canonical is (or at least I think it is) South African

Canonical is British. Headquarters are in London.

The founder, Mark Shuttleworth, is a South African born British citizen, hence the African name for the distro. But it is and always has been British.

I’ve just discovered that the vets in my town are owned by Mars Inc.

You know, of “Mars Bars” fame.

Who knew?

I’d be inclined to see them as a European company which trades in America, rather than a company with American ownership. The reality is that if you buy a Stellantis European marque in Europe, it’s almost certainly made in European factories, designed by European engineers, and the company’s corporate HQ functions are also in Europe. If you buy a Ram truck from them, though, it’s probably originated from their US operations.

This list is similar but specifically for UK brands, and is more up to date: https://moralfibres.co.uk/the-teabags-without-plastic/

Basically all UK brands are now plastic free. Only Taylors of Harrogate and Waitrose are still holdouts.

No, Chrysler and Dodge are Stellantis. Which is Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, Opel and others.

Pretty much. Anyone who is 50 years old today would have been 8 years old when the NES launched. Lots of dads and mums in their 30s will have been hitting their teenage years well into the PSX era.

Not everyone is or was a gamer, but very few parents with young families today will be old enough to predate gaming being widespread and mainstream.

Long long ago, pubs didn’t have names but they just had signs. People would call the pub whatever was on the sign. “The King’s Head” for pubs with a portrait of a king, “The Wheat Sheaf” for ones with a picture of some wheat or barley, etc.

Lots of old pubs displayed the Stuart coat of arms as a show of loyalty to King James I/VI and his heirs, which is a heraldic red lion. Hence why so many pubs have the same name even though they’re all ancient and unrelated.

You can’t spell “public transport” without “trans”!

He’s a man with a dream: a dream of building a big windmill.

Unfortunately he doesn’t appear to have any land, money, or expertise in building big windmills. But it’s quite the vision.

Hey, don’t you cast shade on the Magic Roundabout. That is peak traffic engineering.

Maybe I’m just tired at the end of a long day, but I’m also completely unable to parse that headline. Somebody’s mum is fingering what now?

maybe turn the three sisters

Two of the three precogs were boys, by the way.

Even the US he ce why Vauxhall exists.

Not to detract from your point (because you’re completely correct), but just an FYI that Vauxhall/Opel has been European owned for some time now. General Motors sold it to Peugeot back in 2017, and it’s now part of Stellantis.

Ford had (and still has) essentially the same arrangement, only in their case they use the same brand. Ford Europe and Ford USA are pretty much entirely separate companies, owned by the same parent; hence why their European car lineup looks mostly nothing like their US lineup.

That’s encryption in a nutshell. A message is encrypted until it reaches its destination, and then by necessity is unencrypted in order to read it. Once your recipient has the unencrypted message, you don’t have any control over what happens to it.

Fundamentally, if you don’t trust the recipient (or their system provider), no amount of encryption will protect your message.

“Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”

“If they look like this animal then they are the animal” really doesn’t sound like a particularly useful (or scientifically rigorous) position.

Not least because there are lots of animals that look alike but aren’t the same species.

In the spirit of Britishness, there’s also: https://sheffieldknives.co.uk/

I’m not an “outdoor knives” sort of guy, but I have and greatly enjoy a couple of kitchen knives from them, and they have a full range of outdoor knives that…er…look like knives to me.

In my limited experience experience, Gemini responds better with flat, emotionless prompts without any courteous language. Using polite phrasing seems more likely to prompt “I can’t answer that sorry” responses, even to questions that it absolutely can answer (and will to a more terse prompt).

So I think my point is “it depends”. LLMs aren’t intelligent, they just produce strings based on their training data. What works better and what doesn’t will be entirely dependent on the specific model.

Irish and scotch whiskey are both perfectly good substitutes for bourbon. France has a surprisingly growing whiskey industry too.

apart from Safeway but I haven’t seen one of those in a long time

I hate to break this to you in a “you’re getting old” way, but Safeways disappeared literally 20 years ago. They were bought out by Morrisons.

Morrisons, while we’re on the subject, is owned by an American private equity group.

trying to tell us that in a couple years we’ll have a full-on AI film

To be fair, he never said it would be any good.