The surprise is that while Microsoft did announce how they were changing how Copilot usage is billed, they didn’t really give users a good way to gauge how expensive their current usage would be under the new billing system. Turns out it’s a lot more expensive than most people were expecting.

It felt like there was supposed to be big plans for the Snoke character in the later movies, but he ended up being a complete throwaway.

Perhaps not the absolute worst but certainly one of the most forgettable villains.

There was actually four different standard designs. You had the rectangular lights which came as either a 4x6" quad configuration, or the larger 5x7"design with one light on each side. Then there was the 5 3/4" round lights which were also a quad configuration, and the 7" round lights with one on each side. Prior to 1975 there was only the round designs and prior to 1958 when the quad 5 3/4" round light configuration were allowed, the only legal headlight was the 7" round design, which itself dated back to 1939.

The reason for the standardization in 1939 was that similar to today, every car had different designs in different configurations, though the main problem then was finding replacement lights when they inevitably burned out or got damaged.

The first car with composite headlights (in the US) was actually the Ford Thunderbird, but the Taurus is one everyone noticed.

A number of e-bikes now come with built-in lights that are just on all the time, hence the reason why bikes that are all lit up in the middle of the day are starting to become common.

A lot of these lights have little or no adjustments either.

I point mine down so it illuminates the road in front of me, and slightly in the direction facing away from oncoming traffic. I also use the dimmest setting, and don’t have it in blink mode unless it’s foggy out.

There’s also the projects that people think are dead because they haven’t seen any significant updates in some time. But in actuality there just hasn’t been any need to make changes. The code works, is mature, and feature complete. Unlike proprietary software there isn’t any pressure make changes for the sake of change to convince everyone they need to buy it over again, so once the code becomes stable development naturally will slow down.

That’s one of things that bothers me about how AI is being pushed in the workplace. Assuming AI actually does manage to help me get my work done faster, it’s not like I get to home earlier or work less days. I’m just going to get more work piled on me.

The indie game scene is thriving and while there’s a lot of crap out there, it’s not really what I’d consider enshitified.

On the other hand, AAA games and anything mobile is absolutely enshitified.

Hell, I’m a bit surprised they managed to make that one in 1946.

Despite plants being associated with the color green, chlorophyll is actually a poor absorber of green wavelengths of light.

Hence the reason plants are green, because they absorb the blue and red wavelengths of light, but reflect the green.

My favorite geography one: You get on a plane at Tampa Bay, Florida and fly due south. Which South American countries do you fly over?

Answer is none of them. You miss the entire continent because you are too far west.

Windows XP also had the problem that when it launched, a lot of people’s computers weren’t really up to running XP it very well. Windows XP will run on a Pentium III with 256 MB of ram, but it wasn’t particularly happy about it. A few years later when people when people were running XP on a Core 2 Duo with 2GB of ram, it was a much smoother experience.

A lot of that is just 30-40 years of progress. A car built to be a similar size and performance as that 90’s car using the current state of the art would be significantly more fuel efficient, have less emissions, and would be just as safe as those SUVs.

Banished is a pretty chill city builder game that could work well for what you want. The mechanics aren’t that complicated which I find makes it pretty easy to put down and be able pick right back up where I left off. It’s a Windows game but I’ve had no problems running it under Proton in Linux.

I can’t speak for Civ III, but my experience with Civ V is that running the Windows version under Proton actually performs better nowadays than the native build. But YMMV.

Windows 9x would crash after 49.7 days.

Windows Vista had a bug where the network stack would crash after 497 days, but if you didn’t care about networking the rest of the OS would continue to run.

I have to say that is pretty dumb. I will agree the scenario isn’t completely implausible, but if someone who doesn’t know what they are doing is allowed to do something like that, they’re going to screw up other stuff too.

Most people have their favorite old version of Winamp that they run.

I used Winamp for a very long time myself, but ended up giving it up when I gave up Windows. (yes, I know you can run it under Wine, but I also have Qmmp now)

It may not be completely crazy, depending on context. With something like a web app, if data is being sanitized in the client-side Javascript, someone malicious could absolutely comment that out (or otherwise bypass it).

With that said, many consultant-types are either pretty clueless, or seem to feel like they need to come up with something no matter how ridiculous to justify the large sums of money they charged.

If the goal of Desert Storm was to get Iraq to withdraw out of Kuwait, then it could be considered a success. There was no intent to make friends with the Iraqi people or remove Saddam from power. That was the second Bush’s mess.