Might be that they ordered online and the food is done before they get there?

I was a fan of Miranda IM because that’s what I used for everything else (ICQ, MSN, XMPP, AIM, occasionally Skype though that plugin didn’t work that well). If I remember correctly, joining multiple servers was a bit more cumbersome than with other clients but having everything in one application was amazing.

Bah, the young ones joining IRC through a web interface. Back in my day, we used telnet, typed the IRC commands by hand and hoped we were quick enough to reply to PING to not get kicked from the server.

Well, not really but I did it occasionally to better understand how the protocol works.

The best chat platform is the one where the people you want to chat with are.

If you don’t have anyone specific you want to talk to and just want to join a community that shares your interests, maybe look into Matrix, which is an open and distributed protocol with many servers.

Well, not necessarily. I’ve had my phone for almost five years now. The battery is at 78% of it’s original capacity and still gets me through the day without problems, even on heavy use. The only times I need to charge during the day is when I’m on a long distance train and listen to podcasts or audio books for hours.

Chances are that something else will fail long before the battery. And even if not, the local phone repair shop offers a battery replacement for about 50€ which is more than reasonable for something that will get me another couple of years.

Then you don’t need to worry. Battery degradation isn’t much of a problem for those.

That’s why modern phone operating systems will charge your battery to 80-90% at the beginning of the night and then charge the last bit just in time to be done when you wake up, based either on when your alarm is set or on past usage statistics.

I’m German. Back in my day, we had 9 years of English classes in school and from what I’ve heard it’s even more now. I was lucky to have a teacher who had spent a couple of years in the UK so he had much less of a German accent than most other teachers at our school and was also able to give us a lot of insight into how people actually speak, compared to the rather formal and stilted examples in our textbooks.

Between social media, movies, shows and a job in software engineering, I would say that on most days I read and listen to more English than German.

It may still be missing stuff from before the first person from your home instance joined the community which can make younger communities feel empty.

DB: “At least we’re not National Rail.”

National Rail: “At least we’re not Amtrak.”

Do NOT, I repeat NOT do this. Someone very close to me did something similar and got irreversible brain damage that still shows itself years later in the form of epilepsy. Our brains are not made for that little sleep over long periods of time.

Absolutely and it has done so for over a decade. Not LLMs of course, those are not suitable for the job but there are lots of specialized AI models for medical applications.

My day job is software development for ophthalmology (eye medicine) and people are developing models that can, for example, detect cataracts in an OCT scan long before they become a problem. Grading those by hand is usually pretty hard.

I only found out about E.V.O. way later, probably around 2005 when a friend made a web game that combined its evolution theme with gameplay similar to Legend of the Green Dragon. I still wonder why E.V.O. wasn’t more popular. It’s an amazing game, I still occasionally play it on my Analogue Pocket.

I would say Age of Empires 2 which was where I first used the name that I still have on here, over 25 years later. Its amazing editor also resonated with my urge to create my own games without requiring programming knowledge that I just didn’t have at 11 years old. I went on to create custom content for Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, eventually studied computer science and joined some indie gamedev communities where I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still meet in person once or twice a year. I never became a full time game developer but I worked on some stuff part time in the mid 2000s and still do it as a hobby.

And I think letting everyone decide for themselves how they run their instances and who they federate with is an important cornerstone of the fediverse. I’m more than fine with people not wanting to interact with threads. But what happens on my tiny instance with me as the only active user shouldn’t be cause for outrage.

I’ve once been downvoted to oblivion for not defederating threads.com before it even went online. Fediverse people are weird.

Just a regular Mastodon server with federation disabled might be a good start.

I don’t think so. French “tiens” is a form of the verb “tenir” (“hold”). German “tja” is pronounced almost exactly the same and is only used as an interjection with a similar meaning but doesn’t have any related forms that I could think of.

Especially the southern German dialects have quite a few words that originated as loan words from French so it’s at least plausible. Could of course just be a coincidence as well. Languages are full of those.

And this is the moment I realized that German “tja” (“well”) probably comes from French “tiens” even though I’ve had five years of French in school.

Interesting take and totally understandable though that’s not quite what happens in the plot:

• The battle for the Citadel at the end of ME1 wasn’t the entire known universe banding together by far. What we see is a couple of ships that happened to be nearby because at that point, most of the universe still doesn’t believe the reapers even exist.
• After the battle, the reapers don’t show up at the Citadel but at the edge of the galaxy. They are still months to years away from eradicating the Alliance. Yes, they have a whole lot of firepower but taking down thousands of planets full of enemies who now know what’s coming takes a lot longer than an attack on a single space station where nobody was prepared for an attack.
• At the beginning of ME2, Shepard doesn’t just wake up at the hospital after the battle you saw in ME1. During a later battle/patrol (?), the Normandy gets ambushed and completely destroyed. Shepard dies and their corpse drifts through space. Cerberus (who were only briefly mentioned in a side quest in ME1) manage to retieve the body and use an experimental technology to bring them back to life (it’s implied that they basically built a Shepard-shaped cyborg who has access to at least some of ME1 Shepard’s memories). The goal is to have a well-respected figurehead who can assemble a squad to take down some critical Reaper infrastructure.