AFAICT Sam is in the UK, and that is most British people's lived experience of Brutalist architecture in the UK.

Outside of a few notable examples like the Barbican, many towns and cities in the UK were saddled with ugly concrete behemoths that were poorly designed and poorly maintained.

Many of us actually find it very frustrating when people lionize brutalist principles and talk about 'real' brutalism. If a movement is what it does, rather than what it says it aims to do, then brutalism is a movement that left Britain looking dull(er), grey(er), water-stained and with plenty of dark corners and weird spaces that smelled of piss and were havens for petty crime.

Sam's brutalist laptop stand is entirely representative of brutalism as it really played out in many places across the country.

Failure all around.

But no doubt Trump and his people will tell the world what an amazing success the whole thing was, and how they exceeded all their goals, whatever those goals might have been.

From all reports the regime has not lost control domestically, and internationally it is now emboldened - the US tried to get rid of them and has failed, and they have demonstrated their power to disrupt the region and much of the world's economy.

They come out of this looking stronger.

I have an actual shed that I spend time in, doing maintenance work, building physical items (latest one is an auto-refilling bird watering station), and making beer. Given my day job is so desk-bound, and so tech oriented, I find using my hands in my off-time to be very fulfilling and what keeps me sane.

Different strokes, as they say.

At worst you inject unknown substances into your bloodstream that could do more or less anything.

One party or other mismanaging San Francisco or Seattle has zero effect on me here in Australia. A madman waving his dick around overseas and insulting everyone does though, and is costing me hundreds of dollars a month.

And you voted for it. Thanks.

I don’t really give a rats ass who runs the internals of your country, and what goes on in San Francisco seems like a you problem. Due to voters like this, Trump is now my problem many thousands of miles away.

Don’t underestimate just how much ill will he is generating around the world, especially in allied nations, by insulting leaders and pushing up all of our energy prices.

Thanks so much for voting in Trump and his enablers.

They still list old product sheets here, the oldest being the ftServer 5200 AFAICT - https://www.stratus.com/solutions/previous-generation-produc...

https://www.stratus.com/assets/5200hw.pdf

According to Wikipedia they launched in 2002, so I guess they were quite new when I saw them in 03.

But the x86 I was referring to in my comment above, Stratus, was (maybe still is?) an exotic attempt to enter the mainframe-reliability space with windows. IIRC it effectively ran two redundant x86 machines in lockstep, keeping them in sync somehow, so that if hardware on one died the other could continue. I have no idea how big their market was, but I know of at least one acquirer/issuer credit card system that ran on that hardware around 2002-3.

Eh, they can but even a couple of decades ago there was a shift to open platforms. 90s and early 00s, sure, it was mainframe and exotic x86 species like Stratus machines. But even then the power of “throw a ton of cheaper Unix at it” was winning.

Banks’ central systems maybe, I have less experience there. IBM did also try for a while to ride the Linux virtualisation wave as well, saying “hey, you can run thousands of Linux instances on a single mainframe”, and I did some work porting IBM software to s390 Linux around 2007.

Current gripe is that every so often, usually when my hands are busy, Siri interprets my "Hey Siri fast forward" to skip an ad on the podcast I'm listening to as an instruction to call Troy. Troy is a roofer I got to quote some work last year! He has picked up twice to me going "Sorry, really sorry, my robot called you ..."

I've had to turn off a lot of features. All of the "raise to wake", always-on screens, gesture controls, movement controls on the watch, live activities on the watch, all sorts of stuff, anything related to movement or waking up the phone other than by a button press. Also had to turn the watch so the buttons are on the left to stop my gloves pressing them constantly.

It's a bit sad really, I think I've missed out on some decent features there. But compared to being locked out and/or having random actions trigger, it's an improvement.

He may not have been that successful as a businessman, but his whole clan are monetising the Whitehouse.

I love a good analogy, especially one that takes a complex situation in which esoteric, unusual conditions are distilled and related back to common experiences held by the reader, such that all can understand.

Next time I'm a small part of a soup I'll think of this.

But only one of those involves overcoming anything.

And unless you have information on the relative sizes of those quadrants, it’s meaningless in terms of the overall picture and being able to confidently assert that access to such contraband allows you to draw any inferences about intelligence whatsoever.

And the rest appears to be some serious mental gymnastics to avoid the point, which I don’t believe for a second was meant to encompass “children who are smart enough to get access to do a thing but don’t actually do the thing because they’re so damn smart”. Nor do I believe that 14 year olds who find a willing drug dealer are more likely to take sensible precautions than their peers, having proven their smarts by finding one!

The whole premise is laughable.