If there was intelligent life on Mars in past there would presumably be lasting signs that we could discover.

Who knows what signs we might find in ice cores from the Martian South Pole.

It’s amazing how far technology has progressed.

It’s called “disk destroyer” for a reason.

Always double check your dd commands folks.

The majority of the public is desperate for change, and running out of patience with a political system that doesn't deliver.

Starmer ran on a vague platform of change and competence, but since taking office Starmer has shown have little political vision or political acumen to move the country forward. The Labour government has been less beset by personal scandal, but the bar for that was already incredibly low.

Well, there is still time for a relatively unknown backbencher to come forward. I think something similar happened the last time Burnham ran for the leadership.

Some old computer magazines in the 8 bit era occasionally distributed software on flexidiscs. They were also called Floppy ROMs.

So now Windows bloat is extending to the physical keyboard itself.

Looking at the Microsoft blog post they haven't said exactly how they want keyboard layouts to change. So on a full size keyboard this could be either new key entirely, or replace an existing (and arguably more useful) key.

As a British person that's something I thought I'd never see.

Arrested on his birthday too.

With how aggressive Microsoft is becoming with ads, services, and data collection they could at least make Windows itself free.

But no, you still have to pay £100+ per license to have the pleasure of putting up with this crap.

Kids have been watching plenty of brain melting videos before AI came along too.

If you want kid’s brains to stay nice and firm don’t let them be raised by a tablet.

Oh look, yet another reason to use an ad blocker.

Yet another reminder that “the cloud” is really just “someone else’s computer”. The end users of cloud based products are controlled by “someone else’s” rules and whims.

So a supposedly cutting edge $3500 device plus an additional $300 dongle gets a wired connection speed from the year 2000. USB 2 is 24 years old

Welcome to the future folks.

SEO has been a plague in search engines for almost as long as they have existed. Unfortunately combatting it is an endless cat and mouse game, as there will always be some who will devise new ways to game the system. With how commercialised the web has become there’s enormous incentive to do so.

I’m also not convinced Google has much intention of really fixing it. They already have a monopoly on search, and as an advertising company are unlikely to want to upset the big media companies exploiting their search engine.

In the UK the BBC are running their own instance social.bbc on trial basis, and I think the trial was recently extended.

Hopefully other public bodies will follow suit.

“It was a bug” is the common excuse when an intentional feature backfires.

Loading screen ads seem like an obvious next step of enshittification. They are creeping back into video with ads breaks on streaming, only a matter of time before they are in games too.

One of the main issues is the lack of competition. There are now only 3 main browser engines, Blink, Gecko and WebKit. Blink (which poses Chrome and Edge) is by far the largest, and has a the enormous marketing might of Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) behind it. WebKit runs Safari, which only runs on Apple platforms and arguably only has the market share it does is because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines to run on iPhones and iPads. Gecko, the engine of Firefox, continues to slide into irrelevance (which pains me to say as a long time Firefox user).

We are in real danger of the web being trapped in a browser monoculture again, like the dark dark times of Internet Explorer’s dominance. This led to a period of stagnation in web technology Microsoft at the time put little effort into developing IE. Allowing Blink/Chrome to do the same will likely be just as damaging, albeit in different ways - particularly for privacy on the web.

For the good of the web no one company should ever be in the position to dictate web standards, which is why we need a healthy and competitive marketplace of web browsers and browser engines. The problem is that web standards have now become so complex developing an indecent browser engine is now a monumental task. Opera gave up on Presto, once the poster child for browser innovation. Microsoft, a company with far more resources, gave up on Trident. Mozilla was developing a new generation browser engine called Servo, but gave up on the project also.

The ones that amuse me are the restaurants that don’t do table service, but still have a multiple staff on the floor and door seemingly only to tell diners they don’t do table service.

I’ve always been doubtful about these privacy “protection” services. Giving a bunch of personal data and money to a commercial entity making seemingly dubious claims it can compel other services to remove your data has never seemed like a great idea. Data is the new oil, it’s incredibly valuable, and there is too much incentive for companies like that to become just another data collector.

It’s all vertical video as well. YouTube pushes Shorts fairly aggressively on the desktop website, and it’s a crappy experience.