Someone needs to yarn-bomb this thing. Perhaps something like a headband that falls to googly-eye level maybe. Perhaps, you know, with eyes on it.

Either way, I’d be tempted to put up a sign next to it that says “Help! I’ve gone blind!”

The solutions:

For the individual: Don’t start in the first place, which is what the Maldives are hoping to help people achieve.

For governments: Copy whatever local legislation applies to heroin and make it apply to nicotine as well. The article doesn’t say what the Maldives intend to do to underage smokers and those who’d sell to them, but I’d be making it unnecessarily draconian just so people get the message.

For people who are already smokers: Nicotine patches of decreasing strength over time and some sort of media teaching pen-flipping or other legal hand-based hobby. Having something for the hands to do is a big part of it. If these can be prescribed by medical or psychological practitioners, all the better.

General advice follows. I may be preaching to the choir. Apologies in advance.

Did take a backup before running the update? If not, now would be an excellent time to reboot to externally hosted media and get what you can off the storage before proceeding any further.

If you have a backup, be ready to format and install the new OS from scratch then repopulate necessary files from that. You might not need to if you’re lucky and a reboot and retry all goes to plan, but still something to bear in mind if it hangs again. And maybe a third time.

Also be ready to have to reinstall the old OS if this is a case where the new OS and the old hardware refuse to get along.

Old man ramble: Back in the old days, it used to be possible to tell if a computer was doing something because the HDD would make noise, but with SSDs that’s all but impossible to do. HDD/SSD lights on the case sometimes give strong hints that something is happening, but, in my limited experience, they didn’t always match up one-to-one with what a HDD was doing, so I assume the same is true with SSDs. Onion on belt, etc.

… politics is a hugely partisan-tribal affair with a lot of drama

This is a problem everywhere. In fact it may well be the definition of politics.

I know this isn’t particularly helpful in terms of this specific discussion (China, Taiwan, etc.), but that phrase leapt out at me and I had to call attention to it.

I’ve bounced a few ideas off the limited models currently provided for free online by DuckDuckGo, but I don’t think I have the space or RAM to be able to run anything remotely as grand on my own computer.

Also, by the by, I find that the lies that LLMs tell can be incredibly subtle, so I tend to avoid asking them about anything I know nothing about, so that when they lie about the things I do know about, I can gauge how wrong they might be about other things.

One of Britain’s most commonly used political words is of Irish origin: Tory.

When you look into the etymology, and consider the historical relationship between Britain and Ireland, it makes sense that that would be the one we (Britain) heard often enough to copy.

It’s not Linux native according to the icons in Steam, so try one of the Proton compatibility layers.

Proton Hotfix wouldn’t run it for me but Proton 9.0 got me into the game’s prologue and difficulty select (which requires walking around). Haven’t played any further than that though, so can’t tell if there are to be any problems with other levels.

Was able to modify sound, graphics and mouse settings with no trouble too.

Edit: Made it through to the first intermission screen with no problems. Well, at least not software related. Skill issues are another matter.

As you point out, intelligence is fuzzy and dependent on many factors. Which is why a straight line hard cut-off above and below the mean of a distribution seems pretty arbitrary to me, even if it is based upon a particularly useful way of delineating variance from a mean.

I’m sure cognitive scientists had good reasons for that somewhat arbitrarily defined band of the bell-curve when they gave it the name “average intelligence” but it’s pretty clear that the joke isn’t using that definition.

50% of people are below average intelligence.

(Yeah, yeah, the implied conclusion is fallacious reasoning, but it’s still funny.)

Actually, the British beat the French to it. The Halifax Gibbet pre-dates the guillotine by about 100 years.

Yet another case where another nation somehow becomes better at a sport the British invented.

The southern English are trapped between a rock and a hard place with the whole thing. They do like the idea of stealing culture from the French, but they want to appear to be separate at the same time. And appearing northern would be even worse.

Spiderman can definitely be pluralised that way if it’s a surname. I’m conflicted otherwise.

Spider-matopodes?

Curious as to what Commodore that was. For the C64, a full schematic came with the Programmer’s Reference Guide (PRG) which was a separate publication to the User Manual that shipped with the computer. There were bits and pieces about the internals in the manual, a lot of similar sections and tables, and perhaps a simplified diagram of how things were arranged logically, but not the full fold-out schematic.

That said, maybe I got a pared-down budget manual along with my C64C in the early '90s. When I found a pristine PRG in a bookshop, it was much expanded and had that schematic… which I learned didn’t quite match the C64C once I’d plucked up the courage to open the case.

I doubt anything this new Commodore are planning to release will come with anything quite so detailed, and even if they did, the new C64 seems to be an FPGA (computer on a chip) housed in a keyboard that looks like the original. The diagram wouldn’t be much more than a single box with a lot of wires coming out of it to the various ports.

I’m not sure Perifractic’s Commodore is ready for millions of customers with half-baked conceptions of how computers work, what they should do and how they should do it.

He’s used to dealing with technically-inclined folks of a certain age, not the average computer user, let alone those a standard deviation or more below that.

This is one of those situations where I’d like to be proven wrong, probably because I’m blowing it out of proportion, but better if he actually manages to step up. Even more so if he manages to engineer a legacy that can’t ensh-ttify the moment he’s no longer able to head the project.

When you have a hungry bear on your doorstep, your concern is not misplaced.

I think this is more of a “If Israel keep this up, they’ll be coming for the rest of us once they’re done with Palestine. We need them as a distraction / punching bag to keep Israel busy.”

So far Jordan has kept their heads down and been left alone, but King Abdullah is probably starting to feeling a little tight around the shirt-collar as Israel’s belligerence continues to rise.

Apparently so. It’s probably going to depend on distro, when that distro was installed and potentially also user preferences if they’ve installed something they found familiar instead of using a new default.

Those of us on older Linux Mints, for example, might have had Evince as the default, but now the default is Mint’s own Xreader, an Evince fork.

That’s presumably either because it was forked before Papers was a thing or because Papers has the enforced GNOME interface making Evince a better starting point.

I don’t even think about it. Double-click a PDF and Xviewer starts up and works perfectly.

Their best strategy would be to poison the content with bot accounts, spam, and morally tasteless voices

You mean, make the Fediverse even more like Reddit?

Asbestos is also inert.

Strictly speaking, black pudding is a kind of blood sausage, but we’d probably use the former term for the entire category in Britain.

Some people classify haggis as a sausage, but it’s definitely not a blood sausage.