If the procedure is reversible, sure. Give it a try, and if it doesn’t work for you, you can go back.

I wonder why they didn’t push for the death penalty. Japan has it, and you’d think that premeditated political assassination would be a capital crime.

But would he have recognised a cigarette-packet-sized device that shows text and pictures and responds to touches as the same class of object as the room-sized mainframes that processed payrolls for corporations and were controlled with punchcards? Without real-time processing, VDU terminals, microcomputers and GUIs to bridge the gap, they’d be essentially two very different things.

I have a HifiWalker H2, a Chinese MP3 player that works off SD cards. The default firmware is Linux-based, but you can also flash it with Rockbox.

They were a Stalinist dictatorship throughout the Cold War and built tens of thousands of bunkers around their landscape, spending a large part of their economy on preparing for the inevitable invasion by the capitalist imperialists and/or ideologically degenerate socialists. Then, afterwards, they gave the world Dua Lipa and a few other successful pop artists.

I think that’s meant to be an English-German pun

“Ronnie” has a nice midcentury vintage feel, if that’s of any value to you one way or the other.

I hope that Ukraine isn’t too dependent on France, as it’s likely to have a Moscow-aligned fascist government after the next elections.

Cory Doctorow once gave the hypothetical example of a phone company doing a deal with Domino’s so that every time you called a rival pizzeria, you got “press 1 to be connected to Domino’s or wait 30 seconds to be put through to the number you dialled”

Surely that’s when humanity has forgotten how to be selfish and the state withers away, leaving a utopia of fully actualised workers for whom work and play are indistinguishable, both being ways of joyously participating in society.

Also, in the age of online communications, when information can be limitlessly copied, it’s impossible for authoritarians to destroy information they disapprove of. It is possible, however, for them to make it difficult to find by flooding the world with vast quantities of plausible-looking alternatives to it, making it hard to identify what is real. Before LLMs, doing this at the sort of scale that would have been effective was prohibitively laborious.

Ariana was a brand name used by a Chinese manufacturer of cheap luggage of the sort you’d find in neighbourhoods with working-class immigrant populations. I once had a backpack of theirs which was the maximum airline carry-on size, which is to say, muy grande.

Isn’t that Donald Trump’s phone background?

In Ottoman Turkey, burglars would set a tortoise with a lighted candle on its back loose in a house they were planning to rob, to check if there was anyone home.

If you’re willing to sacrifice cows and chickens to keep your cat fed, a few thousand humans is a quantitative change.

A contraction is a separate word, with its own accepted usages in the community. For example, “gonna” comes from “going to”, but is not the same, as “I’m gonna the shop, do you want anything?” sounds wrong

Chaotic evil in the dog waste disposal alignment chart

How about “jackanapes”?

also, somebody who is au fait with transphobia