistake to try to hobble new technology just to protect existing institutions? Some institutions don’t deserve to be saved, no matter how big they are, when technology offers better solutions, be they cheaper, more direct (fewer middlemen), and/or more powerful.

The EU has had its fair share of successful tech startups, so hopefully the EU will now be more willing to embrace the “disruptive” side of modern technology. I genuinely hope so.

pleasing about buying a Windows 11 laptop, and immediately replacing Windows

there really is! I just got a new laptop, and it really wanted me to go through the Lose-dows setup wizard crap. That wasn’t so much an MS thing, rather the laptop’s idiot-proofing. For instance, I had to hold the power button for a full 10 seconds to get it to hard power-off, and getting a boot menu so I could boot from USB was not as easy as it could’ve been.

But those initial frustrations were replaced by sheer glee once I did finally get to a linux prompt, and using fdisk was able to nuke all those horrible Win partitions from orbit.

I’ve been playing keyboard & mouse so far so I just tried it with an XBox controller. Doesn’t seem to really support it at all - there weren’t any default bindings for it and while you can assign functions to some of the buttons in the key-bind settings, it doesn’t seem possible to assign anything to analogue inputs such as the sticks and triggers, or even the d-pad.

For some reason, in the thumbnail, it’s much easier to convince my brain that it’s a white and gold dress in shadow. When I expand the image, it’s pretty much impossible for me to see it as anything other than blue & black.

What a waste of time!

roller skates

old world, which I got for €10 in the GOG sale. I wanted something like the OG civ experience, where you slowly build up your civilisation, creating a network of cities with good transport links, strong agriculture supporting healthy growth, then, when the bloodlust gets too strong to ignore, building small military forces to go out and crush your neighbours.

I’m enjoying myself so far. The game does seem like a more straightforward and casual Civ - the learning curve is so gentle and you don’t feel like you’re overloaded with admin details that you can’t keep track of. Last time I played Civ, it was Civ 6 and it was fun until a rival civilisation plonked a city down right in the middle of one of my own conglomerations. Perfect excuse for kicking some ass, so I assembled a little force and invaded the city to kick it out. Unfortunately you can’t just declare war and get away with it, and there were a lot of side-effects to contend with, such as becoming a pariah on the world stage affecting trade. War was just not economically viable, and while that might be realistic for some time periods, it just wasn’t the game I wanted to play.

So I am happy with old world. It’s pretty much what I wanted so far - but will the simpler mechanics make the game less replayable? It may well do, but I’m enjoying it for now. Above all, what I like about these sorts of games - zero time pressure. I can take as long as I like on each turn, there’s absolutely no rush to decide what to do, I’m free to bimble about and make sure I’ve not forgotten anything.

well, maybe it helps to know that companies don’t actually want their brand name to become a generic term, even if it seems like a sign of immense success. The brand name loses its distinctiveness as a trademark. Essentially, the public starts to perceive the brand name as the name of the thing itself, rather than a specific brand of that thing.

For instance, in the UK, people still say things like, “I’m going to hoover the front room” to mean they’re going to clean it with a vacuum cleaner. Notice that the brand of vacuum cleaner doesn’t actually matter in this case - most people own non-Hoover vacuums, yet will still say, “love, get me the hoover out the cupboard”.

Other brands that this has happened to include Aspirin, Cellophane, Band-Aid.

So maybe we should actually start saying, “I’m going to google this with Qwant”. In principle, we’d be undermining and devaluing the brand.

if they hit you, you’re going underneath, not over the top

I don’t really understand American car categories, such as SUV, but anyway, older models of the Nissan Leaf have done well in the “Vulnerable Road Users” (VRU) part of crash tests, with the most recent model on the Euro NCAP site scoring 71% in the VRU Protection category.

That’s the 2018 model, so quite old. I wouldn’t expect this latest model to perform much worse than that though and I wouldn’t be surprised if it performs even better. Here’s the side view - it doesn’t look as low and angled at the front as the 2018 model, but you can still see that it’s been designed with not killing pedestrians in mind:

why Netanyahu came to Mar-a-Lago June last year to see trump

Interesting point. Mossad psyop teams helping promote pro-trump disinfo on the social networks?

Americans definitely all seem to be patriotic, like they say stuff like, “I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but was carpet bombing all those villages worth it?”

FYI I’ve had this issue on my old XFCE laptop for a while, and I’m still using X there. I thought it was a sign of failing hardware, given that it happens at the very last point of shutdown (and also, if the system was going into hibernation, it wakes up from it successfully even though I had to force poweroff the machine).

I thought we switched to libre

Maybe some people did. Thing is there’s a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn’t necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.

Gardiner Bryant is great. So great, you don’t have to suffer YouTube to keep up with his videos, he also publishes to PeerTube:

https://peertube.wtf/w/omBg7MPgFSZAB7YkWEYGdu

A collective can be a great way to run a company, for some cases. I lived with a girl who worked at a cafe that was run as a collective - it meant that people had a fair say in decisions that affected them. They could vote on their own wages, working conditions, and no one was barking out orders bossing them around. The owner was an old-school left-winger who was doing this out of pure idealism. He was still the one with the financial risk, he dealt with banks, ensured taxes were dealt with, and all the other tasks involved in running a business such as that.

Nothing stopping you trying!

Great. Yes. Under some kind of egalitarian free-energy tech utopia such as you’re describing, websites like Nexus mods would be even better. Sadly there are no such systems already operating for us to move to, and we do not yet have the technology to try creating a new one.

So any other political systems that are more real-world?

How would this specific problem be better under another system?