You joke, but one time I got woken up by what sounded like a Chinese lady complaining about batteries, and it turned out to be the low power alert on the cheapo import soundbar.

directus→derecho from “straight” to “right”

So that’s why “straight on” and “on the right” are the maddeningly confusable “a derecha” and “en derecho”. Such a pain when following directions.

I’m using an LG K9 right now. Works ok, but I’d prefer a smaller screen

I think they’re regional. I don’t remember seeing one either, but I don’t know if that’s because I haven’t encountered it, or because I didn’t notice.

I would say “it’s on backorder”. You could verb it as “it’s been backordered”, but that feels a bit clunky somehow.

Placebo buttons.

Some appliances like elevators or traffic crossings cycle automatically, but they still have (non-functional) buttons. If the buttons are removed, people complain that the wait is too long. Let them push a button while they wait, and they’ll think it’s much quicker.

I’m often reminded of a SpaceX render they put up on the 'Tube back when they were still working out the reusability thing. Commenters had a lot of questions about how the particular flight plan impacted on their fuel budget. And so, Elon himself waded in with the answers. Except he was talking about the dollar price it cost to buy the fuel. He was like ‘why are you worried about fuel, it’s not that expensive, guys’ because he didn’t understand the questions. He didn’t understand why the amount of fuel and the mass of the fuel would be significant to anybody. Guys, I think he doesn’t understand the rocket equation. He doesn’t understand the central problem of rocketry. I think the guy might be full of it.

If you check the ‘nerd stuff’, it shows it was posted at 15:13, and updated at 15:16. But there isn’t a UI element to show that at a glance.

And also

I don’t even work that hard

Trump would never compare himself unfavourably to anything, even in jest.

The proposal [prohibits] the use, sale, import and export of food and feed “from cell cultures or tissue derived from vertebrate animals”.

Am I missing something, is it a translation issue, or did they just ban meat?

Did you know YAML is a recursive acronym? It stands for ‘YAML AML MAML LAML’

I don’t get the gender neutral either (using Gboard on an older Android). Which is a bit odd because as far as I can tell gender neutral is the base character, and the male and female versions are customisations that are applied as if they were accented characters.

I’d rather have them all as no-gender, no-race, generic little yellow peeps but eh…

Squatters add value to otherwise unproductive property. Squatters are wealth creators.

I couldn’t work out how you were supposed to negotiate it as a pedestrian, and assumed there must be some knack that locals learn. Guess the knack is just, don’t be a pedestrian lol.

I think the TLDR bot has its purpose.

That’s because your question was a non sequitur. Why is a raven like a writing desk?

They would fall through the center of the earth, continue back up through the mantle, pop up momentarily to spook someone on the opposite hemisphere, then repeat the whole trip in reverse with a period of about 40 minutes.

What’s Ubuntu duntu u?

There’s a collection of spooky indie game reviews on Errant Signal’s channel. Faith looks like something you could be interested in.

Isn’t it more like, a guy who wanted to kill the Queen talked to a chatbot about it, and the chatbot rolled with it cos chatbots will default to rolling with whatever you give them? Just seems the likely scenario to me …

Yep, this BBC article has a couple of the chat logs. If they’re representative, the bot is no more culpable than if he asked a magic 8-ball.