Should have included Texas, looks totally different (our traffic lights are horizontal instead of vertical almost always)

Rattus R. Rattus has some real Chuck E. Cheese energy.

No the feeder roads as they are called are a real thing and give the highways here a different flavor (there is a lot more highway-facing development here). The frontage roads are like bonus stroads.

When people said that DS9 and B5 were similar I didn't realize they were referring to the coffee mugs.

I guess it is the year of the Linux desktop for at least some people.

I've used Linux desktop in various forms for just over two decades, this has to be the fourth time it felt like Linux was having its chance to seize marketshare. Each time it ends up not being the mass adoption that people hope for but it feels like the community grows each time so I think it is neat nonetheless.

Since it hasn't been mentioned, one thing that I am truly thankful for that we have improved since the 1990s is public smoking. Not having to be prepared for the reek of cigarettes in virtually every public space is such a big win.

Hell, in 1990, which is 35 years ago, you could still smoke on airplanes in the US. Airplanes! Can you imagine flying back then? Your neighbor could light up and there was nothing you could do but sit there and stew in the smoke stream. I'm glad I never had to experience flying with smoke but I had my fair share of being forced to sit in smoking sections of restaurants until my teenage years.

Walking is much healthier if you can.

Memorizing phone numbers

I didn't read the whole article but it reads like this is just some guy speculating based on the reaction to Windows 11, rather than anything remotely grounded in fact, or even the rumors mentioned in the byline.

The real thing the US fast food market is missing is Indian food and it could be a serious game changer in terms of providing healthier / vegetarian options.

I believe a lot of the reason people hate LLM chatbots is that we are being actively, knowingly misled by corporations into believing that they, like Data, have the capacity to reason and learn and to understand what they know and what they do not know, when they are just word salad bots. These tools are being pushed on us even though we largely do not want to use them and they produce shoddy lower-quality work while putting actual people out of work, in order to justify the capital expense, because it makes more profit for them, while all friction and risk of using these tools is assumed by the user.

Pulaski's prejudice against Data doesn't make sense in the show because Data is decidedly not a clanker, but it is forgiveable if we believe that she has had past run-ins with fraudulent LLM-like AIs that do a good job of looking like Data but lack these capacities, and perhaps were pushed by similarly unethical entities.

But on the other hand, a lot of the issues with AI in 2026 would not apply in the Federation of the 24th century, because there is no capitalism or scarcity-based economy that would justify compelling people to use such a flawed tool. Also, the ship's computer in the Enterprise is already far more capable and useful than an LLM chatbot, and no one ever marvels at its capabilities in-universe. So given these things, her hostility towards Data is still puzzling.

"3-way handshake" does sound pretty lewd in context doesn't it

Pretty sure this is Walmart. Besides the general aesthetics, the cart in the background has blue accents, HEB carts have red accents.

Fashions are cyclical and ornamentation and busy-ness will become popular again someday.

An oldie but goodie: https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/

I'm sure Rule 34 has produced endless variety of these if you dare look for them.

I don't understand how people can read shit like this and then vote for this guy. These politicians just say whatever they fucking want, depraved and cruel and completely devoid of even the figments of sense.

Or fully-hydrogenated oxygen.

Reddit does the courtesy of blocking my VPN so I am not tempted to use it and be tracked.

How does the saying go, the only thing that can stop a bad air pollutant with a gun is a good air pollutant with a gun?