Yeah, I’ve thought the same. It’s like with ads on websites - ads are served from different domains and as blockers work by denying requests to those domains. If they really wanted they could serve the ads from the same domain as the rest of the website. I guess one day they might but so far it must not be worth it.

Yeah you can have a PIN with Island.

Assuming you’re asking about the password manager?

Most important for me is that with Bitwarden I can share passwords with someone else.

They’re such a good idea we’ve even kept them after Brexit.

Interesting, I’ve always had the opposite problem - whatever I say they cut way too much off the top. Perhaps we should go together and order each other’s cuts?

I’m not sure I have anything helpful to say other than to suggest keep trying different places until you find one that listens?

This. Especially driving out of carparks.

The survey is of academics across all disciplines so there is no particularly good reason to treat their views on the topic with particular importance.

There’s also this:

58 per cent of respondents think sex is binary, except in rare cases such as intersex individuals

So they’re only saying it’s mostly binary.

(Censuswide, who ran the survey, as are members of the British Polling Council so we can at least expect them to have run the survey reasonably.)

There’s a small number of surprisingly aggressive and unhelpful responses here. People are different and the world, especially the workplace, is made by extroverts and that can be difficult for those of us that are more introverted.

In an ideal world your colleagues would be mindful of that but unfortunately that’s often not the case (and of course extroverts often don’t engage in a whole lot of self reflection).

You’re going to have to put up with a bit of annoying small talk. Try to find something that’s a compromise you can live with. After that I’d say being polite but direct is best… nice chatting but I need to get back to work. No further elaboration is required.

You can also try telling some people that you’re not a big chatter or something and that you like to just get on with work. See how that goes, people are often more understanding than you would expect.

(I should say I live in the UK and work in a technical industry so YMMV).

You probably don’t even need to remember much. Just asking how the kids are is enough, anything more specific than that is just a bonus.

This is good advice. Headphones can also work on another level as a signal that you’re getting stuff done and don’t want to be disturbed. Not all my colleagues get that but perhaps 9/10 do.

What are you using instead of Google Photos?

I’m the other way round, email was the first thing I degoogled. It’s Photos I don’t know how to replace.

I’ll give you a short answer as you’ve got a lot of detailed ones already: to a native British English speaker “six oh five a m” sounds completely normal. There are other ways to say it that sound equally normal.

+1 for Morrisons. They don’t often sub and when they do it’s usually not completely mad. We found it was significantly better than the others. I think it’s because they use Ocado’s tech rather than whatever bodge the other supermarkets have come up with.

Ocado was also good when we tried it ages ago but of course quite pricey (and the last thing I need is easier access to Percy Pigs).

Not a direct answer to the question but one thing not noted in other answers is in computing you often work at a higher precision than you need for your final answer as the errors tend to increase each time you do a mathematical operation.

In the world of reasonably powerful hardware (laptops, desktops, servers, smart phones etc.) we’d typically work with 64 bit floating point numbers which gives pi to 15 digits (I think, not at a real computer now so can’t check). because it’s simple to do so even though we don’t need the full precision.

Please report back

I envy you. My microwave, oven, car and others all apparently have to have a clock but aren’t capable of switching automatically.

I’m not sure why, in the 21st century, we have clocks that can tell the wrong time.

I’ve heard it suggested that they didn’t expect to get as far as they did into Israel and they barely expected to get past the border wall. If that’s the case they may not have planned what to do when they did and so there may be no grand strategy behind some or all of it.

I guess we’ll never know.

I’m not a big important decision maker but if I always came across your website when searching for answers about software X and your GitHub when looking for code for software X I would go to my manager and say “why don’t we just pay this person to sort it out, they seem to know their stuff” and there’s a fair chance we’d do it.

But also you can’t ask him about his flying all over the world or he’ll ban you from press conferences!

I’m always tempted to get one but can’t quite justify the purchase. What difference does it make to your quality of life?