bshimmin

It always reminds me of how how Apple write the copy for their landing pages. (A couple of examples from the current MacBook Neo page include "Silver, Blush, Citrus, and Indigo. Four stunning colors. One durable design" and "macOS. Easy to use. Runs all your go-to apps. Puts the fun in functional".) It's quite similar to a rhetorical device called the ascending tricolon, and it's definitely not normally how people speak or write unless they're making a deliberate effort to achieve this effect.

Honestly, you just need cron (and Ruby/Python/bash/whatever) on an EC2. It's not very fashionable, but it works, will continue to work forever, and costs hardly anything.

Not to worry, though: his grandson, Louis, is in charge of Palantir in the UK. Definitely nothing concerning about that!

So many of the negative comments about Villeneuve's Dune in this thread are astonishing to me, but I will just pick this one: surely scale is something that Villeneuve does so brilliantly! From Arrival, though Blade Runner 2049, to his Dune, he has an amazing ability to make things seem vast (space ships, buildings, cities...) - it's almost a trademark of his work, to me, so colour me baffled that you would single this out for criticism.

(For context, I read and enjoyed the Dune books as a child, I've seen the Lynch film several times and find it broadly comical, I love Twin Peaks, and I think Villeneuve is arguably one of the best mainstream directors working right now.)

Here's the charity responsible for this bridge and several others in London: https://www.citybridgefoundation.org.uk/about/history Founded in 1122, which is quite something!

Great comment! For anyone looking to learn a bit more about this, the "crossing" technique described above is called "chiasmus": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus

Another famous example is "Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus" from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this poem, in fact).

Yahoo ("once the most popular web site in the U.S.", according to Wikipedia)?

They are considered to be self-employed. If they're earning more than £1000 a year, then they need to file a self-assessment tax return with HMRC, and if they're earning more than a certain amount, perhaps £12500 a year, they will need to pay income tax on those earnings (plus national insurance).

Do most gig workers actually do these things? I have no idea.

This is such a helpful comment - what looks, to the uninitiated, like line noise actually starts to make some sense now!

I'm slightly surprised no one has commented on the custom infix operators. I think if I encountered the example in the wild, I'd understand it was a clamp function based purely on the names, but if it were used for anything else I'd have to spend quite a lot of time puzzling over it. Perhaps they make more sense to Haskell people, though!

You are right, I did - sorry. I wrote something similar in Ruby to check!

A word of warning: a few years ago, the related page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact took me down one of the worst Wikipedia procrastination rabbit holes I've ever lost myself in.

There's a "b" in "about", but there's no "k" or "m".

Thank you for posting this! I gave myself a pat on the back for being able to get through the first chapter unaided thanks to my A-Level in Greek mumble years ago...

I like how they've misspelt "misspelling" there - I wonder if that was deliberate! (I also like how there's even an open pull request to fix the same...)

I only bothered to check `details`, but that one dates back to at least the 2008 working draft of the HTML5 spec, which makes it ~14 years old - not absolutely ancient, but far from recent!

I wouldn't say there's a big name star in there, but I've seen Peter Mullan in quite a few things, Nazanin Boniardi is moderately famous, Lenny Henry is definitely famous in the UK, and Morfydd Clark was tremendous recently in Saint Maud.

As others have said, this doesn't necessarily matter too much.

Not the OP, but if you search for "random country generator" you will indeed find a few similar sites which do definitely have a lot of ads.

Indeed. "Crypto" has very much gone the way of "hashtag" (which is, amongst non-technical people I know, overwhelmingly used to refer to the hash symbol).

I actually have quite happy memories of working with Backbone and jQuery - there were obviously all manner of problems, but everything was quite easy to understand and a lot less magical. Apparently this was in 2012 - how time flies! - so I imagine rose-tinted spectacles must be in full effect here!

You're definitely not alone. I was trying to watch Netflix's newest Harlan Coben adaptation, "Stay Close", and it all looked very nice (especially the title sequence) but the script was abominable, the acting was bad, and it was just... dull. Apparently they're slated to make 14 adaptations of this guy's books, which really sums up the problem: quantity over quality.

As others have said, you're not going to get a lot of purchases without being able to preview what it does first (maybe build some slightly contrived examples?).

I wish there were just a standardised way for recipes to be presented. If I'm on a desktop or tablet, I want ingredients on the left, method on the right, a picture of how it's supposed to look at the top, perhaps some serving suggestions at the bottom, and maybe a few interstitial pictures/videos in the method if it's something really difficult (I'm happy for these to appear in a modal). On mobile, I want the ingredients at the top and the method beneath it. I never want the life story. Having comments at the bottom is sometimes quite nice but fairly optional. I'd like to be able to toggle units to things that I'm comfortable with (I don't want ounces and cups but it should be possible for people who do).

This shouldn't be too much to ask, it really shouldn't.

> Yes, I believe that's the approach Windows NT is taking.

I really like this one - would anyone care to make a suggestion for a modern replacement for Windows NT here? Perl 6, perhaps?

While I broadly agree with this, I would say that my own attempts at making mint sauce were fairly disappointing in comparison with shop-bought - Colman's mint sauce is an awful lot nicer than anything I was able to make, and (though I've never tried to make it) I bet their wonderful mustard is too.

You will probably also not be able to make at home anything all that similar to the mayonnaise you buy in a shop, though what you can make at home will almost certainly be equally as nice (my children were confused by the yellowish colour of home-made mayonnaise, which is sort of backwards since the confusing thing ought to be why shop-bought mayonnaise is white!).

If you read the English line first with a ridiculous French accent (like you might hear in Monty Python) and then read the French in an equally silly way, with a bit of imagination they sound broadly quite similar. Basically if you can make "Mots d'Heures" into "mother", you're well on your way!

Same here - I did this for a couple of months on Usenet and it was more a fun challenge than genuinely difficult. Doing it over that amount of text is quite impressive, admittedly.

Jay Rayner is a delight (he comes across better in his writing, I think, than he does on TV). He had a comically bad time at "The Polo Lounge" at the Dorchester recently too: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/aug/15/the-polo-lounge...

I read this article with some interest because I'm thinking of getting a new kitchen, and while I understand the technologies involved (both generative art and Ethereum), the part I'm struggling with is... why on earth anyone would pay money for these things. Can someone explain it to me?

My only guess is that the people buying these things already have large amounts of theoretical money in Ethereum anyway and thus spending a small fraction of it on some sort of very poor glowing Mondrian-esque art is little more than an amusing distraction that seems cool?

If you have nothing better to do, many of the "Experience" series in The Guardian are a fun read: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/experience