Acamon

Is that why cats can be so ginger and still good hunters? My orange stands out so much in the garden, but maybe to dichromatic mice he's super stealthy?

Can't think of a specific line, but I'm sure something from Grease. I was obsessed with that movie as a kid, and my many questions about some of the plots and lines led to my parents giving me The Talk. So I imagine I misheard a bunch of lines about periods and such.

The Chip Butty is a British classic, but I don't know popcorn and oj. What's the appeal, just a refreshing drink to sip with popcorn? Or is this some crazy oj cereal type thing?

Little chocolate chip cookies as a cracker for hummus. The sweet biscuit texture with the cool, tangy lemon and garlic hummus is amazing. But sadly, most people are not ready for such truths.

Preternatural.

What's that?

Appealing idea obviously. But I think if everything else stayed the same, and suddenly ads were banned, we'd just see a lot of shady underhand tactics emerging.

There's already lots of grey areas, influencers who are supposedly just talking about things they like but have some relationship with a brand they happen to promote... Is no one ever allowed to discuss a product? Can I promote Librewolf to people? But only as long as librewolf don't give me any free swag? Do reviewers no longer get free copies of book or free screenings of movies? What if I contributed to a project, can I talk about my own work on my own channels?

The viral marketing stuff of the 90s was pretty weird. Dreadful though target online ads are, gangs of people going around the real world trying to influence word of mouth feels even more dystopian. Although, if big companies were encouraging staff to volunteer and get involved in community projects, (and giving them time off to do them) with the understanding that they'd "innocently mention" that they work at Nike, maybe that would be better than the current setup.

In the past, physical buildings often served as advertising. Lots of high end stores on shopping streets are mostly there as a physical advert for the brand, not because they particularly make a profit. Do we really want McDonald's expanding into real estate to start making building reminiscent of the golden arches in visible locations? But maybe even if these alternatives would be intrusive in new and horrible ways, they are limited by being in the real world, and thus not infinitely scalable. And if city centres are revived by brands desperate for attention, and corporations has be involved in communities on an individual employee level, instead of just sticking a logo on something, maybe that would counterbalance the bad with some good.

I travel a lot, and spend time in a lot of random places, stay with friends and such like. My job means that I can set my own schedule most of the time, but sometimes I need to respond to something pretty urgently. So, there's been plenty of times when I've been travelling light and suddenly been asked to pull a bunch of data from a spreadsheet and write some quick report on it, so usually I just ask whoever I'm with if I can use their pc for an hour and get it out the way.

It's certainly possible do it all on a phone, but it's much quicker and more pleasant to just use a proper keyboard and screen. And there have been times (like after a ill-advised encounter with a fountain in Rome) when my phone is temporarily out of action, so if I need to deal with travel arrangements on a public computer it might involve accessing my emails.

Yeah, I didn't find it particularly bizarre. Both are very natural ways to process verbal information. Anyone who's ever tried to do arithmetic in a new language knows that we don't just abstractly do math, a big part is that we know that seven plus eight is fifteen. That's why they used to teach multiplication tables by rote. It would be lot more bizarre if an llm had independently devised a reliable mathematical algorithm.

Using email clients is fine on my primary devices, but I often have to use email on other people's computers. I don't really want to go back to carrying a usb of portable apps again. And some public computers have usb drive access disabled, understandably.

Anyone got a any opinions (or a link to a review) of the different options? Proton and tuta come up, are there others worth considering?

I understand that I'll probably need to pay (otherwise I'm the product) and encryption / security is good, but the thing that keeps with Gmail (apart from inertia) is that it feels quick and easy to use. My only real experience of non Gmail sites over the last two decades have been terrible but mandatory work webmail systems that are slow, clunky and look a decade out of date. Or Hotmail, which sucks for a variety of reasons.

Yeah, that's the whole point. Reincarnation is not meant to be a positive, it's a nightmare that you have to escape. That's what 'nirvana' is, reaching a point where you successful escape the reincarnation cycle and get to have oblivion.