I wonder how much of this stuff may still be around on harddrives somewhere.

Probably quite a lot!

Just as an example, I'm a part of an art and writing focused community that's been around off-and-on since the late 90s. Typically each member has/had their own website. So a few years ago when we went from an "off" phase back to "on" again, a major project became reconstructing the stuff that used to be on Geocities, the various smaller platforms of the 90s and 00s, and ISP-provided webhosting. And obviuously it's hard to judge how much stuff we don't remember and therefore don't know we're missing, but well over half of what we have reconstructed has come from "I found my external hard drive from 2006 and it had X, Y and Z on it!" I personally had ~3000 files sitting on my NAS, which I had moved off my own hard drive at some point, but had been unwilling to delete, so I just dumped it into long-term storage. Four years into the reconstruction project, we still occasionally find files we thought were lost forever, usually when someone's found an old hard drive in a box in their attic/basement. The found content often was created by someone else, but downloaded and archived by the hard drive owner.

Although this is representative of just one community, given how apparently common it was for people to download offline copies of websites they liked, it could well be that large swathes of the old internet are sitting on people's hard drives, waiting to be rediscovered.

Yeah, I do feel this reality has been severely missold. There should be an inquiry.

Not too bad. How are you?

They're definitely trains. I live next to a similar one. It is physically a train, with exactly the same hardware as trains on busier lines (though typically only hauling 1-2 carriages instead of 4+). It's just more fuel-efficient for a train to keep going through a station if nobody is getting on or off, so when passenger numbers are low, the practice is to let the driver know if you need on or off.

I live next to a railway line in the south west that is similar. A single train runs up and down the line. If you're on one of the stations, you wave to the train so it'll stop for you. If you're on the train and want to get off, you ask the driver to stop.

Hello friend! It's lovely to meet you! :)

It seems to be a feature that many techbros and financebros share: they all have incredibly punchable faces.

I am definitely happy to be friends. :)

I've been a late adopter of every version of Windows I've ever used - and I skipped 8 too, switching to 10 around the same time you did because my software required it. It does seem the best way to avoid most of the problems: Microsoft has moved on to pulling its old tricks on the newest version, and there are more tools for modifying the old version. So I figure I'll switch to 11 or 12 when Microsoft is doing awful things with 13.

I'm very glad that my definitely-100%-legit copy of Windows 10 seems to have no idea how to upgrade to 11. It still gets other updates, my hardware is definitely compatible. The thought of upgrading to 11 just never seems to enter its mind. I suspect I'll be sticking with Windows 10 for a long, long time, until either Microsoft give up on this ridiculous idea in response to customer backlash, or Linux becomes a viable option for my usecase (Nvidia GPU, lots of proprietary software that I need to use for university and future career). It wouldn't be the first time I've held onto an older version of Windows for a protracted period of time, skipping a dreadful iteration or two, and then upgrading when Microsoft have learned their lesson.

Only freedom for other people. They love their own freedom.

Same here. Section 28 came into effect just before I started school, and wasn't repealed until after I had left, and I'm certain the lack of proper, unbiased sex education contributed to me not knowing I was trans until my mid 30s.

Further proof that all the Tories know how to do is re-enact the 1980s. Vote 'em out at the next election. StopTheTories.vote and BestForBritain.org will both be providing localised information on which candidate is best placed to evict your neighbourhood Tory MP, as it's not a given that Labour are the best choice in every constituency. And make sure you have some form of ID, as you need these to vote now.

Thank you. :)

We did, amazingly, get it done on time, and the end results were pretty amazing. For first year student work, anyway.

Group project is due tomorrow, including the presentation of the completed animation to the client. After one person on the team (who has been thoroughly documented in these threads over the last six months) got caught lying about how much of his sequence he had done, he was given an ultimatum: a hard deadline that passed fifteen minutes ago, and if he failed to meet it, someone else is doing his scene and his name is getting taken out of the credits. We could justify this as he hasn't contributed significantly to any other part of the project.

He failed to meet the deadline.

I would like to note at this point that his scene is two shots totalling about 15 seconds. My scene was eight shots totalling 45 seconds and I was done last Friday.

We have another assignment due at midnight tonight, which I sensibly/foolishly completed and handed in on Friday. Since everybody else is finishing that assignment this evening, I am the only one with any time available to animate and render this scene, I get to rig and animate the final scene of our animation. That's why we can't just cut the scene and work around it: the story would not have a conclusion without this scene. In retrospect we probably should never have trusted him with it, but it's not like there was anything else that was short and simple he could have done.

I am very angry with this guy, and I'm not convinced I'll be able to hold my tongue if he turns up for the presentation tomorrow.

My local museum takes this approach with some of its historical exhibits, which were, to put it bluntly, stuff British soldiers nicked while they were in Africa, which were then donated to the museum when they died. These are all low value personal items which would be impossible to trace descendants of their original owners (its not practical to find the descendants of the owner of a shirt, a toy, a musical instrument, etc from 200 years ago), so instead the museum displays them with signage that puts them in the appropriate context for the time in history when they were acquired. As a result, I now know that a lot of men from my local area served in south Africa in the 19th century, who stole everything that wasn't nailed down.

Yeah, I'm surprised as well. I assume it's a reflection of how weakened regulators have become that no one was able to say "no" to Musk.

I mean, I'd like to be surprised that a technology driven by a techbro with the "move fast and break things" mentality has broken because of moving too quickly into human trials, but....

I guess we should just count ourselves lucky that the poor human test subject patient wasn't permanently harmed by Musk's raging arrogance.

Final week on the final group project of the academic year. Deadline is Monday. And I am fucking pissed off.

• Team leader and sub-team leader for the production phase of the project are incapable of providing leadership, because the former is lovely but timid, and the other is just never fucking there. With just days to go and important decisions and instructions just not happening, I have simply taken over and started telling everyone what to do. But this now means that on top of my work, everyone is now coming to me with questions, including the team leader and sub-team leaders.

• The useless, obstructive, narcissistic, lazy, arrogant piece of utter shite who I had to work with on the last project. Well, it transpires he has basically done absolutely fucking nothing on this project since January, apart from 3D modelling half of a rock (someone else finished the rock) and modelling 80% of one character (it's shit and the texture job is half-arsed). But this week he actually had to do something, which was building one set and rigging one character. I got a phone call at 8:30am this morning from the person who had to animate that one scene, and... yeah, surprise surprise, it's only half done. Lighting, cameras, and rigging are not done. I hope the guy who has to clean up this mess calms down by Monday, otherwise there's going to be a murder.

• After spending all day rendering shots, after making a judgement call on the resolution because it wasn't included in the assignment brief (so I guessed based on the previous project) and we were unable to get a response from the teacher when we contacted to ask. Nope, that's the wrong resolution. So everything that was rendered yesterday needs to be rendered again in a different resolution and format. Which takes twice as long. Shots that took 2.5 years yesterday require 5.5 hours today. So while I set up the remaining shots today, I've got both my laptop and my spouse's laptop re-rendering all of yesterday's work. My desk is a chaotic collection of three computers, six screens, three keyboards, two mice, and a specialist 3D mouse.

Yeah, I am extremely fucking pissed off and if my teammate opts for murder I might just join him, because right now an awful lot of people are looking incredibly stabbable. I hate group projects.

For me the biggest problem with modern games is the obsession with high fidelity graphics. The dev teams that create games without a focus on photo-realism or jaw dropping visuals are often the teams creating the best games in my eyes.

I think this is very much down to personal taste. While I don't think a great game needs photo-realistic graphics, for me a game's graphics do factor into my enjoyment of it, so it should at least feel like the devs put some effort into making the game visually appealing. That could be focusing on making the graphics beautiful, or stylised and quirky, or just incredibly cute. But if I'm gonna spend hours looking at something, I want it to look nice.