It depends. “Donald Trump wants to annex Wisconsin as the 51st state” wouldn’t be funny. Pocketpair launching a Steam store page for the Palworld dating sim (which was last year’s April Fools joke) was.

But yeah, this isn’t the time for political humor.

Besides, “there are only two sexes” is rather obviously inaccurate. While intersex people aren’t terribly common, they do exist and are well-documented – as are the genetic reasons for why they’re intersex. XX men and XY women are also a thing. Genetics are inherently messy.

But acknowledging all that would mean having to admit that sex is a complex matter and can’t be handled with simple statements like “the one you were born with is the one you should have”. It’s easier to just pretend intersex people don’t exist.

We absolutely do. The paper is plastic-layered, which is how beverage cartons generally work.

I am aware of waxed cardboard. I dismissed it because I thought that relying solely on it to store a liquid sounded a bit too ambitious. But it might work so yeah, I should have considered it.

Besides, how would an all-paper bottle even work? Liquid soap is, well, liquid. Paper soaks through when it’s in contact with a liquid. The only other way to do such a bottle would be to use coated paper, which is less recyclable than an inner plastic bottle.

The social implications of veiling are an interesting and complex topic. Unfortunately, public discourse tends to be pretty bad at handling complex topics. But there are occasional moments of lucidity. To wit:

Sometime around 2015 or so we had a big political debate in Germany. Some politicians were floating the idea of a “burqa ban” (= a flat ban on all forms of Islamic face veiling). For a while it was seriously debated but it ultimately failed as most Germans considered it to violate freedom of religion.

The media were actually helpful – at least the publicly funded ones were. One particularly interesting report I saw was when a female reporter put on full veils (and correctly identified what she was wearing as a niqab, not a burqa) and went out in public. First with a hidden camera to see how she was treated, then with a camera team to get vox pops.

Opinions were actually fairly divided even among Muslims. One male Muslim argued that face veils always are inherently oppressive and have no place in society. A young woman (who was wearing nothing indicating her religion) expressed admiration for those who fully veil and hoped that one day she’d be able to as well. An old woman wearing a headscarf who was carrying groceries said that she did wear the niqab “but not right now; I have things to do”.

That diversity of views has stuck with me, especially that last statement. I never expected someone who observes such full veiling to be so pragmatic about it. (Yes, that does go against the reasons for wearing them in the first place but everybody tailors their religion to themself.) If wearing any kind of veils can be something you can just decide not to do, then it becomes an expression of agency, not one of lack thereof. I respect that.

Of course it’s not respectable when someone is forced to wear a headscarf/a niqab/whatever. But a ban isn’t going to fix that; people who oppress their wives aren’t going to stop doing so. If they feel that nobody outside the house is allowed to see their wife’s face then the wife will simply no longer be allowed to leave the house.

Ultimately, in my opinion, people should be allowed to wear any religious garment they want, provided it’s their own desire to do so and there’s no overriding reason to disallow it. (E.g., no matter how religious you are, you do not wear a kaftan or a cross necklace or anything else that dangles while operating industrial machinery.) Anything else is useless at best.

I find that LLMs also tend to create very placative, kitschy content. Nuance is beyond them.

Yeah, the 13 feels a lot more solid. The 16 pays a certain price for its enhanced configurability. Honestly, though, a full-size touchpad module would go a long way to fixing that. The two spacers next to the keyboard look fine (if the keyboard is centered) but the touchpad spacers look less great.

I have a Framework 16. Is it as well-built, efficient, or quiet as a MacBook Pro? Nope. But if something breaks I can easily replace it, and I can upgrade it without having to throw everything away. Also, hot-swappable ports. That’s nice too.

It’s all about trade-offs in the end.

Honestly, Windows isn’t ready for the desktop, either, it’s just not ready in a different way that most people are familiar with.

Things like an OS update breaking the system should be rare, not so common that people are barely surprised when it happens to them. In a unified system developed as one integral product by one company there should be one config UI, not at least three (one of which is essentially undocumented). “Use third-party software to disable core features of the OS” shouldn’t be sensible advice.

Windows is horribly janky, it’s just common enough that people accept that jank as an unavoidable part of using a computer.

So far Article 7 hasn’t been used because Poland had Hungary’s back. Given that Poland is no longer ruled by the right-populist PiS, that might no longer hold, though.

Not everyone needs to talk to everyone. But many people need to talk to many people.

Microsoft has to abandon the initial Vista project and start over because they couldn’t manage a team of 1000 developers. People working on adjacent features had to go through so many layers of management that in some cases the closest shared manager was Bill Gates. For something like getting a change in the shutdown code reflected in the shutdown dialog.

Huge teams become exponentially harder to manage efficiently.

Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.

Do you mean the Atari 2600? Because all Amigas had either a floppy drive (all of the desktop models) or onboard NVRAM (the CDTV and the CD32).

PO: Someone else figure out how to repeat what he did.

Second developer: Sorry, I tried to make sense of his rocket design but I can’t figure out how to make a copy that doesn’t explode before we even put the fuel in.