roryirvine

It got less cringeworthy once they toned down the dated American culture references during the second season but, yeah, it's as if a homage to Star Trek were created by someone whose favourite Trek series was Enterprise.

More common in the North and Scotland, I think.

Scots (the Scots language, not Scottish English) tends to use bare "else" wherever "otherwise" is used in English, so I assume it's coming from the Northumbrian dialect of Middle English and leaks through to those dialects of Modern English with more Northumbrian influence.

I'm fairly vague about post-1990s Microsoft products, but wasn't Windows 2008 exactly that?

No GUI, with admin through Powershell, remote MMC snap-ins, or the SCUM/SCOM automation stuff. The managed hosting company I worked for around 2010 used it fairly heavily, and it didn't seem much worse to admin than the CFEngine / Puppet type tooling we had for Linux at the time.

Even tech-adjacent folk in areas like product, user research and enterprise architecture seem to love it.

The bulk of the hands-on-keyboard time for those disciplines now seems to be using Copilot 365 as "fancy autocomplete" and "make this presentation better", Copilot Notebooks for deeper work, and coming up with all sorts of Copilot integrations and agents for managing email, Teams meetings and chats.

It's almost as if "copilot" has already become the generic term for "professional LLM", and many genuinely can't understand why us techies find it so limiting.

I mostly agree with you, though I think it's more of a sharpening of focus onto a narrow subset of the original grand vision that's more likely to be immediately useful as a product.

Whether it's a product that anyone actually wants is another matter, of course - as is whether they'll ever be able to zoom out and bring the entirety of the original vision into focus if this more limited version does become a success.

Britannica actually had a great website during the dot com era - hyperlinked, very browsable, and definitely had that semi-addictive "rabbithole" quality.

The hurt themselves badly by imposing a really annoying paywall just as Wikipedia was beginning to take off. A hybrid model with tiered access (maybe even a limited ad-supported free tier) might well have kept them on top - instead, they offered only a single expensive annual plan priced to compete with the paper or CD editions.

I've had 3 so far this year in the UK - all to do with car finance overpayments (I don't have a car!). They were all marked as spam automatically, so none of them caused a notification.

I suspect this is another example of the pathetic form of American exceptionalism - "no way to prevent this, says the only country where this regularly happens".

Is there no regulator willing to step in to force the telcos to block spam and scam texts? If not, why not?

Yeah, as I understand it, student visas have one of the biggest GDP multipliers of any visa type (second only to the Tier 1 Investor). It's reckoned that the window allowing you to stay on after graduation for long enough to find a good job on a subsequent employment visa is a large part of that.

Unfortunately, it's also one of the easiest types to fiddle with when people start screaming about immigrants / the evils of student housing / etc - prospective overseas students don't have nearly as many people willing to speak up for them as people with employment offers or who have family members already in the UK.

Hence this scheme intended to reduce the supply of places, the 'visa brake' under Starmer, and all the wild variations in policy under the previous Tory governments. We've not really been able to find any sort of happy medium since Brexit, and in the meantime - as you rightly point out in some of your other comments - it's the universities that are being harmed.

I'm probably showing my age here, but I'm astonished to read that 8 GB of free space could be considered so exceptionally low that you'd receive OS alerts about it or that apps would start preemptively failing.

The most my homedir has ever grown in one year is 3.2 GB, and I don't really go out of my way to keep things tidy. I'd be very pissed off if things started pestering me to clear stuff up years before it actually became a problem.

Much of the variation between accents lies in the unstressed vowels. We could simply omit those, treating the alphabet more as a semi-abugida.

You'd end up with something pretty close to early 2000s txtspk, so it might actually be a surprisingly easy conversion for many people.

And, though admittedly not really exposed much to the public, canals and railways both manage to mix chains in there, too... agh!

Because to convert from one to t'other, you have to multiply by 22 x 10 x 8 or whatever it is, rather than simply shift the digits.

For example, there's a park that's 1 mi 180 yds from me - if you were to pick one and stick with it then you could say either 1.1 mis or 1940 yds, rather than mixing the two and expecting people to do multiple rounds of arithmetic.