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”!

Imagine trying to dust that. Just think of the cobwebs.

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.

“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 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.

Obviously toasted. I mean what the fuck.

I’m pretty free and easy with the toppings. Marmite is good. Jam is good. Golden syrup is good.

My dad used to make his standard “Sunday night supper” of crumpets with cheese, garlic, sliced tomato, done under the grill cheese-on-toast style. Haven’t had that for ages, but it was awesome.

Now you mention it, Branston Pickle pizza sounds pretty great.

Like a cheese and pickle sandwich in pizza form.

To be clear, this one isn’t in London or one of the other big cities; it’s in the suburbs of Bristol, a smaller city.

I was under the impression that property prices in Tokyo were pretty insane. This is more like the equivalent of a garden shed in Fukuyama.

We have the same thing you call “pickles”- we call them gherkins (and very small ones “cornichons”). We just have lots of other pickles too! Pickled onions, pickled cabbage, pickled carrots, pickled beetroot, pickled cockles, pickled eggs…

There are two things which we call pickles that are really more like a chutney- “sandwich pickle” (which is what this is; Branston pickle and its imitators) and “piccalilli” (which is bright yellow).

Ubuntu Touch is such a nice user experience. If it had an Android-tier app ecosystem it’d be a very nice daily driver.

I guess it could have been four people ordering 2000 cars each on back order?

Or perhaps one person ordering 8000.

That person’s name? Nole Ksum. You’ve not met him. He goes to a different school.

Both Network Rail and LCR have already been working in this space for a long time; this is more about increasing the scale than about doing something new.

Reading is an interesting example; all those big towers and blocks that have sprung up around the station in the last decade? The vast majority are on what was previously railway land.

Orwell’s Animal Farm would seem like a good way to go. Not having any Orwell in a dystopian literature class would seem like a miss, and Animal Farm’s heavy parable style sets it apart from the others in the list.

Off beat suggestion: The Lorax by Dr Seuss. It might be interesting to study dystopia aimed at younger children as part of a full exploration of the genre.

Possibly somewhat on-the-nose, but It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis is fairly timely.

Back with the classics, perhaps The Trial by Franz Kafka. Very effective and highly distilled form of dystopian text, boiled right down to its elements.

Shout out to The Last Man by Mary Shelley, which is a contender for the first true dystopian novel (certainly one of the first worth remembering).

There’s also just no real incentive for them to do it. The number of devices running fully de-googled Android forks are miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Everyone running devices with non-standard Android but which still uses Google Play Services and the rest are just as valuable to Google as the ones running stock. And it suits Google to have the small ultra-privacy hobbyist market still running Android forks, even de-googled ones, rather than moving on to something else entirely.

For as long as it’s still under the Apache licence, they’re still obligated to release the source under the terms of that licence. They’d need to change the licence to stop providing code; which as you say, they could do, but that would also kill AOSP entirely overnight so is a bit of a bigger problem than the one described in the OP.

I know a Candida!

It’s actually surprisingly a relatively common uncommon name. Crops up a lot in certain Catholic communities as it’s Latin for “white”.

Is it possible? Sure.

Even then, not really. Not legally, anyway. Open source licences require that the user be provided with the source code (if requested) alongside the binaries. If they roll out an update to Android (to code which is under an open source licence), they have to release the code at essentially the same time. Rolling out an update and then withholding the source code for an unnecessarily long time would be against the terms of the licence.

This strikes me as bluffing between the DfE and Treasury.

“Oh, you want me to make 15% savings cuts do you? Here’s what that looks like:”

In the hope that the Treasury backs down to at least some extent.

Very co-operative mother!

I’m a politics person, and knocking the doors is a significant part of the deal. 2 hours per door knock 2-3 times per week is not at all unusual. Also council meetings and various party meetings scattered amongst the evenings.