It accuses the EU of going after successful U.S. space companies via the legislation, saying its rules “appear targeted specifically against U.S. companies due solely to their size, prominence, and successful track record of innovation …. such unfair and unwarranted regulations are unacceptable to the United States and must be removed.”

Hmm, I wonder what draconian legislation this must be

The EU proposed the law in June in an attempt to dial up regulatory oversight of satellite operators — including requiring them to tackle their impact on space debris and pollution, or face significant fines.

Oh… “Don’t litter”

Yeah I’ve personally never got the appeal

I think it’s that it basically has a grip on small economy

It’s a chat app yes, but it’s also Amazon, it’s also a payment provider, not just online either, you pay in shops with a WeChat QR code, I think if you’re going to a gig, your tickets are on WeChat

It’s basically all encompassing.

WeChat I guess

Oh that’s interesting, you’ve got me curious. I looked into it and some other company has already established a similar system involving “chef hat” ratings apparently. I guess maybe they didn’t want to bother competing with it.

Apparently Michelin seems to focus on Europe, the Americas and South East Asia. Africa and the rest of Asia seem to be left out, though they seem to be expanding every year (the Philippines got their own guide this year for the first time apparently), so I guess it’s probably just a matter of time before other places are covered.

A fiver says OOP has never left their suburb

The software isn’t really the hard thing about these companies, the customer and provider UIs are nothing special and they achieve their scale using fairly industry standard event driven tools and cloud compute. They all talk a lot at industry conferences, so it’s no secret really.

Ensuring a restaurant will make the food for an order, ensuring a delivery person shows up to collect it, ensuring that food makes it to its destination in the same condition it left the restaurant, ensuring everyone gets paid at the end.

Preventing any of that from going wrong and handling it when it does is where the value of these companies lies.

Who is going to step in if a restaurant starts ignoring orders, or a driver starts eating the food, or a customer does a fraudulent chargeback?

Then there’s the money issue: where does the money go when people pay? Who owns the merchant bank account? Does every driver need a merchant bank account? How is tax accounting handled?

You can’t use cash for this system as both the driver and restaurant need to be paid (and TBF, whoever is paying for hosting the back end servers), and the driver won’t necessarily go back to that restaurant

Having been to a few over the years in different places, the Germans just do it better. Any of the main cities will get you the experience

It’s pretty global, anywhere with a good restaurant culture will probably have at least one or two. I believe Tokyo is the city with the most stars for example, I would have assumed it was Paris or somewhere else french before I found that out

I do wonder how much goes into getting the AI to select some sources over others.

Given the car crash that MBFC has turned out to be, it’s not like there’s a good list of trustworthy sources, and even then there’s more nuance than good Vs bad. A good example is Al Jazeera which is generally a pretty good news source for the middle East except anything about Qatar, where it toes the government’s line.

I guess I was more wondering why do the name change at all

But I’ve gone and looked it up now and apparently Wally is a less common name over there, so they changed it up to something more familiar.

Which now begs the question: is Waldo a common name over there? I don’t think I’ve ever met or heard of anyone other than this character go by that name

Why do you guys call him Waldo?

Take another look, this is a good thing.

It’s not good that Wall St (and therefore typically American investors with American values) has such a huge amount of influence today. This is hopefully a correction for that.

My favourite is the difference between French french and Canadian French.

Many of the uniquely Canadian French swears are oddly religious compared to French french

FWIW I think it’s mostly gone the Aussie way in the UK over the past decade unless you’re taking to a pensioner.

Just the yanks now

This might be the most stereotypically American thing I’ve ever seen

Beautiful ❤️

Not necessary preppers as that is someone who’s motivation is to mitigate some hypothetical future bad thing happening

I think most self-hosters are doing it out of a combination of technical exploration and mitigating real issues that exist today, e.g. cloud service outages or market exits causing something previously bought to be useful to become a temporary brick or permanent e-waste. Well, and cost in some cases, no one particularly enjoys having an extra bill for hosting.

I miss the keyboard screen series of Logitech stuff, I held onto my G510 a lot longer than I probably should have and only really retired it for something much nicer to type on around 2020.

If Logitech had released something like their G915 but with the screen, I’d have got it in a heartbeat. Even though game support had long dwindled, it was still good for media player feedback, system stats and IIRC there was a third party way of getting notifications from some sites to show up.

I guess smartphones kinda do most of that better these days… Well excluding the system stats, but that was always the fallback if nothing else was worth showing

Lived in Liverpool and then Manchester from the age of 18, now nearly 2 decades of never needing to own a car.

The odd couple of times I’ve needed to move stuff around it’s either enlisting the help of a friend with a car or just renting a van. Other than that public transport and taxis cover 99% of any journey I’d need to make, and ultimately cheaper.

The only thing I’ll say is travelling across the country by train is forced into being something of a privilege at the prices of the tickets these days. The fact that if I decide to go to London for the weekend with my partner at short notice, that’s going to cost me about £200 discounted with a Railcard, is patently absurd when I could rent a car for the weekend and get a couple of tanks of petrol for less.

Still, travelling by train for long journeys beats having to concentrate on driving anyway IMO, so I’ll still pick the train.

I reckon we’d see a lot more people forgoing a car if more areas invested in their local public transport like the north west has, and if we can find a way to slash the prices of longer train journeys equivalent to equivalent prices in Europe.