There’s nothing truly like a Framework, because they’re a whole unique category of one. But if you just want something that is user serviceable there are other options.

I’m a big fan of my Star Labs laptop. It came with complete disassembly and reassembly instructions, and pretty much every part is available to buy individually as a replacement. It’s not magically “plug and go” like a Framework, but if you’re comfortable with a screwdriver you should have no trouble.

They’re a Linux specialist small independent producer, too. And being based in the UK, imports to Switzerland should be more straightforward than imports from the States.

The corollary of that line of thought though is that by preventing tech companies from dabbling in microprocessors you reduce competition in the microprocessor space- a sector which has proven very prone to the formation of monopolies/duopolies. If anything, we want to encourage more new competitors in that space, not fewer.

Also, it’d be essentially arbitrary. Is it OK for Apple to design its own microprocessors, but not Amazon- and if so, why? Is Google allowed if it uses them in phones like Apple, but not if it uses them in data centres like Amazon?

What with Trump recently declaring (in his usual completely coherent and not at all deranged manner) that Google Are Bad, the Supreme Court might not necessarily be feeling so keen to help out on this one.

The UK isn’t quite that far, but it’s absolutely the dominant text messaging and calling app in the UK. Nobody uses the built in Android or Apple tools anymore, and I’m as likely to receive a WhatsApp voice call as an actual phone call these days.

I have Signal on my phone, but I’ve literally never had a cause to use it; I’ve simply got no contacts on there.

See, now I’m fine with that. I pay for Netflix and I want what I pay for to stay ad-free. Having an ad-supported tier with no fee in addition to that means that there are options for other people without enshittifying my experience.

That’s a world of difference to what Amazon have done where they’ve shoved ads into the service that I thought I was paying for, and then offered to charge me even more to get my original ad-free service back.

They said wrong answers only, wtf.

When ordering meat or fish; you should be aware that, while much effort has been taken to remove any bone, meat and fish products are nonetheless served alive. You will need to slaughter them yourself. They have been pasteurised at birth, so cooking them first is not recommended, but advised.

This is high art. Kudos on all the talent.

Something between trolling and a wish fulfillment fantasy from Farage here, but the fact that this sort of story isn’t even absurd is a prety damning situation for the old Tories.

Most local parties have something in the region of 500 members, the vast majority of whom aren’t active canvassers. Losing 48 door knockers would suck, but I’d bet good money that all 48 weren’t door knockers.

Losing 48 passive members would be nothing; membership fluctuates by almost that margin for mundane reasons over the course of a few months anyway.

It always seemed weird to me that most companies just discontinued their traditional sugary variety and went diet only, instead of having a diet version and the sugary version just at a higher price.

The death of original Irn Bru is a bit of a tragedy, and I’m not even sure what the point of low sugar Lucozade is supposed to be.

This feels like something you should go tell Google about rather than the rest of us. They’re the ones who have embedded LLM-generated answers to random search queries.

I am completely satisfied with the idea that all doctors should be career doctors who have dedicated a large part of their life to the study and practice of medicine.

I am not entirely as satisfied with the idea that all politicians should be career politicians who have dedicated a large part of their life to the study and practice of politics.

Parliament would be a much richer and more effective place if it were populated by people from a range of backgrounds and specialisms. I don’t think it’s a good thing that a sizeable fraction of them all studied the same politics degree at the same two universities.

I’m no fan of Wes Streeting, but the Canary is trash and is doing its usual of selectively quoting.

We will go further than New Labour ever did. I want the NHS to form partnerships with the private sector that goes beyond just hospitals. Here’s one example. High street opticians have the staff and equipment to provide basic tests. Meanwhile 220,000 patients have been waiting more than 18 weeks for eye care. Specsavers have welcomed Labour’s plan to use high street opticians to cut waiting lists, saying they stand ready to help.

Personally I’m not enormously bothered about high street opticians taking NHS appointments (within their competency). This is essentially the same model that GPs and dentists already follow (and always have done).

There’s plenty to be guarded about, but let’s not catastrophise based on half-quoted electioneering material.

Realistically, they could just move their servers abroad to a country with less problematic copyright rules and wind up their US operations. It would make no difference to the end user, unless ISPs are also ordered to block access. And even then it’d only be a VPN away.

The risk of total data loss is not zero, but it’s also not the likely outcome.

Oh yeah, I’ll just tell my wife that we’re never having sex again because we’ve now got enough kids. I’m sure this will be a healthy and emotionally viable way of strengthening our relationship over the next 30 years or so until the menopause.

A “rival operator” in the sense of route duplication seems utterly pointless. Assuming finite capacity and demand for tunnel crossings, that’ll mean halving the customers for each operator carries, reducing opportunity for economies of scale, increasing complexity for ticketing etc. Unless there’s some suggestion that Eurostar is price gouging (and they’re hardly wildly profitable compared to other operators) it won’t do much.

What we do need is more diverse routes with different destinations (so that not everything is a transfer at Paris or Brussels). There probably is capacity for that, but Eurostar (and other operators who have dipped their toes in) have generally concluded that the demand isn’t there to make the routes sustainable (at any price).

It’s a command that pulls a whole bunch of useful system information and sticks it on one page.

Really, the biggest use of it is for showing other people your system- especially showing off. It’s a staple of “look at my system” brag posts.

But to be generous, there are (small) legit use cases for it. If you manage a lot of machines, and you plausibly don’t know the basic system information for whatever you happen to be working on in this instant, it’s a program that will give you most of what you could want to know in a single command. Yes, 100% of the information could be retrieved just as easily using other standard commands, but having it in a single short command, outputting to a single overview page, formatted to be easily readable at a glance, is no bad thing.

I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?

Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone’s tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.

GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).

Yes, it’s always going to be unfeasible to cross the Atlantic or Pacific by train.

But the vast, vast majority of air journeys taken every day aren’t trans-oceanic ones. Most journeys are between destinations within the Americas or within Eurasia and Africa. There are an awful lot of journeys by plane that could be moved to trains if the infrastructure was right.

That seems to be a rather unfair assertion to make. Boeing seems to be unique amongst the big airlines in having these problems; and they’re relatively new problems for them too, in the grand scheme of things.

I’ve never once heard of systemic issues of this sort at Airbus, and it seems lazy to do a “they’re all the same!” when this really does seem to be a Boeing problem first and foremost.