moopet

I'm shocked to my core.

This is not a particularly relevant comment, but you reminded me of when I was a kid and a friend had a TV on a stand opposite her bunk-bed. She didn't have a remote control, but she did have a long stick, and she was amazing at pressing the buttons from like 2m away. Proper life skill.

Which is incidentally the opposite of proprietary products, where if you give it another go in a few years it either doesn't exist or is enshittified.

1. The same is true for Bsky but people don't complain about it there. It asks you what server you want when you sign up, etc., which is what people complain about in the Mastodon journey.

2. Most people aren't on locked servers. By which, I mean the majority of mastodon users are on the .social instance which is the default when you sign up on the official app/site and is open to anyone.

3. Not an accessibility issue.

I'd be amazed if this works, since these sorts of tricks have been around since dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and most bots will use pretty modern zip libraries which will just return "nope" or throw an exception, which will be treated exactly the same way any corrupt file is - for example a site saying it's serving a zip file but the contents are a generic 404 html file, which is not uncommon.

Also, be careful because you could destroy your own device? What the hell? No. Unless you're using dd backwards and as root, you can't do anything bad, and even then it's the drive contents you overwrite, not the device you "destroy".

There's one generation between boomers and zoomers? I'm pretty confident I know who it is you're forgetting.

They should have made it a bunk bed

Around here there are a variety of supermarket solutions. Morrisson's for example near me has about a dozen cashier lines, usually 3 or so open unless there's a rush. They have a self-checkout section like people are describing, with the small bagging area (about big enough to cage a toddler), maybe 10 of these. They also have a trolley self-checkout area, which is the same but has a bagging area big enough to cage a lioness.

M&S have cashiers, basket self-checkout, and a third scan-as-you-shop section, where you put things in your basket and scan them, and on your way out you put the scanner back and tap your phone and bag stuff, or if you're using a trolley, just push it out to your car, whatever.

If I worked for a self-checkout manufacturing company I'd record myself saying "beep" as the beep. And "Ruh-roh" if it didn't scan.

That's not where it goes!

Just read some of his other posts. Every one is the same, what a horrible person.

To be fair, this is how most things work. It's amazing how many science stories get published in popular titles like "New Scientist" and sound believable, yet every time one's appeared that's on a subject I know well, it's been terribly misrepresentative...