A variant of the Hering illusion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hering_illusion

Maybe I’m jaded but with the brand still being visible, I’m not sure this isn’t a marketing ploy.

My 80+ year old parents don’t care about ads or AI. They just want a working PC, and W11 won’t install on the cheap machine they got a few years ago. They’re not going to buy a new one because this works perfectly fine.

And yes they tried Linux for several years, but went back to Windows because it was just too much hassle and not compatible with too many things.

It absolutely is a hardware problem.

Gen X: don’t quote the ancient piracy to me, Millennial. I was there for BBS and Napster.

Press and hold the Windows key, then tap the R. Let go of the windows key. Type cmd enter. Type format C:\ enter.

Sadly they “fixed” this.

I wish they would ban me. I haven’t logged in in over 15 years and even block several of their servers, and yet I still get mails that someone in there commented on something.

I always go into stores to throw stuff from the racks onto the floor, to make sure the people whose job it is to clean that up stay employed.

I never buy anything of course, I don’t want stuff that’s been on the floor!

Horses are relentless.

But I would argue that the rest of the world also uses primarily English online. And just by virtue of being the rest of the world, outnumbers the Americans.

In other words, of all Internet users that use English, the vast majority is likely not American.

Of course I don’t have data to back this up, except anecdotally.

I’m sorry but this is nonsense. I’m in a lot of online communities where everyone uses English, despite it being nearly nobody’s first language. It just happens to be the only language that everyone there knows. Language is no indication of nationality, especially online.

And to be honest, in those places the assumption is usually that everyone is European, which I can imagine is just as annoying for the stray American.

People like your art director are the reason people like my product manager want us to write code to verify QR codes, so that our clients can tell their clients that they forgot the quiet zone and their client’s clients may have trouble reading the code.

Damn that’s a lot of levels of clients.

Most painful upvote of my life.

That’s because nobody helped when their hair was on fire, and now they’re dead.

I’m right there with you. Also, it’s “it’s” and not “its”.

It’s called Xitter now, pronounced shitter.

I refuse to think of 2000 as anything but the future where will all have flying cars.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve heard of it, but haven’t tried yet - but I will.

That comma in the title made me think they blame Iran for Trump.

I gave up on Google over a decade ago - maybe two decades by now. Way back when I was using Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Astalavista, and others. When Google came, it somehow beat them all at finding exactly what I was looking for.

Later they stopped searching for the exact words you typed, but it was okay because adding a plus in front of terms, or quotes around phrases, still let you search exact things. The combination of both systems was very powerful.

And then plus and quotes stopped working. Boolean operators stopped working. Their documentation still says they work, but they don’t.

Now, it seems like your input is used only as a general guideline to pick whatever popular search is closest to what it thinks you meant. Exact words you typed are often nowhere in the page, not even in the source.

I only search Google maps now, and occasionally Google translate.

(b) will just lead to fewer up and down votes, i.e. less engagement. That in turn could lead to slowly bleeding out.