You know, it’s not always, but apple does sell things that are price-competitive with similarly performing competing products.

Some iterations of the Mac Mini have been hard to beat with a tiny PC with similar performance.

The M1 MacBooks had some surprisingly cheap options for the relatively premium laptops they were.

Samsung’s Ultra phones tend to cost more or less the same as the Apple Pro Max phones.

The main difference is sometimes just that Apple doesn’t make low-end or low-mid-range, or sometimes not even anything below “relatively high-end”, products in a particular category.

My company used to allow it, but then it became clear people were doing too many dumb things with their work computers to control them normally. For example, some people would explicitly turn their PCs off without updating the OS every Friday and were nearly a year out of date.

That, plus other security concerns I don’t remember surrounding the tightening of our policies for security certifications required to net a very demanding client, made it so that we needed to institute mobile device management (MDM) for everything.

We went with Microsoft’s version because there were some crucial things I forgot that only it could do. But it didn’t support Linux.

So our few people using Linux had to choose between Windows and Mac OS.

Not really on topic but wait just a gosh darn second.

This person is playing and reviewing (what might be called) the prettiest, most demanding game ever made, and they’re doing it on a Steam Deck, on Low?

But still, the visuals are the main thing they praise about it?

I’m a bit surprised? Confused? Anyway that’s a little weird.

To be honest I just look at the state of the world and laugh like I’m watching a sad comedy.

And I avoid thinking about how I’m in it and I have basically zero power over it.

I vote for whomever is the least bad candidate and try not to think about it too much the rest of the time.

Hey not just the EU. There are smaller initiatives in other countries, including Canada.

Hah, that’s smart. I like that.

Also woo, dials. I hate how most ovens use capacitive buttons nowadays.

You know what happens when I stop visiting Facebook? I don’t learn anything about extended family because they don’t give a shit about me.

You know what happens when you sell not on Marketplace here? You get like 10 clicks a month and you don’t sell.

You know what happens when you message people not on Messenger? You’re the annoying person on the hipster app/sending text messages to a phone number and people don’t talk to you unless talked to first.

Also, good for you if you’re a significant enough friend to be invited personally, but no one invites me anywhere unless I show up in a list of people to invite.

I realize my comment was a bit too generalizing but holy shit dude calm down

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do use it because that’s where people are. You can’t really not do Facebook at all. You can’t talk to people on Messenger, you can’t sell stuff on Marketplace, you can’t get invited to events…

To the disappointment of evil prankers everywhere. Reminds me of “format c:”

That’s genius. Absolutely evil, but genius.

Blacklist-based ad blocking.

I don’t mind ads when they’re reasonable. If it helps fund your website at all, advertise away. But when there’s a sticky banner plus an autoplay video ad reducing my mobile viewport to a ridiculous degree, and the X buttons are too small to click and ad loading completely breaks the search bar until it’s done (hi fandom wiki) I want to be able to say “fuck these ads in particular”

I think that would be a history/etymology lesson going all the way back to Latin. I haven’t studied Latin, but I think there used to be a lot more grammatical genders, but they were gradually merged into one another in languages with a Latin heritage.

Why the neutral gender got merged into masculine and not feminine is a good question. Maybe it was just because they were the most similar.

The very same happens in French. The use of recently popular gender-neutral structures like “étudiant.e.s” is strongly discouraged in formal writing. The older “étudiant(e)s” less so but still not recommended.

What’s recommended is to either say “étudiants et étudiantes” or just use the masculine form as a group for both masculine and feminine forms, as has been the standard forever, and almost no one bats an eye at.

It’s not TERF, it’s not misogynistic, it’s just to make texts easier to read. It takes more time and effort to read a text full of those extra period/parenthesis characters, for very very little gain.

People wanting to write a text where they consider the sacrifice in readability worth it for the extra emphasis on gender inclusion still can; the police won’t show up. It’s just not standard grammar.

I’m all for blaming the US (it’s a fun pastime) but can you expand on that transition process? Sounds interesting.

As a Canadian, yes, yes it is.

I’ve never really understood it. My Mom asks me to check her pool’s temperature. “24 degrees”

And she’s confused! “I have no idea what that means! Tell me in normal pool temperature”

But if I told her the outside temperature in Fahrenheit she’d be utterly confused, as would I. Only thing I know about Fahrenheit is that 30 is cold and 100 is very hot.

The pool thing is completely crazy.

I can understand the oven thing though. It’s so hot that it might as well have nothing to do with other everyday temperatures. So if you get ovens and recipes from the United States, I can see why it wouldn’t really be a problem. It’s treated as basically just a power level.

Still I wish we all switched to Celsius. It just feels useful to me to know how far you are from the boiling point of water, for instance.

Want more craziness?

• Construction materials, imperial.
• People’s weights, pounds, although most people understand kilos, they’ll just internally think you’re being a hipster if you make them convert in their head.
• People’s heights, generally feet. They’re hard to convert back and forth to cm, so people are often confused when I use cm. Though on government ID it’s cm.
• Short distances? Mostly imperial, especially with older people, but sometimes metric.
• Long distances? Hours by car. If you press it, people will use kilometers, but hours are absolutely the casual unit of distance.
• Weight of things? Usually metric, but a pound of butter is a pound of butter.
• Volumes? Metric, or metric-ified imperial units, like metric cups (250 ml), tablespoons (15 ml) and teaspoons (5 ml). Ounces only used for alcoholic drinks AFAIK. No one I know understands wtf a “15 ounce drink” means, even though restaurant chains sometimes use the measurement on their menus.
• In Quebec in particular, pint and gallon have been completely denatured from volume units to container types. A pint is a small container, usually a carton, containing 1 or 2 liters. Usually only used for milk. Can also be a 1-litre plastic bag of milk. (Used to be a popular Canadian staple; now cartons are the more popular thing.) A gallon is a jug or jerrycan. People are aware they’re supposed to be volume units but you rarely see them used as such.

Huh. So I can blame the British for influencing Canada to be fucked up.

Frickin’ temperatures. Fahrenheit for ovens and pools and Celsius for the rest. Why.