Haha yeah. People are so accustomed to short TLDs that ‘smith.technology’ just intuitively feels kinda wrong, and it still feels that way to me, even as a tech person who knows it is perfectly valid.

You’re thinking like “smith dot technology dot what?”

Another reason is brand identity.

Using ‘.tech’ or ‘.flights’ or .sports’ for your site feels too “on the nose” and gives vibes of like browsing some directory where things are categorised and sorted. Even worse it implies there are other sites under the same category, and those other sites may be competitors, and this dilutes strength of brand.

lt also suggests strongly what the business does, and while that might seem desirable at first it actually isn’t from a corporate perspective because it means the company becomes tied to their business area and can’t expand and grow out of it into other things.

I think this is a major part of why descriptive TLDs continue to be less preferred over ‘meaningless’ two letter TLDs, because companies want the focus to be on the main part of the domain, not the TLD.

In English too, the colloquial name for tardigrades is “water bears” :D

L A M P

I appreciate your point, but I still believe spelled-out numbers work better.

In prose, especially fiction writing, the ideal case is that the words themselves slide neatly out of the way and become invisible, leaving only a picture in the reader’s mind. Generally speaking, anything distracting is therefore counter-productive for fiction. Strange fonts and strange typesetting, while interesting, take the reader out of the prose. There’s a reason almost every fiction book you pick up from the shelf uses Garamond.

In an engineering context, remembering exactly “12 eggs, 6 toast” is probably the most important thing, and numeric digits assist in that. In fiction however it doesn’t matter if, by the next page, the reader has forgotten exactly how many eggs there were; the important aspect is to convey the sense of a large and chaotic family, and the overall impression is more important than the detail.

Thats why although the numbers are important for setting the scene, we really don’t want them to jump out and steal attention. We don’t want anything at all to have undue prominence, because the reader needs to process the paragraph as a cohesive whole, and see the scene, not the specific numbers.

Cooking is just applied chemistry, after all.

Context is everything, IMO.

In engineering work, numbers should always be digits. In prose, numbers should be spelled out.

Breakfast at the Thompson’s was a busy affair; 12 eggs and 6 rounds of toast for their 3 sets of boistrous twins.

Compared to

Breakfast at the Thompson’s was a busy affair; twelve eggs and six rounds of toast for their three sets of boistrous twins.

To me it’s pretty clear which of those reads better and more naturally as prose; digits really ‘jump out’ on the page, and while that is great for engineering texts, it is incongruent and distracting for prose.

Proper massive innit

Doctor Evil didn’t go to Evil Medical School for six years to be put in the section with no training, thank you very much!

Does a male’s eye look substantially different?

That’s what you get for being indecisive!

Thanks. I’ve been keeping my eye on colour ereaders, and the tech has improved so rapidly in the last couple of years I do wonder if I just hang on for another year then the colour reproduction could be even better.

Can’t wait forever of course, that defeats the whole purpose, but it might pay to wait just a little.

I’ve had two kindles so far, but my next e-reader won’t be from Amazon.

I’m trying to move my tech life away from closed ecosystems as much as possible, So I’ll probably go for a kobo or boox.

For me the dream would be a really large colour ereader around 10 inches, where you can view even the densest manga or comics comfortably without zooming or scrolling. I think that’s what I’m holding out for.

UK here and they are turned on.

Thanks a lot, Brexit :(

I had so many good times on forums back in the day.

The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.

When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It’s like living in a small village versus living in a city.

The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn’t as VPNs were barely a thing) you’d lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.

The worrying truth is that we are all going to be subject to these sorts of false correlations and biases and there will be very little we can do about it.

You go to buy car insurance, and find that your premium has gone up 200% for no reason. Why? Because the AI said so. Maybe soneone with your name was in a crash. Maybe you parked overnight at the same GPS location where an accident happened. Who knows what data actually underlies that decision or how it was made, but it was. And even the insurance company themselves doesn’t know how it ended up that way.

I’m really not sure there is

Yeah I thought that was somehow supposed to be the punchline

If a tree falls in the woods…

Haha yep. Not the support process you want. Glad you managed to let them eat some humble pie at least.

The support process you want is this: “We’ll make you a channel on our Slack, if you’ve got any issues you can talk with our devs direct!” - yes please!