ID scanning has become very common in Texas. Lowers insurance rates for sellers and gives the state a full database of alcohol purchases.

It’s unclear how this is feasible. Also, are we saying “cookies” these days?

With NordVPN? Cool. You know what the top of a funnel looks like?

The tech-savvy relative should have had them on Firefox long ago. They don’t need a fork. Firefox will do.

It’s hard to understand how anyone who was using uBO on Chrome was unaware this was coming. The Manifest V3 shit started years ago, and I expect uBO users to be more technically literate than the general public.

This is definitely one of those “the longer you look, the worse it gets” things.

At lower right, we apparently have a real-world option to turn off that damn noise. Moving slightly up, at the top of what appears to be a pneumatic lift towering to six inches are marshmallows or ice cubes. Both are an issue as they are known for not being pink.

We have avocado-shaped markings on these … what are they, anyway? The one on the left literally has a pig snout and ears, plus something from Tron designed for a dog.

To the right? The ultimate symbol of depravity (one notes Macavity wasn’t there). This is a rat who isn’t just evil (red … thing) but also poorly stroked. Can you imagine going through life with one or two points of white outline on your body?

Rats, as we know, famously enjoy caviar, hence our friend at the counter both speaking and thinking about red spheres.

We have found a new use for a dashed yellow arrow!

I expect to see waves of Dolly Parton-related layoffs in the coming months.

Great. Relevance to the topic at hand?

Going to Faux News for science is … a choice. Also, jesus christ, kids these days and the luxury of having the space to replace “glaucoma” with “eye disease that can cause irreversible vision loss.”

We all fucking know what glaucoma is. This isn’t some 2026 development that’s flown under the radar.

I also have no idea what this has to do with technology.

Anyway, for those interested in the paper, it’s here.

I prefer buying my music by the track at a reasonable price, having a couple of backups and not paying monthly.

Yeah, and I’m going to urinate ahead of death. At least, I hope so.

Point being, the hed is a cheque the threadbare story can’t cash. There’s no causality. “Apple lays off staffers ahead of heat death of universe” also works. In the latter case, no reasonable person would see entropy at fault.

The Texas cities are an AP Style aneurysm.

Fascinating read. Thanks for the link!

My experience with diamonds is limited. I grew up in the '80s, so I of course remember the ubiquitous DeBeers ads with everything in silhouette except the ring.

By the time engagement sauntered my way for the first time, it was totally unplanned. My girlfriend had moved in after the end of the academic year, though functionally living with me for months before that (turns out the dorms suck as a freshman at 21), and one Saturday morning in September, I took a shower and on returning to the bedroom asked if we were headed toward marriage.

“I guess so.”

“Does that mean we’re engaged?”

“I suppose it does.”

So we decided apparently the order of the day is finding engagement rings. Both of us being oblivious to fashion, we set out on this journey with bleached hair of the same length, matching shirts and matching pants.

“Oh, twins!” someone remarked passing us on the street downtown.

Now, don’t get me wrong, at this point, we’re both giddy. We’d not so much ever discussed marriage, and neither of us was big on the institution, and yet, here we are.

First off, jewelry stores find this to be an odd situation. “We’re looking for each others’ engagement rings” was weird in 2005, I guess. The first two places we went were keen on … things neither of us was. They also found our target spend pedestrian, and explaining these were mere engagement rings and that the real money comes for the wedding rings didn’t improve matters.

This being a city of 20,000, options were limited, but we found success at the third place. This one wasn’t just a jewelry store; the guy actually was a jeweler and had a selection available but preferred doing custom pieces.

In the end, I got her a silver bypass ring with a negligible diamond off the shelf, and she got me a simple white gold band that he assured us he could add to for the wedding ring.

We were both very happy with what we picked up a week later, with hers needing to be resized and mine needing to be made.

Obviously, some phone calls happened the evening of the engagement, and my mom was a bit miffed that she only learned after the fact, despite assuring her I’d not, myself, woken up that morning thinking I’d discuss getting married.

But the net result was she offered me her engagement and wedding rings to use for the one I would design. Three diamonds were included in this, with the largest having been appraised at $7,900. I turned the smaller two into earrings and then went with a bypass solitaire. After we’d moved to another town (yay, newspapers!), we went into a jeweler and asked what we could get for the ring as a whole, gold and stone, and were told about $3,000.

It’s a racket.

(also, no diamonds were involved in my second wedding … a welded cone-spiked 1/2" stainless-steel collar is also forever)

The web is unusable without uBO. And this isn’t like the brief window where FF was a contender; I’d imagine the proportion of FF users with uBO is rather large.

I think some of us remember MySpace days, when you reconnected with old friends and quickly remembered why you’re no longer friends. For my cohort, Facebook solved a solved problem. Once I got anything other than from friends, I bounced. Haven’t talked to a few since, but if that’s their bag, more power to them.

Tom’s should be able to crunch the numbers themselves. “Scientist says” should be reserved for things with a confidence interval.

Stated briefly: Kurzgesagt isn’t what it once was.

I played Doctor totally wrong in the dorms, it seems.

That dovetails nicely with the mental state of an undergrad. In my case, I did actually know everything back then.