Nineteen people died on the ground.

Technically 260 people died on the ground. Because that is where the plane crashed.

However, nineteen people on the ground died.

There is a critical difference in that word order. The former includes everyone who had reached the ground by the time they died, the latter only includes those who were on the ground to begin with, and not those who were on the plane.

Or in other words, the first phrasing highlights destination, the second highlights source. Everyone died on the ground after the plane impacted it, but only 19 were already on the ground when the impact killed them.

The placement of the word “died” is what makes all the difference.

Isn’t English fun?

Markup pro tip: to have multiple separate lines appear as a single large block quote, insert the quote signifier (>) into the blank newlines between them as well.

so this

is one giant

block quote

despite the newlines.

I have been using the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase and heritage, since the release of NCSA Mosaic.

That was 32 years ago. And holy f**ck, that dates me.

Sure, I dabbled around with others. There was the original Opera, back when Netscape cratered and the only other real option was IE. Opera’s tab behaviours made me install Tab Mix Plus for FF, and I still find that extension to be the second-most critically important extension FF has, right after UBlock Origin.

And lately I took a shine to Vivaldi, but I have been weaning myself off of it once I realized that the Manifest v2 shutdown was unavoidable for it as well.

And the only reason why I even have Chromium is as a sandbox for any Google services I access and as a “naked” web browser for those websites who implement malware and spyware in the name of “website security”. Which, of course, also means a majority of websites that are “protected” by CloudFlare’s incredibly hostile anti-user practices.

And of course, I also run forks, such as Librewolf and others, also with the appropriate anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. It can be useful having multiple web browsers up at once.

But my main will always be Firefox.

Canada.

I think that the bar to owning any projectile weapon should be very high, and have tiers that go progressively higher with the type of weapon requested. Hunting rifles? Comparatively easy. Hip-wielded auto cannon capable of sending 300+ rounds a minute down range? Yeah, that’s a decade-plus of effort to get licensed and approved.

Proactive qualifiers would include psychological testing, social media monitoring, lack of criminal convictions, wait times for both weapons and ammo, tracking of ammo consumption, extensive training and marksmanship minimums, and red flag laws. Any violent ideation such as fascism, accelerationism, religious extremism, or white supremacy would be instant disqualifiers.

On the flip side, once someone passes the thresholds, they should be able to own any damn weapon they want. Even clear up to naval ordinance and other heavy weaponry. Want to romp around your 500ha property with a fully functional Abrams tank? Go right ahead - just ensure that a fired shell never goes beyond your property’s border or there will be legal hell to pay.

Now active carry is yet another issue. At which point, unless the person is in a high-risk job or has been under the receiving end of actual threats to their life, any carry should be highly questionable. If an average person wants to cosplay with live weaponry while out in public, questions need to be raised about their mental stability. A mentally stable person is not going to be wandering about with an AR-15 slung over their shoulder - there is absolutely no need for that under virtually 100% of all cases.

But without them most ecosystems would fail

a minor hiccup, at most. Many ecosystems wouldn’t even notice.

I love how the Streisand Effect works. They just made this app the hottest thing out there.

Allowing men’s issues to even be addressed risks giving legitimacy to the fact that these issues even exist. And if they exist, men can no longer be that evil monolith that exists only to be torn down and used as the cause for whatever is wrong with the world.

After all, the zero-sum game must be properly reinforced with an appropriate evil that cannot be allowed to have any weaknesses or redeeming attributes.

Yeah, my heat exhaustion event was a quarter century ago. It’s just gotten worse and worse over the years.

Ever since I had a heat exhaustion event in my late teens, I have been exceedingly sensitive to heat. Think actively sweating like I’m in a sauna - only in normal office temperatures. I have to shave my head for nearly half the year in order to not look like a drowned rat - and carry a “sweat towel” with me at all times to wipe the dripping sweat off a half dozen times an hour.

My home office is set to between 15℃ and 18℃ because that is the temperature where I feel the same amount of comfort as most other people do between 24℃ and 28℃. Throw a business suit into the mix, and that comfort range drops by 4-6℃.

There are times in the winter where I throw all the office windows open, let the -20℃ air roll in from outside, and actually enjoy wearing long pants and a sweater.

…I live in Canada. Near where it hit 50℃ during the heat dome a few years ago. Climate Change is going to be brutal for me.

Apple is the least bad + most functional option out there.

Nothing else will go further in being least bad, unless you are willing to completely sacrifice functionality and usability.

Apple at least walks the walk of protecting user privacy because they aren’t dependent on non-hardware, non-app-store revenue (as in, selling user’s data). Google is absolutely dependent on revenue from selling user data because their hardware and App Store revenue is almost insignificant in comparison.

I have a really big thing for 70s PNW homes done really, really well. The vaulted ceilings, open concept main areas with multiple levels, the sunken living rooms, the cedar used everywhere… just leave out the shag carpet and I’ll be A-OK.

Good brutalist architecture can take your breath away. It’s so solid, so permanent, so delightfully uncompromising.

I have to praise Stephanie Meyer

Except the Twilight series glorified toxic relationships, normalized abuse and underage grooming, and hit an uncomfortable number of red flags in DSM-5.

Hey nice, journalism with a backbone!

If only more news orgs in America could import that.

But then, it would probably be blocked by TACO tariffs.

deleted by creator

A mirror of Anna’s Archive.

Information is meant to be free.

…And it’s bound to be stupidly expensive.

Wish I could afford 20 of them, but not without winning the Powerball.

Until the oil pump shaft broke: a 1965 Holder AG3 European vineyard tractor. Centre articulating, 35+ Hp diesel, close to 2 metric tons, and a third the size of a VW Beetle. We used it extensively on our orchards for a good four decades, or just shy of that.

Sucker was stupidly strong for its size, and could out-pull most tractors twice its physical size. Last I was using it for was some pretty extreme landscaping in the front yard. Another story, because it takes some explaining, but yeah.

So apparently the oil pump shaft broke late 2023, and we thought it was just overheating. Nope. Plus, the mechanic also found a rather severe hydraulic leak into the oil system, which was about the only thing that kept the engine from totally seizing.

Unfortunately, we are about three decades too late for most of the required parts. The engine place does a lot of remanufacturing and machining, so I did ask them for their “fuck off” price (gotta have a benchmark in that regard). But they did strongly suggest a Kubota engine as a replacement, primarily because the original oil pump required some pretty unusual maintenance to avoid breaking like it did. Whoops. No-one in my family realized that, least of all my father who had bought the tractor in the 80s.

Nothing for the Nokia 7.2, and yet the 4.2 sits there with more than a half-dozen options. WTF??

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.