Touché.

Not a problem for the FRC, and 2023-W20 compares just fine with 2024-W20. Same part of the year, and the weekend is in the same spot.

If that were true, intercalary months shouldn’t have been necessary.

Months are the craziest, weirdest, stupidest measure humanity has used for this long. ISO8601 week dates make more sense, or even the French Revolutionary Calendar. Humans organize all of society by weeks, not by months. Compare last January to next January, or last February to next February for metrics. Do they have the same number of weekdays vs weekend days? Even if they do, do they happen at the same point in the month so you can compare the flow of the month? Now compare two weeks, and that’s apples to apples. Group by weeks instead of months and your irregular, bumpy graph smooths right out. We only hang on to Gregorian months out of inertia.

I wouldn’t even notice it as unusual, even though it isn’t my usual order. It could vary by region or profession, or maybe it’s just you that notices it this acutely. In plain English emails and other narrative text, I always use “Sat Aug 31” (adding the year only when ambiguous), which is short but complete, and includes the day of the week, which is much more important to humans than the month anyway.

Gross. I haven’t run into that.

USB-A requires three attempts to connect, C only one.

SNW is so good I’d sooner toss TOS if forced to choose (which I’m not). The musical episode is vastly better than Turnabout: Intruder.

Windows 10 keeps turning that stupid news feed back on on my taskbar, too.

I work in finance, and the only time I use office is when my coworkers infrequently send me something locked in an Office document. Plenty of non-technical coworkers are addicted to it, but there’s no need, because it’s awful.

The Office programs are an ancient, bloated mess with an impossibly convoluted UI that to one uses more than a small share of.

The styles in Word and PowerPoint are never consistent: the bullets in lists never really match, fonts change randomly without reason, &c. These are intelligent people who have used this garbage for actual decades, and the WYSIWYG lie just results in a sloppy mess.

Even Microsoft wants everyone to stop using the desktop versions, and rent it from the cloud, which can be done from any OS.

For years, there was progress in moving governments away from implicitly endorsing Microsoft, and toward the simpler (but often still overcomplicated) OpenOffice/LibreOffice formats, and Microsoft engaged in some pretty shady behavior to stop it.

Markdown is better for documents, or maybe HTML, or LaTeX via LyX or something. Databases and legitimate file formats are better for data, with scripts for formulas. There are many simple alternatives around, but the addiction is so automatic and insidious, I can’t tell you how often over twenty years I’ve gotten screenshots pasted into an empty Word document rather than just sending the image.

Adtech has been controlling the Overton Window too long. That’s what fueled the rise of (actual) fake news, as originally observed coming from Estonia, radicalizing dumb Americans.

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/774-the-ad-money-fuelling-fake-news/

…unless you’re a horta.

“I came here the easy way: down the stairs.”

“Down the stairs? To Ursa Minor‽ Wow, you must be unbelievably fit.”