I like to compare the 1960's Plymouth Suburban to the current Chevy Suburban both because of the name coincidence and because they cover roughly the same market segment (family hauler).
The Plymouth suburban is 9 inches shorter in length and well over 1000lbs lighter. I couldn't find specifications on height for the Plymouth, but the Chevy is obviously much taller.
The "there is something wrong with you if you are at all off the beaten path" has cropped up a lot more for me recently; two examples both from 2026:
1. You can't use Firefox with our website (when I got this popup, I thought I had been transported back in time 20 years, but with Chrome substituted for IE).
2. You can't sign up for accounts with an e-mail from a "custom domain"
2a. I ran some tests; it's the domain itself, not the host, so e.g. foo@gmail.com is allowed but not a foo@somewhereelse.com, even if hosted by google).
2b. After a bit of back-and-forth with support: "No, we won't tell you the list of allowed domains, but gmail and hotmail both will work."
Vote with your wallet. I've only experienced two instances where systems wouldn't accept my custom email domain. One was a bank. I proceeded to close the account.
> 2. You can't sign up for accounts with an e-mail from a "custom domain"
I remember debugging apple account creation because of that for a few hours. It wouldn't even tell me that my email domain/host was the issue, simply fail at the last step.
The same thing exists for phone numbers. About 90% of my calls with US banks go like this:
"Ok, first, to verify you, what's your phone number?" (oh no, it's one of those, because why do they need to ask...) "" "Ok, you'll receive a te— oh. Oh no. This is not a real phone number. What's your REAL phone number?"
VoIP, in my case. Probably much more secure than the average big three carrier plan from a SIM swapping perspective, but try convincing banks or their “security” service providers.
They don't care about how much older, more secure, more trustworthy and so on your domain is. That's not the issue they're having. The issue is that you are 'abnormal', and it is in the common interest of tech companies to make any signs of abnormality (read: not-total compliance to their whims) to be inherently suspicious and nefarious behavior that needs to be curtailed.
I started a typical registration process: enter e-mail, click on confirmation link, but the confirmation link showed a generic error the first time and then a "link expired" afterwards. I tried again a few hours later and then contacted support when the same thing happened. The response after a few days:
> BAND currently permits sign‑ups and linking only with certain email domains. If you want to create a BAND account using an email address, please use a more public domain such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.
Strangest one still was the answer my mom got from Macy's. She is very persistent and was eventually told that Macy's does not support domains that have been registered with GoDaddy (note that the e-mail is not hosted by GoDaddy, just the domain is registered with them).
Fun fact, on Windows 95, minesweeper had a cheat code; xyzzy "shift" "enter" and it would change the color of the top-left pixel of the screen depending on whether or not the mouse was hovering over a bomb. It didn't work on later versions though.
Is it always wrong when it says "I think there's a mine here"? It seemed to to me on my playthough...
[edit]
Oh, it says "I think there's a mine here" when you mark a location, but the yellow-diamond is "click here because there's no mines" it's not related to what is being said.
e.g. one of the lemmas in the NL description is false, but a weaker version of the lemma (that does hold) is sufficient for the proof, so the (incorrect) lemma is never formalized.
The cost of HDR displays is decreasing, and the data cost is minimal. (adding more bits to video actually decreases the size because the rounding errors get smaller)
It's trivial to make an image that you can see the 8-bit quantization in. Just make 256 vertical gray bars, equally spaced. In much of the image (usually the darker parts, but depends somewhat on monitor calibration) you will see the border between two values. Note that this is every single possible grey value in 8-bit RGB, so it is a proper un-dithered rendering of a gradient, and the borders you are seeing are definitely quantization artifacts.
Now, if you apply proper dithering, particularly on a high-dpi screen, you can make it look a lot better, possibly even undetectable.
And this is just with the dynamic range that is comfortable on a computer monitor! If we really want to represent vibrant images, then the glare of the sun off of shiny objects should be much brighter than the "paper white" background used in e.g. your word processor. It should be intuitive that the brightest highlight in a real-world image ought to be too uncomfortable to fill your entire monitor with...
Lastly, there's a question what and how the image gets to the browser. Sure for the images on the landing page for $LARGE_CORPORATION you have a graphic designer make everything look great, and since most people still have 8-bit displays, you'll want something that looks good on one. But what about e.g. a site for uploading photos? Are you going to quantize all of their photos before displaying them (possibly to someone with an HDR display)?
I have used tape (of various flavours, QIC, DAT, LTO) and DVD+R and DVD-R for decades. Bluray has been the most reliable of all of them for me overall.
Tape is amazing, and resilient, but the drives are fragile and expensive.
The sad part is that Panasonic/Sony/Pioneer have pulled out of making drives (I believe Panasonic still make some for their own vertically integrated products), which just leaves Hitachi-LG.
The Plymouth suburban is 9 inches shorter in length and well over 1000lbs lighter. I couldn't find specifications on height for the Plymouth, but the Chevy is obviously much taller.
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