Poacher5
Re:Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power
on Monday November 02, 2026 @05:49AM (#50335224)
"Far Beyond The Stars" is also incredibly tight and affecting writing and Avery Brooks delivers an absolutely stone cold believable performance while also keeping up the very Avery Brooks scenery chewing. Might be lost one someone who didn't know the characters outside of the Benny Russell scenarios but holy smokes.
Re:Show HN: XY Music Notation
on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @07:02AM (#50085697)
The issue unfortunately always falls back to familiarity - It's like spelling reform or DVORAK keyboards. You can create a thousand compelling arguments why new system X is better than the old clunker we're all forced to use but the fact of the matter is that you'll still have to read music the old way to interact with the rest of the world. Millions of musicians, including myself, read music as naturally as reading the written word. It's a functionally impossible ask to change that paradigm. Even learning bass clef for me as a previously treble clef only player took several years of focused and targeted practice to attain equal facility with both.
Re:Forgotten Woodlands
on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @05:30AM (#49890422)
Very short version: one autistic US teenager wrote a massive majority of the Scots Wikipedia by copying the English Wikipedia, doing find-and-replace for a limited collection of words and rewriting the rest in a phonetic transcription of Mel Gibson in Braveheart. I'm not going to take a side on the "language or dialect" argument with Scots but it's definitely got it's own specific grammar quirks and ways of speaking that were utterly destroyed by this approach. Scots Wikipiedia had to effectively be rolled back several years and there's some evidence to suggest that in that time AI had ingested the data and caused actual damage to the AI's ability to produce realistic Scots.
Re:California Farmers Are Struggling to Sell Grapes as Demand for Wine...
on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @05:23AM (#49890373)
Guiness Zero is my go to for a sipping beer when I'm actually in a pub. I like a pine needles and lemon IPA when it's very cold but they get a bit much when you're having a few over a long evening.
Re:Forgotten Woodlands
on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @05:30AM (#49709915)
No, you're poisoning any research into an endangered language. Do we have to remind everyone of the Scots Wikipedia fiasco?
Re:Show HN: 1080p is 920px tall – 1k real browser viewports
on Monday September 14, 2026 @07:20AM (#49695016)
Heads up, imgur is bust in the UK because their compliance people took the huff.
Re:iPhone Duo
on Thursday September 10, 2026 @05:23AM (#49640827)
This was the stated intention with Samsung DeX - and it almost works but there are just enough pain points in day-to-day use to make it unviable for me, and a thin&light laptop is almost always the better solution, and easier than carrying around a mouse, keyboard and docking station and hoping whatever desk I'm working at has a display on it.
Re:How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:29AM (#49533437)
Yup, sitting here on a work-issued laptop that's locked down tighter than a walnut - I couldn't install chrome if I wanted to, and yet every time I have to actually go to google for something I get the "would you like to install chrome" begging.
Re:Bomb Fishing Is Wreaking Havoc on Indonesia's Coral Reefs
on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @11:00AM (#49435361)
That's addressed in the article? The claim made is that this is more a way of middle-income market-trading fishermen increasing their catch and profit. Those at the bottom can't afford the necessary explosives.
Pls use an image host that I can view without having to turn on my VPN - signed, a brit.
Re:Climbing Guide as a Shared Infrastructure
on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @06:02AM (#49343499)
It's an interesting idea but these things have never taken off in the past. I'm speaking from a UK-centric position here, but there's a pretty strong ethos that guidebook creators should get paid for the work that they do and there's also a responsibility attached to a professional guidebook that doesn't exist on a crowdsourced platform. UKC can only take you so far, and 25 quid for a copy of whatever SMC book you need is hardly onerous. Any donut can add "Shit Chosspile E8 6C **" to the UKC database but if it's in the SMC book it's probably worth having a look at.
Re:Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
on Thursday July 30, 2026 @05:02AM (#49107539)
The BBC's "impartiality" is frequently it's biggest downfall - It's a very standard UK joke that if the BBC was discussing if the earth was flat you'd get a 5 minute interview with a top geographer or physicist from Cambridge followed by an equally credulous 5 minute interview with a madman in his basement claiming it's all the work of the lizard people.
The covererage of the Genocide in Palestine (and I'm betraying my view just by calling it that) just brings this into incredibly sharp relief as there are, to a first approximation, no real centrists in that discussion. And yet you still get the same 5 minutes of interview for a doctor on the ground in Palestine and for Ben Gvir, presented as if there's some kind of happy middle ground that everyone can broadly agree on.
Re:CarPlay Is Additive
on Friday July 03, 2026 @06:26AM (#48773314)
This is huge for me - I'm in rental cars every other week or so 'cause I fly a lot for work and getting to factories in the boonies isn't really doable on public transport. I used to spend 20 minutes in the europcar car park every single time and then have to log out of everything when I dropped the car off. Now I just hook up Android Auto and I'm back into the same podcast I had on the flight, my itinerary is planned in already and I can head straight to my hotel. Still have the old problem with smart TV's though. Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop.
Re:Amazon Seller Reveals Rare Glimpse of Shadow Bribery Market
on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @08:41AM (#48745760)
B&Q in the UK went exactly the same way - used to be pretty reliable, and I didn't mind paying the extra to have all the things a home DIYer might need without going to half a dozen different builder's merchants and trade suppliers. Then they opened their store page up to anyone who wanted to list anything even tangentially related to home improvements and predictably it's a huge heap of drop-shipped rubbish and it's all been SEO'ed to the Nth degree to appear higher in the search rankings than anything actually sold by B&Q.
Re:The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s
on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @07:08AM (#48657992)
Same's true in the UK, but honestly they're some of the best drivers out there 'cause they've been hustling in farm equipment since they were tall enough to reach the pedals. I've seen farmers get picked up from my old local by their kids in a tractor before when they were too drunk to drive home.
Re:The Cost of Safetyism
on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @05:16AM (#48277170)
But there was a place in which to do nothing - whether it was a scrappy patch of land that's now a big-box store, or a permissive neighbour's garden who has now put up a fort knox of ring cameras, or a mall that used to tolerate kids just screwing around that now has a fleet of rent-a-cops. Third spaces aren't just trendy urban cafes, especially as a child. Having a place that feels like "your bit" is increasingly rare.
Re:Canvas (Instructure) LMS Down in Ongoing Ransomware Attack
on Friday May 08, 2026 @03:54AM (#48060031)
And there are no other students at any college other than CS students? I'm not sure why a biologist or a literature student would need to be au fait with Google's admittedly fairly unfriendly email management setup.
Re:Show HN: Dull – Instagram Without Reels, YouTube Without Shorts (iOS)
on Thursday April 02, 2026 @04:59AM (#47611801)
What does this have that Youtube Vanced/Revanced doesn't already do for the cost of about half an hour of your time messing with sideloading and getting a clean youtube APK file? I already block all shorts through that. It's not perfect, but you admit you're playing whack-a-mole with the filtering just the same as the Revanced devs.
Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did
on Thursday March 12, 2026 @11:25AM (#47352115)
They're basically bank receptionists for old people who will type details into the same system that the general public has access to. They also handle cash for small businesses (I worked in a cafe during university and we'd regularly have to do runs into town to deposit rolls of bills and get more change to float the till)
Re:3D-Knitting: The Ultimate Guide
on Thursday March 12, 2026 @05:39AM (#47348395)
This is knitting as a method of mass-production. It's not cannibalizing hobby knitters making hats and gloves for their loved ones at Christmas. The comparison to AI music doesn't work because that is trying to occupy the same space as musical artists.
Re:British Columbia to end time changes, adopt year-round daylight time
on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @04:17AM (#47230094)
There's a noticeable increase in sleep disorders and related conditions in the far west of the single time zone [0]. I think when it's on the order of a single hour's shift for daylight savings the effects are pretty negligible but they are measurable.
Re:World first: Plane hooks a skydiver out of the air
on Monday February 10, 2025 @10:56AM (#43001705)
The Red Bull branding almost goes without saying at this point.
Re:A Phenomenology of Spotify and Vinyl
on Monday January 27, 2025 @10:26AM (#42842088)
There's something about the connection between people you get with physical media as well, beyond just the "playing it for other people" effect in the article. - I have a collection of a few hundred records I've mostly inherited from my Dad, my Uncle and a few of my Dad's friends who were getting rid. It's a very lovely experience to pull a record out at semi-random and try to work out who's collection it came from and when and why they might have bought the object I'm listening to that day.
Re:I'm the Amazon Worker the Media Doesn't Want You to Meet
on Thursday February 25, 2021 @08:55AM (#26262722)
I can believe either of these explanations. This employee also seems to be an outlier in terms of amount of shit they have to deal with. I worked at an FC for a month and a half while waiting to start a graduate job, and all of our shifts were 8 hours plus, with hilarious lack of clarity on start time, finish time and break times. Also, if this guy is able to actually enjoy being on splitting (the yellow sticker job he alludes to) then he's the only person I've ever met who can.
Re:We need physical audio kill switches
on Sunday September 20, 2020 @05:48PM (#24537709)
Unless something's changed since I bought my big maglite, the outer ring only controls the beam pattern, and the button just gives you on and off. Things might have got fancier in the meanwhile, but mine still does what it needs to.
Re:Players are fixing Microsoft Flight Simulator’s monuments with Goog...
on Sunday August 30, 2020 @05:00PM (#24325900)
There's an excellent book called "Flight Sim X For Pilots" that's essentially just a walkthrough of flight school, starting in a piper cub and gradually progressing through to instruments flying and multiengine flying. I think it's probably a bit dated now, but it's an excellent source of information for how to do things properly in a sim, since it's aimed at real aspiring pilots.
Re:How Gov.uk Notify reliably sends text messages to users
on Saturday April 04, 2020 @01:01PM (#22779560)
From the article: "If we ended up sending only a small number of messages through one provider over the long run, they might not be massively incentivised to be a provider in the future."
Gotta keep the service provider happy to ensure they still go along with the program.