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“Scrambled to respond” is rather generous, I’d say.

It took Otter.ai three months to confirm the email was genuine - having initially said that it wasn’t.

The article doesn't explain why pure water will burn your throat, unfortunately.

It's a fantastic interview question if your goal is to hire irritating smart-arses.

He covered it a couple of days ago.

Agree. Compare the process for renewing your passport with the experience of logging into My eBay. Gov.uk is something the UK can be really proud of.

Watson was sold as being able to spit out answers without you having to think of the question.

Could somebody more familiar with its capability reveal whether that was at all true?

This brings to mind the other post about the Amish that's on today's front page. I believe the Amish sometimes use compressed air as an alternative form of power.

By the sounds of it, this happened before Andrew started doing "pre-interviews". Now he has one of his team members speak to the person to suss out their story. Andrew just just wrote a book about his interview process – it's called Stop Asking Questions, and I thoroughly recommend it. He shows you how to get interesting material from people, rather than platitudes like: "business is a marathon, not a sprint".

Why was it controversial?

The barrier to entry into modern "journalism" evaporated with the internet. All Matt Drudge did was post links to other people's stories.

I remember – aged 10 or 11 – calling the Nintendo UK hotline, because I was stuck on Zelda: Link's Awakening. Zelda is a pretty big game, but the person I spoke to knew exactly where I was and helped me find the instrument I was trying to find. Even at that age I thought this was pretty incredible.

Nice tool, I've signed up. Question: I've selected the pages that I need backed up (i.e. all of them). When I add more pages in Notion, will they automatically be backed up too?

Dumb question: how do chip makers predict their roadmap? If they know they’ll be able to do still finer etching in 4 years, what’s stopping them from doing it now? How can you not be able to do something today, but still know fairly accurately you’ll be able to do it in future?

Long time Plausible user here. They are the “good guys” of analytics.

I'm not sure either, and I posted it! Didn't expect it to take off.

Question: with pre-made loops it seems fairly easy to make something that sounds decent. Is it okay if it’s really that easy? Could you put a few of these together and release a track? Should it be “hard”? I’m sure most producers have fiendishly complex arrangements. But do some producers basically paint by numbers?

Thanks. To challenge that a little, MUDS certainly felt pretty real. Somebody wrote a book about a rape in LambdaMOO. [My Tiny Life.] I'm still confused about what's a metaverse and what's something like Second Life.

Question for greybeards – would something like LambdaMOO nowadays be described as a metaverse?

All these memey distress signals, like asking for “Angela”… are they actually adopted? Or do they just exist on the internet?

Discover Weekly is remarkably good at suggesting new music. But I’m surprised at how few of my friends use it. It doesn’t seem to be promoted prominently now.

It’s a bit like how Steve Jobs proudly demoed Expose in Mac OS X 10.3, but then subsequent versions of the operating system progressively hid it - to the point almost no Mac user knows it exists.

There’s only a few things missing. Just choose different veg?

The language on the site is intriguing. Do enthusiasts refer to Sanyo and Panasonic personal stereos as "Walkmans"? (And is the plural of Walkman really Walkmans?)

I was curious if and when this sexism argument would come up.

Why is Elizabeth Holmes in court and not Adam Neumann? Well, he might have had a bong chimney put in his office but he didn’t fake people’s HIV tests.

Apologies if this is a very stupid question but is random mutation a fact or a theory? It’s something I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around. If you corrupt a line of code you don’t get a different program you just get something that won’t compile. I suppose nature works very differently to programming - but it’s still something I struggle with.

Granny’s Garden. Anyone?

So it's "lease on life" rather than "lease of life"? Never knew that.

Didn’t know this. Thanks.

If I may mount one small defence of the Touch Bar: it’s great for picking emoji.

Future launched my career too. I started writing for .net in 1998 magazine when I was 15 and joined as a staff writer two years later. Fun fact: its editor, Richard Longhurst, went onto start Lovehoney.

The British computer press of the 80s and 90s - magazines from the Future stable like Your Sinclair - pioneered a lot of the whimsical, zoo-TV style writing that’s popular now.