800W is very much a standard for a home microwave in the UK and what the average consumer would expect. 1000W is also popular, though.

As for the food, it doesn’t “ask” for 1000W - rather it tells you the time for 1000W, and it is up to you the consumer to add or remove time based on the power of your own appliance.

Part of the reason food manufacturers like to stipulate 1000W on microwave meals is so that they can advertise “Ready in 2 mins!” on the front of the carton - that time being made shorter with higher microwave power - so it’s in their marketing interests to calibrate against a higher wattage.

Cooking food on lower power for longer can sometimes give better results, as you will get a more even heating and reduce hot/cold spots.

It was to figure out if they /really did/ start charging for it, how many people would actually pay.

I hope Tado goes bust because they don’t deserve to survive, treating customers like that.

If it’s not broke…

Well yes, that’s the point.

That’s how we know exactly how this playbook goes, because we’ve seen it before.

The fact that all big companies are doing this doesn’t mean that we should think any less badly of HP for doing it too.

The problem, as far as HP will be concerned, is the strategy was leaked to the public. If there was no leak there would have been no news, and no ‘feedback’.

HP won’t take this as a signal to not do the shitty thing. They’ll take this as a signal to back off for now, and then try the shitty thing again later, but slowly and bit-by-bit, so there’s no big news.

Truly, it’s the existential horror that really keeps me going :')

The slop is an unfortunate consequence of the streaming model.

Because there is so much content on streaming and it’s so readily accessible, watching a movie isn’t an “event” anymore in the way it was when DVD or VHS was the only option. And when you pair this with second-screen devices (phones) then it all adds up to people treating movies as background entertainment while they scroll their phone or do something else.

And because of that, the way shows and movies are produced has changed, too. The reason everything seems like homogenous cookie-cutter crap is because it is. In fact Netflix have specifically been asking producers to dumb content down so viewers can still understand it even when they are only paying half attention.

Of course, there are still talented people out there making great movies and shows, but they are increasingly drowned in a sea of copy-paste mediocrity.

And I do feel sorry for all those perhaps equally talented but less senior writers, directors, editors and artists who might never get to produce a movie they are truly proud of, because they’ve been captured by the streaming content factory that demands of them only a constant treadmill of dumbed-down slop, cheap and quick and instantly forgettable - and that people will only ever half-watch.

Personally I have had plenty of issues, and find this meme very relatable.

‘matematician’

A pirate without adblock installed? Truly the worst pirate.

Yep.

And it’s especially difficult to compete with the entrenched giant when that giant actually doesn’t suck while some of the storefronts going up against it absolutely do, both in features and as toxic companies.

The batteries are for dipping

I used to be very much into My Little Pony when that whole thing was big, and there was a tremendous amount of very dark fan theorisation and spinoff material.

I think what you say is correct in part, that it can make things less shameful, but I also think there’s a simpler explanation - it’s fun.

It’s exactly because kids shows are so happy and non-threatening that these dark fan theories are so entertaining, because of the stark contrast between the theory and the source material. And so the darker it is, the better.

I mostly don’t think people “believe” the dark theories are true, or in any way actually intended as subtext by the showrunners. People aren’t “reading between the lines” so much as they are purely “making it up” - in ways that were never intended but feel somehow plausible. It’s just a bit of fun.

MLP itself was a strange case, though, and got quite bizarre in the end. As the show went on, the writers and animators became increasingly aware they had unexpectedly developed a huge adult following, and some of the plot points that began purely as fan theories later became canon… but that’s a whole different story…

If you take a peek at world history there are certainly some reasons for that correlation, and it’s not a pretty story.

There’s an errant extra “as”

"yesterday as. As she helped me clean*

Sounds like you’ve got quite the esoteric setup, hehe :)

My personal solution isn’t exactly small as I have two identical four-disk NAS servers which operate with one as primary and the other as a read-only mirror of the primary. For off-site I don’t have an automated solution but just backup onto external every so often and leave it with a family member.

A good solution could be as simple as a raspberry pi with an external SSD at a friend or family’s place, and then make that accessible via VPN to your home network.

SSDs at the end of their lifespan do tend to fail more gracefully than HDDs, as even when they become fully worn and unable to take new writes, they will often still allow reads.

But, that depends on the specific type of failure.

I had an SSD fail in the same way as yours, where the controller chip or something along the path there died, and it went from fully working to toast in an instant.

Some drives are more reliable, some drives are less reliable, but the only rule is that any drive can break, at any time, old or new.

Always have backups.

For what it’s worth, I’m with you.

I also work from home, and while I generally cook all my own meals and do meal prep at werkends, sometimes I have a bad/stressful week where I cave and get fast food like three lunches in a row.

I keep a grocery bag in the car and put the fast food in there to hide my shame.

Turned out that scratches can easily be avoided if you are careful, and - more importantly - a few scratches won’t prevent the disc being read, thanks to the error correction.

Back in the day I remember using one of those AOL internet sign-up junk discs as a drinks coaster, for several years. As you’d expect from grinding around on my desk it was filthy and scratched to total hell, never mind the thermal stress of hundreds of hot tea mugs being sat on it. I’d never seen a CD looking so bad.

One day out of curiosity I decided to wipe it off and put it in the PC to see what would happen. I was genuinely surprised when the AOL splash popped up (and also a little disgusted because I had no love for AOL and was hoping I’d killed it)

Fair, some good points there :)

I’d argue that tiered licensing wasn’t really enshittified as it was still just a one time thing where you bought a license and got a product. Not enshittified but simply unnecessarily confusing. And they somehow made that even worse with Vista.

In a similar manner I’d suggest online activation isn’t enshittified either, as that’s a pretty reasonable behaviour even for an ethical product as it helps prevent piracy. And a key again is that it’s a one-time thing, not something constantly bothering you or interrupting your experience over and over.

But the rest of your examples definitely count!