Theodores

Curious, isn't it?

I don't order artificial food on apps or go anywhere near the golden arches, but it amazes me that the majority of the app orders are for these chains that sell utter garbage.

It is a bit like a phone, you could open a book to read classic literature or you could doom scroll AI trash all day. For some reason the latter option is invariably chosen over the former.

The money is also ridiculous, I am not sure of golden arches prices with delivery and tip on top, I just don't live like that. However, I always cook from scratch with no animal products, just stodgy vegetables, and I am sure that my weekly food bill is going to be less than one delivered cold and late burger meal of no nutritional value.

Also shocking as a cooking person is how few McDonald's orders are sit down with people. We have ended up with people eating with their fingers in their solitary confinement cars with the worst junk food possible, whereas we once had dinner parties with a proper table, home cooked food of nutritional value, valued company, crockery, cutlery, etiquette and prayers to an imaginary god.

Even stranger is that there is no free healthcare in the USA. Eat this garbage and you have a healthcare bill coming for the obesity, saturated fats blocking arteries, cancer and the rest of the chronic diseases that go with artificial food.

This situation is a product of American corporate ways of doing things and hard to unpick, but with these delivery apps now worth billions, there is now another barrier between healthy eating since this silly gig economy now needs to be kept in existence since jobs and corporate profits depend on it.

Once upon a time kids had train sets, however, other toys such as LEGO came along and train sets fell out of fashion. However, in time, the boomers that did have train sets retired and some of them built the train sets that their nine year old former selves could only dream of. The toy for kids became a hobby for retirees.

I wonder if LEGO is going to follow the same fate, to no longer be of interest to Roblox and Minecraft obsessed kids, to develop an increasingly elderly customer base, ending up with just retirees.

Daft Punk became a household name in the late 1990s, placing their core audience as Gen X, which is reasonably elderly, and well on the way for the kids to retirees pipeline. Expect LEGO to be grand-pa only in a couple of decades.

What remains of the train set business makes a token effort to appeal to kids, all of it is priced out of their league and not marketed to them in ways of yesteryear. Instead it is all about limited edition, very expensive and highly accurate models that get sold to a diminishing customer base, necessitating ever higher prices and further consolidation in the industry.

Imaginably, LEGO in twenty years time will be like this, making nothing but a token effort to sell to kids yet making money with expensive and even more elaborate reissues of models such as this one.

Hopefully this won't be the future of LEGO, however, they do need this adult market given how kids don't play with toys now they have tablets.

Dell have a different range for gaming, with the obligatory LED lights and whatnot. This is for 'content creators', which mostly means video editing, and it promises the benefits of the RTX Spark SoC with ARM-based CPU. This means extended battery life and being able to do editing in half the time.

Given that editing is a bottleneck and cost in the production process, this laptop, with its huge screen and Spark CPU is a no-brainer, however, there is also the ASUS ProArt range, which also comes with RTX Spark, but an arguably better screen, it is not as if there is anything new here for the 'content creator'.

But this does not answer your question, however, I am sure that FAFO applies, so you can expect a glitchy experience, up to the point of unplayable. Honestly, running an obscure North Korean linux on a Microsoft Surface gadget that has been specifically designed with closed source, Windows only drivers would be a preferable challenge to getting your games to work on this.

Therefore, dive in and be an early adopter, the prices will be double next year.

Thanks for your miserly comment. I am glad to have had that little put down from someone that has nothing to add to the conversation or possibly the world. This is because this serves as a reminder that I am not like that, as a rule, taking miserly pot shots at others, as some seem to do, including you.

Please can you add the colour names used by cars in the post war era.

For example, my father had a Ford Cortina in Saluki Bronze, which sounded better than Polished Turd, so the marketing men went with it, even though the latter was more accurate.

All of the automotive colours had imaginative names then, however, the colour was dependent on light, so a singular RGB value is always a bit naive.

Very impressive presentation, not sure it is a usable tool or a definite resource without Saluki Bronze though.

Recently I learned that only those with over-active immune systems survived the 14th century plagues. Therefore, inflammation is to be taken seriously, or at least understood in this historical context, depending on your ancestry.

As for the article, the findings come as no surprise given what we know about the risk factors in the post-smoking world. Nowadays nutrition, specifically saturated fats in combination with lots of sugar and salt, as found in today's artificial foods is showing up in the research (not paid for by 'big beef').

There is no need to over-think it, just stay off the corporate 'food' and cook from fresh ingredients, where you don't get 'HFSS' (UK government term for high fat/salt/sugar) held together with weird chemicals. Sure, nobody has time for that, but this is the frontier of public health, a.k.a. the 'obesity crisis', with a simple solution - actually bother to cook!

I would like to cheat at this assignment, using an SVG file that has the whole book as an HTML foreignObject, that just scrolls by in its special way, to simply name the SVG file as a GIF, knowing that browsers just read the headers in a file, ignoring the file extension.

My cheated assignment would fool humans because they would assume the SVG was a GIF binary.

The file size would be significantly smaller.

This skill in being able to deceive and brazenly stick to the lie would make me perfect for a top job in government, big tech, automotive or 'space'.

It has a small solar panel between the lambo doors for providing the electricity needed for the gas compressor /s

Team and driver for in 2026?

I am always on Team Hamilton even though I appreciate that he is a little long in the tooth and doing the classic retirement act in a 'stupid red car'.

I am obsessed with SVG and image compression/delivery, and I would like it if you could introduce the concept of an 'SVG sampler' to the world. This is very much inspired by embroidery samplers from the times when women needed to sew.

The point of the sampler is to impress, so as to get the work in, however, it is also a reference, with stitches to copy for lettering, numbers, religious iconography, sock-darning, button-holes and whatever else needs to be repeated.

With an SVG sampler the idea is to use the whole SVG toolkit, filters, masks, clip paths, symbols, views, SMIL, CSS and everything else.

Sure this can be done in Inkscape, however, the goal of the SVG sampler is to make it human drawable. For example, the search icon is a circle and a line, which can be done in a 45Kb export from Illustrator, with the circle defined as a thousand points, specified to NASA numbers.

Or it can be done in ten lines or so of SVG primitives, with the circle and the line using simple two-digit integers. The former is not something that a mere mortal could draw, whereas the latter could be.

Clearly some paths do need to be complex and imported from elsewhere.

SVGOMG will be able to mash the 45Kb Illustrator export into a tenth the size, however, it will not be as concise or as human readable as the 'haiku of the SVG sampler symbol'.

The SVG sampler does not have to be web-optimised, it can max out the CPU for the PC to go full China Syndrome and melt its way through your desk. However, it could be forked, culled of CPU-eater show-stoppers, to just have the icons needed for the next project.

Another way of seeing the SVG sampler idea is 'SVG golf', where you want to strive for maximal 'use' clones, maximal human readability, yet also an insistence on detail such as light/dark mode currentColor things, animating pretty much everything and using the primitives rather than paths, even if the code is longererer according to SVGOMG.

I think that SVG falls within an awkward gap where artworkers don't care for the code with programmers also not caring for the code, because SVG is artworker stuff, not for programmers, right?

In a typical team workflow there is no scope for this to change, the frontend developer is obligated to use the 'assets' churned out by the art worker and the backend developer certainly doesn't care.

Hence, an SVG 'sampler' competition of sorts, with some acknowledgement, could help Firefox win over some developer mindset to FF. Already MDN has the de-facto best documentation for SVG, I probably have a dozen MDN tabs open right now, maybe with all of them on some type of FEconvolve type of feature.

For the sampler, the IDE rather than the graphics program is how it works. Anything with 'sodipodi' type of extra markup can be considered not worthy of being an SVG sampler. Really it has to be a mostly text-only thing, under version control, and not needing CodePen or other. To go with the SVG there needs to be a 'sampler.html' file to show the sampler symbols in 'inline mode' as well as CSS, the favicon and as shown as an 'image' element. Scripting is allowed, but really the goal is to keep everything in the SVG file, to not need huge amounts of extra files.

Ideally comments outside of 'title' and 'description' should not be needed, the author should be able to explain their own code, hence an emphasis on 'defs', sensible id names and descriptive ids.

Since F1 is your thing, you are welcome to give the SVG sampler idea a F1 inspired ethos to it. If you think of the FW14C with the active suspension and whatnot, or the F-duct, DAS and other wonders, then applied that design rigour to SVG, think how good it could be. Added marks for everything good looking, however, there needs to be this solid human-readable underpinnings.

Please do something for SVG at Firefox, to inspire people to get into it rather than assume it is someone else's job. Maybe just have a competition, no prizes needed, with folks able to vote on awesomeness, sophistication, haiku-esque simplicity and how educational a given sampler is.

I see no reason why you can't call yourself 'uncle Bernie', to cosplay as the benevolent dictator that gives out a star prize for an SVG sampler (every time there is an F1 race, rather than monthly, as that would be tedious).

As for AI, Google suggest does offer up SVG code that never works, it gets a duff namespace declaration on line one, dooming any of its concoctions to never open. But where we are going with 'SVG samplers', we don't need no AI robots.

Jake's interest in F1 hasn't waned, which is good to see. I am presuming that picture of an Alpine/Renault at Goodwood is his 18Mb photo, but I could be wrong. Neither has his interest im image compression waned, which is also good to see. But why the move from Google to Firefox?

I am still on webp, thinking that I am on the bleeding edge in a world where artworkers are obsessed with pixels with JPG/PNG as the only formats they know, which is an advance on GIF.

Every browser advertises what formats it will accept and if it is in 'data-saving, low bandwidth mode', so I just configure the CDN to keep the names the same '.jpg' but to send the bestest format for the situation/browser, whether that be webp or AVIF, fetching super-high resolution files from the origin server, outputting them in 'retina' resolution with none of those 'picture' elements referencing half a dozen 'responsive' sizes.

In this way nobody has to care what image format is being served, and if it is deemed that everything is way too compressed, the CDN can be flushed of the cached images, quality increased, and cache rebuilt.

It looks like I will need to update my server configuration to use JPEG XL in the usual five years' time, given the lack of any revolutionary benefit.

Interesting how they have kept MS-Paint as simple as Notepad for three decades, when they could have 'embraced, extended and extinguished' every photo editing application known to man during this time.

This could have been done like a classic OS calculator, with simple/scientific/financial UI variants, with simple/artworker/programmer modes. Programmer mode would be like the image processing toolkit VIPS (or Imagemagick), where you could batch process images without opening them, or, as per the article, rotate a 10K x 10K image by 0.02 degrees around any given x/y origin. Presumably 'artworker' mode would be somewhere between Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop, with 'simple' being the MS-Paint that grandma can use to crop undesirables out of family photos.

Admittedly, this is not what an Operating System is about, however, over the years Microsoft have acquired and relinquished many a graphics application, including Softimage 3D and the Seadragon infinite zoom image viewer. It is almost as if they don't care.

Many thanks for your kind words. I do have plenty of stories from the cheese factory, not all of them negative, for example, our cups of tea were the best ever, with water from the mountains and unpasteurised milk from a 100ft 'milk jug' that reached into the sky (with a miniature tap in the bottom).

Nowadays there is absolutely no dairy in my life. No cheese, no milk, no chocolate and not even butter. Yet, as an white Brit, I have to acknowledge that my ancestors owe a lot to dairy and I probably would not be here, had it not been for dairy farming. The Romans documented how 'Celts' drank milk and were quite disgusted by it. The Romans were lactose intolerant, and from a warm climate where milk just went sour, so they could not believe what they saw.

The history of tin comes into it too, the Phoenicians brought the recipe for clotted cream to Britain ('land of tin') some three thousand years ago, enabling year-round calories for tin miners. They got their copper from Afghanistan to make bronze in the Levant, to found an empire on that.

In Europe and the UK there are many protected foods, including many region specific cheeses. All of them have fabulous history stories, really well written, and in public domain documents. For example, 'Orkney Cheese' is a WW1 innovation, when many ships were based there, with many sailors to feed.

If you want to avoid processed foods then it helps to know about the protected foods. For example, a 'Cornish Pasty' is available in petrol stations and other 'food deserts' where your options are limited. However, a 'Cornish Pasty' can't contain any junk in it, if it has 'Cornish Pasty' written on the packet.

"You must be joking.."

I can fully understand the love of cheese, however, there is a hidden cost to it, that I have experienced but only recently acknowledged.

The places they show on TV and in articles such as this is analogous to showing posh West End made-to-measure tailors and pretending that those SHEIN garments from Bangladesh are made the same way, with no 'slavery' involved.

I worked in a cheese factory as a student, taking up the job with an attitude that it must be 'women's work'. How wrong I was. Twelve hour shifts, with 'every object' weighing (or wheying) upwards of 25Kg and every one of your senses brutally assaulted, always with the potential to lose life, limb or another finger in a moment of lapsed focus. Just surviving became the intellectual challenge, with many not making it past two hours before throwing in the towel. Mastery was my goal and I put in the sleepless 'nights' with relentless 'tennis elbow' to get there, achievement unlocked.

Because I was a student, this was not a forever job, and there was a higher tax threshold for students, making it financially tough but worth while.

On a trip down memory lane I looked the old place up, to discover it had shut down due to numerous health and safety violations, which made me chuckle. That was the culture, and the rule, for example, those chemicals that have huge warning labels, to read such a label after getting nervous ticks after using it, would be moral cowardice. Or, if you needed someone's attention, because the machines were so loud, you would casually throw a 25 Kg object at them (a cheese or a bag of salt) as a 'gentle tap on the shoulder'.

On reflection, there is this small matter of the human cost to cheese. PETA might shock people with cheesy animal welfare issues and cardiologists might not be entirely positive about the consumption of 'saturated fat laced with salt', however, few have experienced the harsh reality of working in the industry, to have the strength to write about how extreme and ultra-violent the production of this harmless product can be.

I am not saying 'boycott the product', just 'value it more'.

Everyone wants to drive their Lambo on the moon with Montana plates thanks to social media clowns, and it has been this way since the blockchain craze of a few years ago.

I wonder if the Montana plates 'loophole' would be as well 'exploited' had it not been for the fictional world of YouTube.

On the day that the war in Afghanistan started in 2001, I visited Trafalgar Square with my sister late at night to place a singular paper crane in each of the two pools below the fountains.

I have liked paper cranes ever since, hence I commend your crane-themed fashion 'statements'.