I think it is probably a living document that has been updated since.

Yep - I think the best strategy is what Richard Stallman suggested in 2005 - don’t give her money under any circumstances.

I’d suggest not giving the works any form of oxygen; definitely don’t buy the books or watch the movies for money, including on a streaming site that pays royalties, or buy branded merchandise. But also don’t borrow them from a library (libraries use that as a signal to buy more), promote them by talking about them in any kind of positive light, don’t encourage your kids dress up as a character (builds hype and creates demand), use analogies drawn from the books, or otherwise support them.

As far as books about wizards and educational institutions, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is way better anyway - they have more realistic character interactions and social dynamics (despite being a comic fantasy), and it makes for a much better read.

I think it was a 18th century British fad that spread to America - for example, look at the date on this London newspaper from 1734:

- in the text it does also use the other format about “last month”, however.

It didn’t make it into legal documents / laws, which still used the more traditional format like: “That from and after the Tenth Day of April, One thousand seven hundred and ten …”. However, the American Revolution effectively froze many British fashions from that point-in-time in place (as another example, see speaking English without the trap/bath split, which was a subsequent trend in the commonwealth).

The fad eventually died out and most of the world went back to the more traditional format, but it persisted in the USA.

Possibly “Making History” by Stephen Fry - although at 380 pages it doesn’t quite match as a short story, and the protagonist doesn’t stop himself so much as do something else to reverse the effects of his actions to save Hitler.

Or at least the other way around. Reddit is banned from me.

“Except for Claims (i) in which a party is attempting to protect its intellectual property rights (such as its patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, anti-circumvention, or moral rights, but not including its privacy or publicity rights) …”

So in other words, the types of matters Nintendo thinks it might have a dispute against users, court and class actions are okay, but for everything that they think users might file against Nintendo, they think arbitration is best.

Easy! Why do you think it happened? Inadequate food regulation? Underfunded healthcare? Insufficient regulation of pollutants that can impact health and cause chronic disease?

I don’t know your individual circumstances, but given the state of the world right now, I’d bet it’s a combination of all three.

IANAL, but it is an interesting question to consider whether it would be illegal in Australia (if anything, as a test to see if the right laws are on the books to block this kind of thing). The laws are likely different in the US, and it might vary from state to state.

The Fair Work Act 2009 (Commonwealth), s325 provides that:

An employer must not directly or indirectly require an employee to spend, or pay to the employer or another person, an amount of the employee’s money or the whole or any part of an amount payable to the employee in relation to the performance of work, if:

(a) the requirement is unreasonable in the circumstances; and

(b) for a payment—the payment is directly or indirectly for the benefit of the employer or a party related to the employer.

I think you could imagine the employer arguing a few lines:

• The employee is not required to spend, it is only a factor in promotions and not retaining the same role. OP said you can “get in trouble for not using this” - countering this defence perhaps depends on proving what kind of trouble to show it is a requirement. In addition, under s340, employers are not allowed to take an adverse action against an employee for exercising or proposing to exercise a workplace right, and adverse action includes discriminating between and employee and other employees of the employer.
• That the employee is not required to pay any particular person, they can choose what to buy as long as the select from a prescribed list. However, I think that could be countered by saying this is an indirect requirement to spend, and the “or another person” attaches to the “pay” part, so I don’t think that argument would fly.
• The the requirement is reasonable - however, that could be countered by arguing the privacy angle, and the fact that this is for personal shopping, far outside the reasonable scope of an employment relationship.
• That the payment isn’t for the benefit of the employer. I think that could be countered firstly by arguing this is a requirement to spend not pay, and event if it was to pay, it is indirectly for the employer’s benefit since it allows them to attract and retain clients. The way they are pushing it could further prove this.

So I think it would probably be contrary to s325 of the Fair Work Act in Australia.

Another angle could be the right to disconnect under s333M of the Fair Work Act:

An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, from an employer outside of the employee’s working hours unless the refusal is unreasonable.

If someone has a work and a personal phone, and has the app on the work phone, but refuses to use take the work phone or install an app on their personal phone so they can respond to tracking requests from the employer, then maybe this also fits.

I also wonder if in Australia this could also be a form of cartel conduct - it is an arrangement of where purchases (other than those the company should legitimately control) are directed centrally under an arrangement by an organisation.

Under s45AD of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010,

(1) For the purposes of this Act, a provision of a contract, arrangement or understanding is a cartel provision if: (a) either of the following conditions is satisfied in relation to the provision: (i) the purpose/effect condition set out in subsection (2); (ii) the purpose condition set out in subsection (3); and (b) the competition condition set out in subsection (4) is satisfied in relation to the provision.

So the purpose condition has several alternatives separated by ‘or’, one of which is:

(3) The purpose condition is satisfied if the provision has the purpose of directly or indirectly: … (b) allocating between any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (ii) the persons or classes of persons who have supplied, or who are likely to supply, goods or services to any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding; or

It sounds like there is a solid argument the purpose condition is met - they are allocating where people who are part of the arrangement (employees) shop.

They’d also need to meet the competition condition for it to be cartel conduct. For this to be met, the arrangement might need to include the clients of the company:

(4) The competition condition is satisfied if at least 2 of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (a) are or are likely to be; or (b) but for any contract, arrangement or understanding, would be or would be likely to be; in competition with each other in relation to: … © if paragraph (2)© or (3)(b) applies in relation to a supply, or likely supply, of goods or services—the supply of those goods or services in trade or commerce; or

So it could be argued that this is a cartel arrangement between the company, its clients, and its employees, and so attract penalties for cartel conduct.

To save on costs, QAs could be paid in exposure.

As an experiment / as a bit of a gag, I tried using Claude 3.7 Sonnet with Cline to write some simple cryptography code in Rust - use ECDHE to establish an ephemeral symmetric key, and then use AES256-GCM (with a counter in the nonce) to encrypt packets from client->server and server->client, using off-the-shelf RustCrypto libraries.

It got the interface right, but it got some details really wrong:

• It stored way more information than it needed in the structure tracking state, some of it very sensitive.
• It repeatedly converted back and forth between byte arrays and the proper types unnecessarily - reducing type safety and making things slower.
• Instead of using type safe enums it defined integer constants for no good reason.
• It logged information about failures as variable length strings, creating a possible timing side channel attack.
• Despite having a 96 bit nonce to work with (-1 bit to identify client->server and server->client), it used a 32 bit integer to represent the sequence number.
• And it “helpfully” used wrapping_add to increment the 32 sequence number! For those who don’t know much Rust and/or much cryptography: the golden rule of using ciphers like GCM is that you must never ever re-use the same nonce for the same key (otherwise you leak the XOR of the two messages). wrapping_add explicitly means when you get up to the maximum number (and remember, it’s only 32 bits, so there’s only about 4.3 billion numbers) it silently wraps back to 0. The secure implementation would be to explicitly fail if you go past the maximum size for the integer before attempting to encrypt / decrypt - and the smart choice would be to use at least 64 bits.
• It also rolled its own bespoke hash-based key extension function instead of using HKDF (which was available right there in the library, and callable with far less code than it generated).

To be fair, I didn’t really expect it to work well. Some kind of security auditor agent that does a pass over all the output might be able to find some of the issues, and pass it back to another agent to correct - which could make vibe coding more secure (to be proven).

But right now, I’d not put “vibe coded” output into production without someone going over it manually with a fine-toothed comb looking for security and stability issues.

I believe nothing in the podman rm family worked because the container was already gone - it was just the IP allocation that was left.

By population, and not land area, certain more remote geographic places are well known but have quite a low population. ‘Everyone’ is a high bar, but most adults in Australia would know the following places (ordered from smaller population but slightly less known to higher population):

• Wittenoom, WA - population 0 - well known in Australia for being heavily contaminated with dangerous blue asbestos (which used to be mined there until the 60s), and having been de-gazetted and removed from maps to discourage tourism to it.
• Coober Pedy, SA - population 1437 - well known in Australia for its underground homes and opal production.
• Alice Springs, NT - population 25,912 - well known for being near the centre of Australia in the rangelands (outback) - most larger population centres in Australia are coastal.

Self-hosted Gitea or Forgejo. It’s pretty easy to host, and if you’ve got a reliable Internet connection and an always on computer, you can host it from home without too much effort.

Stargate SG-1, Season 4, Episode 6 has a variant of the loop trope, but everyone (including most of the protagonists, and everyone else on earth) don’t remember what happens, while two protagonists remember every loop until they are able to stop the looping.

They debrief the others who don’t remember at the end (except for the things they did when they took a loop off anyway!) - but they didn’t miss too much since everyone else on earth missed it.

Another fictional work - a book, not a movie / TV show / anime - is Stephen Fry’s 1996 novel Making History. The time travel aspect is questionable - he sends things back in time to stop Hitler being born, but no people travel through time. However, he remembers the past before his change, and has to deal with the consequences of having the wrong memories relative to everyone else.

IANAL (and likely neither is anyone here) - and I think the answer would be “it depends” on other details if you asked a lawyer to make a decision on what you’ve shared. So I think that is the only route if you can’t get YouTube or the blogger to do the right thing.

Some relevant things this might hinge on:

• Is the person posting this doing making videos as a business venture - e.g. by making videos that they hope to profit from (e.g. by including advertising in it, or through YouTube monetisation)? If this was done as part of a business, that could make a big difference (generally businesses are held to a higher standard).
• Which country did this happen in? Laws are different between countries.
• Did they deceive you in any way to get you to do what they wanted for the video?
• Are you a public figure in any way (prior to the video)?

Some potential causes of action that your lawyer could consider if they apply:

• Misleading conduct - if they used deception in the course of their trade.
• Fraud - if they obtained valuable consideration (your video performance) through deception.
• Privacy Infringement - if they processed (including collected) your personally identifiable information (e.g. including images / videos of your face, or the identifiable sound of your voice) without consent or another lawful basis / denial of right of erasure. Some of this could apply to Google too - you might be able to submit a Right of Erasure (right to be forgotten) legal request, and at minimum they might need to blur your face and mask the audio so you aren’t identifiable.
• Copyright infringement - potentially what they recorded counts as a performance and you have a copyright interest in the video. Another one that could apply to Google and be used to take it down.

No point asking them to justify why they have to ask, they probably don’t even know. Just say “Sorry, I don’t give that out”. I’ve never had a store push back after that - they probably get it all the time.

TIOBE is meaningless - it is just search engine result numbers, which for many search engines are likely a wildly inaccurate estimate of how many results match in their index. Many of those matches will not be about the relevant language, and the numbers probably have very little correlation to who uses it (especially for languages that are single letter, include punctuation in the name, or are a common English word).

Modems also make noises when connected. However, the noise of them connecting is more distinctive because they go through a handshake where you can hear distinct tones, but then negotiate a higher baud rate involving modulation of many different frequencies, at which point to the human ear it is indistinguishable from white noise (a sort of loud hissing). If you pick up the phone while the modem is connected at a higher baud rate (post the handshake), you’ll hear the hissing, and then eventually you picking up the phone will have caused too many errors for the connection to be sustained (due to introducing noise on the line), causing both ends to hang up. You’ll then hear the normal tone you hear when the called party has hung up the line.

Note that this looks like non-FLOSS (but source available: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/blob/master/LICENSE.md).

Tip for increasing the life of your next battery:

Li-Po batteries degrade far faster when their charge level is at the levels the manufacturers call 0-15% or 85-100%; the exact minimum and maximum charge levels are a manufacturer decision that trades off total battery capacity when new against battery life. Manufacturers make the decision by thinking about what is most profitable for them, which is the biggest possible advertised (brand new) battery capacity, while dying quite fast (within a couple of years) to sell more, but not so fast consumers can claim it is faulty.

So they will happily make the battery last 1/5th of the life it otherwise would, for +30% brand new battery capacity, even if that 30% will be gone in a year of typical use.

Those decisions are aligned to the manufacturer’s interests, but they are seldom aligned to a consumer’s interest. Most consumers would be better off with 30% less battery capacity, but a phone battery that lasts 5x as long - many people for example charge every day, and only get down to 80% or something anyway.

The way to re-align to your interests are to: stop charging above 85%, and shut down at 15% instead of going down to 0%. You can do this manually, but it is a real pain; you can’t just plug it in, and leave it until it is charged, you’d need to micromanage charging. Some more responsible manufacturers (e.g. some Samsung devices) have features that will do this for you if you set preserve battery mode. Others, including Google, however, really don’t want you to do this, because it hurts their sales. They don’t provide standard APIs available to unrooted devices that would allow apps that do this.

If you are willing to root your device (and ideally install a third party Android distro like LineageOS), you can install ACCA (https://f-droid.org/packages/mattecarra.accapp/) on a rooted device, and set it to stop charging at 85%, and shut down at 15%. This will increase your battery life very significantly, and drastically slow the decline in capacity you’d otherwise see. Unfortunately, many manufacturers hate people taking control of their own devices this way; Google has unfortunately convinced major banks etc… to use their so called “Play Integrity API” to check that your device is “secure” (where secure is defined by Google as including a phone no longer receiving security patches, with known vulnerabilities that let someone trivially install a keylogger over the wifi, but excluding the same phone rooted by the owner, with a highly secure up-to-date LineageOS install, with extra security software like firewalls that stock Android wouldn’t allow, and with ACCA installed; it’s almost like “secure” means toeing the Google line, and the banks have been conned). There are sometimes ways to pass the Play Integrity API checks even when rooted, but Google is constantly battling users to try to break them. But it might be worth it for better security and battery life.