Aside from it being a decent icon, the original 3.5 inch floppy actually had amazing ergonomics.

Compare it to the things that came before and after:

• Punch Cards
• Magnetic tapes
• 8 and 5.25 inch floppies in flexible sleeves
• 3.5 inch diskettes
• CDs
• USB drives
• Memory Cards

Punch cards are fragile, even if you could somehow change them so they could hold gigabytes of data, cardstock is inherently not ideal. Magnetic tape can get dirty, it can stretch, etc. Flexible floppies have an open window so they can get scratched, get dust in them, etc.

Skip forward to CDs and you have something much more fragile that can easily get scratched. Then after that there are USB sticks that are pretty good, but because the part you plug in has to be able to make electrical contact with the USB port it can get dirty or bent or something. Often there’s a cap you have to take off then have to avoid losing. Or the plug part can be retracted, but that has to be done manually. They’re also all different sizes and shapes, so you can’t have a standard sized box to store them neatly. Plus there’s the notorious issue of trying to plug it in upside down. Finally memory cards. They’re small and easy to lose, they’re fairly fragile, and they also can be plugged in upside down.

3.5 inch floppies were a good size. They were big enough to be hard to lose, but small enough to be easily carried. They were nice and thin so you could have a stack of them. Because they were a standard size and shape you could have a storage box to contain a lot of them. They had a dust cover to protect the sensitive bits, and it moved aside automatically when you put the disk into the drive. They had a very obvious top side, so it was hard to put them in the wrong way, unless you had the drive mounted vertically which wasn’t that common.

I would hope that eventually if there’s another removable medium for storage, that it has a lot in common with those 3.5 inch diskettes.

I grew up calling those (save icon ones) hard disks to distinguish them from the floppy ones

This was just you. I’m also from the before-times, and was using cassettes as a storage medium before even seeing my first floppy drive. But, nobody called the ones with a sliding window “hard drives”. Diskettes, maybe, but more frequently just floppies, or 3.5 inch floppies to distinguish them from the bigger ones.

IBM PCs introduced computers with hard drives before they even switched to the 3.5 inch format. The earliest IBM PCs only had 5.25 inch floppies, often 2 drives. But the XT from 1983 came with a 10 MB drive by default, but still used 5.25 inch floppies. By the time IBM switched to 3.5 inch floppies, the hard drive was well established. That was in about 1987 with the PS/2 models.

The earliest Mac computers took a surprisingly long time to come with a hard drive. The earliest model Macs starting in 1984 came with 3.5 inch drives and no hard drive. It wasn’t until 1987 that Macs started coming with hard drives. So, I could maybe imagine someone who used macs not knowing what a hard drive was during that 3-year window. OTOH, someone who only used Macs wouldn’t have known about 5.25 inch drives because Macs never used those, so there wouldn’t have been a need to distinguish between 5.25 inch drives and 3.5 inch ones.

Did people care enough about the Best Buy commercial for this to be on Gamestop’s radar? Did she have a fan club or something? She’s fairly attractive, but not in a memorable way. It seems like good casting in the sense that she looks like she might be someone who works a retail job.

If this is what he has on his face, imagine the stretched horrors he must have elsewhere on his body.

Normal ones? But as infrequently as possible.

Part of the reason for the rise of AirBnB is that hotels suck too:

• “Your $225 per night hotel”, oh sorry, all those rooms are booked, we do still have these $250 per night rooms though…
• Oh, you didn’t want to be next to the ice machine and hear that crunch sound all night? There’s another room here but that will be $275…
• Not next to the elevators? Well, there’s this $300 room down the hall
• Yes, the room has a mini-fridge. Oh, we didn’t tell you but it’s 100% full of overpriced things, and if you touch one you bought it. No, there’s no way to put your own things in the fridge.
• Oh, you wanted to use the TV? Well, we have HotelTV and every time you turn it on it goes to the HotelTV channel, you can get all the local TV stations too. HDMI? No, sorry, we don’t have that feature.
• Of course we offer a free “continental breakfast”, it’s offered between 4:35 and 5:20 AM, and consists of reconstituted dehydrated eggs, malk, cereal, taste-free muffins, and pancakes. We’re out of pancakes.
• Internet? Of course we offer Internet. Just sign on to this captive portal and you can use Google. Send emails? You should be able to get to gmail… Play games? You mean like backgammon? I think we have a backgammon set in the back here. VPN? That sounds like hacking…

Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.

I just really hope that Amazon at least has it set up so that the really important stuff goes to actual, trained SREs. They could set it up so there are queues for things that aren’t business critical and have a very loose SLO that get assigned to the new grads. Or, the new grads get paged when the error rate for the service is 1% and if it gets above 3% someone who knows what they’re doing is woken up. If say all issues with Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service is shunted to new hires, AWS would be going down constantly.

Probably, it’s also why Google has 100 different chat clients.

Amazon puts all new hires on “on call” status for like a week every month

That’s insane. Where I worked you had to spend about 6 months learning enough that they trusted you to be on call. For months you’d just learn the systems. When you and your team agreed you were probably ready to be on-call, you’d be the “shadow” on call. The primary would get paged and you’d get paged too. You wouldn’t actually do anything, but you’d watch while the primary tried to solve the problem and take notes. If that went well it would switch to reverse-shadow. Then you were on call but there was an experienced person who was paged and ready to step in if you needed help. Only if that went well could you proceed to full solo on-call status.

being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you’re world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world

Where I worked there were 2 teams in 2 different time zones. But, you still were up late or early at times because there’s no perfectly-opposite time zone where team B is exactly 12 hours behind team A throughout the full year.

Also, if you recorded yourself doing on-call activities on YouTube or TikTok or something, you’d be fired. It would be the same thing as speaking to the press without authorization.

Why fluid, not liquid? Air is a fluid too. Is it in gaseous form?

Also, why “washing-up”? Was “washing” not enough? Was a direction strictly necessary?

But, together we’re 2 people. And we can recruit more to the army.

people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common

And we can work to stop it from becoming more common by nipping it in the bud.

then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically

At least you turned up to the fight.

But language is a shared medium

Which is why change should be gradual and limited, otherwise two people who use that language are unable to clearly communicate.

I don’t even see “nice” in “play nice” as an adverb. You could switch “play” for “be” – “be nice”, same with “be safe”.

But, how much less could you care? Alot less?

there is a very strong extent to which the notion of “nonsense lawsuits” being an epidemic in America is pro-corporate propaganda

Really, it’s not. Every other country looks at the absolute chaos of lawsuit nonsense in America and recoils in horror.

Take the infamous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit, for example. The woman in question received third-degree burns.

Sure, and in most countries that would be solved by good regulations not lawsuits. As you said, they’d received multiple reports of it being a problem, but the US laissez-faire system means that corporations are free to do whatever they want until someone gets severely injured. In a properly run country this woman would never have been injured, and if she was injured she wouldn’t have to rely on lawsuits to get her medical bills paid.

I’m still there. I’ve always wanted to be able to offer an email service to family or friends. But, even though I’ve been doing it for a couple of decades, it’s never been stable enough to offer to them. For part of that time it’s because I didn’t really know enough of what I was doing, but the more I learned and the better I got at it, the more I started to lose the war against both spammers and against the major service providers who kept making it harder and harder to prove you’re not a spammer.

The latest one was literally issue 3. My provider splits an IPV6 /64 among multiple VPSes, when most of the world, including blocklist publishers, think a /64 is for a single “entity”. The only way to resolve it was to not use IPV6.

Incidentally, I really hate that the UK expression for when someone is feeling sick is “poorly”.

It’s got the “ly” ending which is one of the clear signs of an adverb, and in other contexts it is used as an adverb. But, for some reason the British have turned it into an adjective meaning sick. Sometimes they use it in a way where it can be seen as an adverb: “He’s feeling poorly”, in which case it seems to be modifying “feeling”. In the North American dialect you could substitute the adjective “sick”: “He’s feeling sick”. But, other times they say “She won’t be coming in today, she’s poorly”. What is the adverb modifying there, “is”?

What if it isn’t everyone who uses a word “wrong”? What if it’s say 25% of people who use it incorrectly? Should you encourage them to use it correctly?

If there are two different ways of using the word and they could be mistaken for each-other that’s bad. Once the use of a word has flipped and means something very different from the original (idiot, gay, etc.) then there’s no reason to try to return to the original usage. If the usage is still in dispute and the majority of people use the word in the original meaning, I think it’s good to discourage people from using the word incorrectly so that people are still able to understand each-other.

Do you care a lot or only a little?