The flag patriotism and intense praise of military action was a lot for me. I remember going to a mall, and seeing what would typically be reserved as disabled parking was instead veteran parking?? And then the cinema in the mall loudly advertising its discount for veterans as well. We do have a general discount in my country too, but it’s not so… intense. Like no one else has to know it’s happening because it’s more of a state benefit than it is a form of patriotism.

Neighbourhoods in general are what I found the strangest when I stayed in the States. Flags everywhere as you say, but also just the intense size, and the lack of walkability (the kurb drops felt massive compared to my country). Beyond that I remember walking for around 20 minutes through a suburb and counting upwards of 10 different company logos on rubbish bins. This neighbourhood seemingly had 10 different bin days rather than one centralised service.

I remember reading the manual for a new powertool and it said something like this:

To start the blade, disengage the safety (European models), then press the trigger.

Baffled me.

Laser tag is actually the best option.

I’m pretty sure it’s just trendy to call Google search shit, and to criticise the top product. I’m also pretty sure DDG is just uses Bing search under the hood (plus it’s privacy features), so I always thought these complaints were quite funny. The ads on Google are probably the most aggressive though, which IMO is the worst part.

Is that really the case? Because you can still see all the songs and a basic set of chords without an account/payment.

Ultimate Guitar Tabs. After spending years getting a community to contribute to one of the best music resources on the web, they turn around and lock all but the most basic features behind a pay wall.

I interpreted this as a criticism of the sort of people who make posts for the ‘brain crack’ of maybe learning to code one day in place of putting the actual work in to learn.

Typically when creating API interfaces you’d be better off marking the inputs as unknown, and then using something like Zod to validate the types

I love how Gemini is so sorry that it can’t help you kill children

Literally just had the same experience haha. Grateful to whoever mentioned tagging in the other thread

Me too! Thanks for the info. I was never a part of that community and I have to admit I’ve been wondering when someone was going to realise my 3 year membership should’ve finished

To be fair nor do most email providers! It’s in the spec, though.

Here’s two: you can have multiple @s forming relays in an email address, and you can also break all the rules around dots and spaces if you put quotes around the local part, eg ".sarah.."@emails.com

https://www.netmeister.org/blog/email.html

Shoutout to Pocket Casts

Not exactly at the same level, but a short story related to this topic that I love is Understand by Ted Chiang.

As far as I understand it, there are political interests too. Not just the obvious, ie a city council wanting to see economic movement within the city. Any regular person with a pension likely has money tied up in real estate. Ensuring those pensions maintain value is a concern for governments.

I have this power, and one little caveat of it is how much I crave dozing, ie being awake, sleepy, and cozy but not needing to get up. I guess could just set my alarm earlier but I need the sleep more

What do you mean by ‘never neutral’?

I know at least for French it’s been more controversial as there was no direct they/them equivalent. Instead new language has started to be used, though it’s not standard. I find it interesting as they/them is often defended (beyond the fact that it’s been in use in English for a long long time) as being a language tool in English that’s readily available and a far more palatable alternative to neo-pronouns. However in French (and other languages) I wonder if an invented gender neutral equivalent is culturally perceived as being no different.