Ha, these fucking assholes. Glad to see they got forced to honor it. That’s what you get for jumping on bad tech in order to save a few bucks.

Hope other companies face the same liability if they rely on AI chatbots.

As another poster suggested: muffins and a nice card go a long way. Especially since few students show appreciation anyway. She’ll definitely appreciate the card and gesture more than any particular gift that you might include.

And definitely don’t do perfume. It’s difficult enough to shop for yourself, much less for others. Just don’t.

This is a pretty common response to national trauma like this. The US had a million ‘we’re gonna kick their ass’-songs post-9/11. Most weren’t exactly subtle about it either.

Calling out other artists like Dua Lipa though… I’d probably avoid that as a musician. You never know who you’ll end up sharing a podium with down the line.

I honestly can’t remember the last time anyone’s asked me for directions. It really is awesome that every phone now comes with decent navigation as standard.

Heck, it’s much, much better than most standalone systems ever were. You now get free traffic advisory on your phone, which used to be an expensive paid feature on devices like TomTom.

I do shudder to think what’ll happen if GPS ever goes down or gets downgraded to unusable. Most people have lost their non-technology navigation skills, assuming they ever had them.

Well things like motherboards can only be so large. It needs to be a certain form factor to fit in a standard case. And that motherboard needs to offer all the standard physical connections as well. So basically, there’s a finite space where everything needs to fit.

Adding ports to the case is quite nice. And technically there’s no reason why OEM’s couldn’t just add a ton more ports.

But I guess the average user doesn’t really complain about it. And us powerusers simply buy hubs.

Personally, I’d need about a dozen ports to connect everything.

While I agree that things like that shouldn’t be on social media, I feel like this is definitely more of a personality/upbringing issue.

99 percent of people who see videos like that immediately understand that’s a very foolish thing to do. Only the stupidly dumb would consider actually doing that.

There certainly have been studies on it, like this one:

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/490177

But you’re right in that more empirical evidence would be nice. Right now, everyone ‘knows’ that attention spans are worse. We can feel it in ourselves, and we see it in others, according to surveys.

But it’s hard to quantify how much or the exact reasons. Even research like the one above points out that it’s not just social media. It’s basically everything, all at once, which makes it hard to focus.

More evidence would certainly be good. Either we discover that it’s nothing to worry about or we discover that it’s a thing we should definitely attempt to fix before it gets worse.

Don’t set your OS language to Serbian, or it’ll suddenly stop working.

Honestly it’s annoying as fuck. Nobody asked for YouTube to become TikTok. In fact, I feel like we’d need to go in the opposite direction…

It’s sadly a fact that attention spans have gotten worse over the years. When it’s too much effort for people to watch a ten minute video or read more than a paragraph of text, we’re in serious trouble.

I’m doing my part by rewarding creators who put out actual quality content in longer videos. But I fear they’ve got a difficult time ahead if this trend continues.

Well usually I’m in the fuck cars camp, especially as I’m pretty much forced to bicycle everywhere.

In a rich western country, low car ownership would be great. But cars are also an indicator of personal and economic prosperity. Car ownership is good ‘to a point’ so to speak.

Since the per capita gross national income of Ethiopia is barely above a thousand dollars, I don’t think they’re making informed decisions vis-a-vis car ownership. They simply can’t afford them. Heck, they can barely afford a bicycle I imagine.

Ah, so this is basically mandating that your unicorn needs to be painted pink…

I suspected car ownership would be low, but I didn’t know it was THAT bad though.

When you reach that point where you get sexually aroused by a traffic cone, it’s time to step back and evaluate some of your life choices.

Ugh, those poor kids :-(

The only thing schools should be concerned with is providing a good education in a safe environment. Whatever gender a kid is or chooses to be is not relevant to that goal. And they certainly shouldn’t be forced to put kids in actual danger like this.

Man, what the fuck is wrong with the US these days that this even needs to be said.

Makes sense. Here in the Netherlands, it's quite densely populated. You only need a very small antenna and not much power to reach other people. I know a guy who's a pirate. He has a telescoping antenna fixed to the back of his house that he can raise up when transmitting. He can reach everyone in his city of about 24.000 people, even with relatively low power. When he's not using it, the antenna isn't visible to anyone.

In the US you'd need a lot more power and a bigger tower to reach people, which means easier detection.

Even so, it's a pain in the ass involving police reports, there's a deductible, the equipment needs to be special order, etc. etc. Not to mention the week or two of complaints you get. But yeah, insurance is good to have when an FM transmitter can cost anywhere between 3000 and 16000 euros depending on wattage and features. The remote ones are at the cheap end of the scale, but you're still looking at about 4 grand when all other costs are factored in if you didn't have the insurance.

We haven't had OUR towers stolen per se, but we have had people strip wires and lightning strike protection stuff from them when the scrap metal prices soared years ago. Most of our towers are close-ish to populated areas, so I doubt it's worth the risk to hang out for a few hours to dismantle one. I could see someone stealing one of it's remote enough and given enough time.

Here in the Netherlands, pirate radio is definitely still a thing. As long as radio has been around, people have tried to regulate it. And if something's regulated, people are bound to ignore and break those rules.

Our own local station actually has its roots in pirate radio. Back in 1994, a group of local pirates got together and formed a legit, licensed FM radio station. The reason being that those pirates got caught frequently. They figured going legit would be cheaper than constantly paying fines and having equipment seized.

Even in 2024, pirate radio still exists. In 2023, the police and Dutch telecoms agency caught 114 illegal stations. When someone finds an illegal transmitter, police get involved. In some cases, that's also due to safety issues. There have been cases where the pirates put the equipment in trees, surrounded by asbestos as a deterrent to dismantling it. That's actual, legitimate crime that endangers people. When caught, they can get fined up to 45.000 euros.

Now, you might be thinking: why even risk that? Why be a pirate when you can just set up a completely legal online station? Online radio gets you an even wider audience without all the risk. But to the pirates, that risk, the illegal nature, is part of what draws them to it. Most pirates aren't assholes, thankfully, and they frequently run nicer, more modern equipment than the stuff we use. As long as they keep off legit FM frequencies, we don't really have beef with them doing their thing.

I work for a local radio station that has a few remote transmitter sites. They widen the broadcast area or put out specific frequencies for that area. Annoyingly, this happens more often than you’d think.

Over the years we’ve had about a handful of transmitters stolen. We’ll get complaints about poor reception or a frequency being off air and we send a tech guy out. And sure enough, the transmitter’s completely gone.

Of course it’s all insured, but it tales a few days to get the new gear and install it. That costs us listenership and potential ad revenue.

Usually the thefts are done by people who run pirate radio stations. Because if you’re doing crimes already, one more doesn’t make a difference. They use the stolen transmitter to set up their own remote site so they don’t get caught. We’ve had gear recovered by the police when they discovered pirate station locations.

Well yeah, if your group self-identifies as FOSS nerds, that’s about what I’d expect :D I bet a lot of them are also into Linux, right?

I love my Linux/FOSS brethren, but most people just buy an iPhone or some Samsung and are perfectly happy just using those as is.