Dried grasshopper does really taste like prawn crackers.

Including comic sans. German website with aesthetic from the previous century, what else is new?

The mammoth one is uncanny valley for me.

I laughed a lot reading that series. Lots of profanity, but really fun.

Some suggestions

• Saturn Returns by Sean Williams
• the Uplift universe by David Brin (Sundiver, Uplift war, Uplift trilogy etc)
• Existence by David Brin
• Helix and Helix Wars by Eric Brown
• the Shoal Sequence by Gary Gibson

As a Dutch resident, I seriously disagree here. We are just coming out of a 15 year long neoliberal period that has caused the following:

• public transport costs just went up 12% in January, whereas they are going down in surrounding countries
• the total amount of minutes of disruptions with the largest rail company has gone up by five-fold over the last 10 years, and no sign of abating
• the high speed rail line was taken out of service completely at the beginning of this month.
• peripheral areas have increasingly less access to public transport and other services. Everything gets centralized to Amsterdam.
• the local tram network in The Hague is downsizing in March due to lack of personnel. And the trams are already completely full in rush hour.

All these things are having the effect of pushing people IN cars, because the alternative is getting more expensive for reduced service. Heck, road congestion is significantly up from pre-pandemic levels and that’s with the neoliberals investing billions upon billions in new asphalt.

Not Just Bikes is in a bubble, and it’s seriously irritating to have foreigners believe we’re this utopia.

And nearly all of that is usually prefilled correctly to the euro by the Belastingdienst.

Why did this take the IRS so long where other nations have been doing this for decades?

Official government recommendation for Dutch school is to ban smartphones in class. For now it’s just an advice, but it may become law in the future.

This does not entirely surprise me. When Tesla became well-known a significant fraction of taxi services in my country switched to Tesla. Why: a) it was cheaper to buy since subsidies for EVs, b) electricity being cheaper than fuel, and c) Tesla being perceived as luxury.

Within a couple years most taxi services had gone back to ICE cars. The Teslas had inferior build quality, and repair turnaround time was awful compared to regular ICE cars. This meant a large fraction of the Tesla fleet was idle as they were waiting to be repaired.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Hertz encountered the same. It’s not that EVs are bad. It’s that the largest supplier of EVs in the West, Tesla, is bad and slow to repair cars.

A website where you can download paywalled scientific literature. Most scientific literature is paywalled by publishers, and costs a real significant amount to read (like 30-50$ per article if you don’t have a subscription).

Scihub basically just pirates it. And has been shut down several times. But as most scientific studies are already laid with public money, scihub isn’t that unethical at all.

Sigh…

Authy desktop was extremely useful when my phone broke during an international trip, and getting a new one obviously took some time due to well… being abroad.

Yeah this sounds more like a distraction so as not to spend a single dollar extra on real measures.

Sync filters a lot in client.

1506 partners. Insane.

That has been tried with the DoNotTrack header. Turned out servers didn’t oblige by it.

Whether or not it was a plug, at the time of the incident this piece its role was basically that of a portion of fuselage.

Venus is interesting. While the surface is extremely hostile, the upper atmosphere is maybe the most similar to Earth-like environment out there in the solar system. At about 50km up in the air, the air pressure is about 1 Earth atmosphere, and the ambient temperature is about 20C. A 80/20% nitrogen-oxygen gas mixture is buoyant too at that depth, so a balloon filled with breathable air will just float. A rupture won’t cause explosive decompression like it would on Mars either. In addition, the gravity one would experience is only very slightly less than that of Earth, and the large atmosphere also provides some shielding against radiation.

Mars doesn’t have these perks. Mars is cold, really cold, with only 1/3rd of the gravity of Earth, has practically no radiation shielding, and any breach would cause explosive decompression and almost instant unconsciousness. On top of that, regular solar panels really don’t work that well on Mars because of the extra distance from the Sun, while solar panels would actually work better in the upper atmosphere of Venus.

Concurrent is not the same as parallel.

Insanely vile.