Exactly. Even if a technology might have a shot at being desirable, I often see seller interests trample the value and then the seller surprised that the customers didn't go for it after they did absolutely nothing to cater to the user base.

One company I worked at had this persistent issue and a strong warning sign was that they just absolutely worshipped the fictional Henry Ford quote about customers just wanting faster horses and the inventor knowing better than the customer about what the customer should want.

It's almost like elections have consequences, and America has elected that it and its businesses are going to be treated like the plague. Well, even more than that, even visiting the US is dropping, and now with US Marines on city streets in a major US city, well, fuck that banana republic. I will never enter the US again.

I've had rendering nightmares in Word, including docx files. There are most certainly version and rendering issues in Word just like any other word processor. It gets really horrendous with tables and frames, particularly when they are used as some sort of typesetting system, at which point try to open up on a different version of Word than the documented was created on, and it can turn into a mess.

I can get native Zoom apps on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS and Linux. It isn't perfect, and they've added a lot of cruft, but all in all, I've had less problems than I've had with Teams.

It's not like the writing in the original Star Wars film was all that great. Guiness's dialogue was cheesy enough that he begged Lucas to kill his character off (and Lucas, to his credit, found a way to get Guiness into two more films).

But if I were making fun of the third trilogy at this point, it wouldn't be so much about the bad writing (though in general it's bloody awful), but the almost complete lack of any kind of plotting.

The Producers? Young Frankenstein? Blazing Saddles? High Anxiety?

I'm not sure there's a funnier scene in any movie ever made in history than Springtime For Hitler (the reaction shots in that scene are the best I've ever seen in a movie), with the possible exception of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster doing a song and dance number to Putting On The Ritz.

For me, at least, Mel Brooks is probably the pinnacle of comedy filmmaking.

The only one I can think of is John Candy (which is a big hole), but Rick Moranis has been retired for many years now, and he's rebuffed most attempts to get him in front of a camera again.

And that underlies the reality of WYSIWYG, that there are limits to what any word processor can actually do to guarantee formatting and fixed placement. It's why Tex/LaTeX and PDF were invented to begin with, and why there's really a point at which trying to force any WYSIWYG word processor to behave that way is going to lead to fragile misbehaving documents that fall apart. As a very good example, the use of tables and frames in documents (both docx and odt) to guarantee the positioning of various elements creates can quickly lead to documents so fragile that any attempt to update styles causes havoc.

I'm working my way through some biology and general science courses right now in my spare time, and I'm seriously looking at re-familiarizing myself with LaTeX to produce reports and papers, because the amount of work I've had to do to get diagrams and images to stay put, and to break my cardinal rule relying solely on styles for formatting makes me think the kind of work I'm doing is much more in typesetting than in word processing.

Selecting office software so that you aren't held digitally hostage to a government that is, say, threatening to annex a significant proportion of your territory, is both eminently defensible for operational, security AND political reasons.

Providing you have control of your DNS, it means using DKIM , SPF or similar measures. I've been self-hosting email for three decades, and it ain't complicated.

"Likes long romantic walks in the park, binging Buffy the Vampire, pasta, and overthrowing the US government by lynching the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House."

I've been using it pretty much full-time for the last couple of years, and while there's some compatibility oddities, all in all it works and works pretty well, to the point that I find manipulating styles far more coherent than in Word. It's actually opened some docx files that were just outright screwy when I opened them in Word, so I'm baffled at times how such documents get produced.

Even adjusting for "all movement is somewhat useful for the skill of driving", an AI model driving consumes training material way more than a human will ever see in their lifetime if they popped right out of a womb and drove for every waking and sleeping moment of their life, several times over. The amount of input and feedback about spacial navigation from just moving about is still a tiny amount by both amount of movement and hours of movement of the training data.

Same for text processing, not only does it consume more than a human will ever see, it will consume more text than a human will ever see, hear, conceptualize across many lifetimes.

Yes, the AI scenarios have a more narrow scope of material but the volume of it is still inordinately more than a human will consume no matter how much you credit somewhat different experiences as "equivalent".

Every few years, whoever is in government decides they like the idea of a national ID card. Whoever is in opposition states that this is a horrible idea.

Bear in mind that this will have absolutely no effect on the number of refugees. The conservatives would have forced them on people as they got out of their boats. The current lot will have to think of something else...

It's going into the oceans, just so the combination of pH fuckery and increased warming turns the world's oceans into an tepid acidic brine.