I’ll use the cliche meme of “I was today years old when I learned where the name comes from”. Just made the connection when I read this article, and I love Pulp Fiction.

But I too am not a native English speaker. Just always accepted the clunky acronym as the reason for the name.

I remember a talk a few years ago where someone engineered controlled detonations to destroy a single server in a rack without damaging any surrounding equipment. Was pretty fun to follow the engineering.

No worse than all the tech startup names tbh.

I’d love to have one if I had the space. My toilet is roughly one square meter. For illustration purposes, that size, only less grungy. These are leftovers from how they used to plan apartment buildings in the late 19th century in Vienna.

In the railway context an engineer was the person who worked the engine.

In German the word comes from Latin roughly meaning inventor. Presumably the general usage of the word engineer in English has the same etymology.

One third Trekkies, one third talking about how shit twitter and Reddit are, one third content.

If the traffic plummets, YouTube wins. Serving content to ad-blocking users only costs them money. They don’t want those users.

I would be bowled over if any el stations had them.

I like that expression, I’m going to steal that.

These train displays haven’t changed in probably 30 years here. Vienna also has a bunch ofthese public clocks on big intersections and squares.

Really? Where are you located? I walk past three clocks on the way from my office to the metro station alone.

But that’s the thing. When that Video was made, almost all of the advertising was focused on the same BS the article is disagreeing with.

I remember lots of NordVPN ads by uninformed nontechnical creators just reading the provided script. Saying that Balaklava wearing hackers will steal your credit card data just by being in the same cafe as you, and only an expensive VPN subscription can protect you from that. Or that only using a VPN will protect you from malware.

This sort of advertising is what Tom Scott critizied back then. IIRC he even said that there are real use cases, but that you shouldn’t believe the fearmongering. Same as the article.

The fearmongering advertising was the problem, not advertising the service itself.

Mistaking if= and of= when using dd.

Because the main use case for most people - browsing the internet - sucks on e-ink. Scrolling is horrible.

About a hundred probably. Almost exclusively porn. I’m fine with porn, but I want to use All without scrolling past 10 pairs of tits to see one normal post.

And a handful of just annoying communities. The ones reposting Reddit content, US politics, crypto stuff, that sort of thing.

No JavaScript or ads. (…) Prevents Wikipedia getting your IP address.

Wikipedia is light on JavaScript and has never had ads. You prevent Wikipedia from getting your IP address but instead reveal it to some random third party, combined with letting them know everything you look up.

What the hell is the point of this. All this does it confuse people and decrease privacy.

Once you set it up it’s fine, but on first opening you have to click through a bunch of menus (no, I don’t want to share data, no I don’t want to sync my account, and so on). In other browsers it’s a small popup in the corner which you can ignore, and just google what you wanted to google. In edge they’re fullscreen and you have to click no on each one.

Probably a rather unique problem because I regularly set up new machines, most people just go through it once and never see it again.

What lights do you use?

All that would do is increase handling effort and make shipping more expensive, with no benefit for companies except maybe greenwashing PR.

Let’s try a real world example. From the outskirts of the city where the already mainline railway connected tram shed would be, into the city center. It’s about a 45 minute tram trip, for which you’d have to load and unload the cargo on each end.

So, you unload the cargo from the train which takes time, store it in a warehouse. Later load it into the tram, should take about the same time as loading a truck. So far, so good.
But instead of just delivering the cargo to your customer directly, you drive it to another more central warehouse using the tram.
You unload the cargo again, and once again have to store it in a very expensive warehouse in the city center., until you can distribute it to cargo bikes. Which once again means handling the cargo.
Only then can you deliver your goods at the customer.

So instead of unloading / storing / loading / delivering at the customer, you’ve added another loading/unloading step, and another warehouse to rent in a more expensive area. Loading and unloading and warehouses are already is essentially the most expensive part of shipping anything - the transport on a train or truck itself is not that expensive.

There are specialized cases where cargo trams can work, but they are rare, and they do not involve delivering goods directly to stores, and do not involve expensive facilities in city centers.
In Dresden for example, VW used cargo trams the same way they would use mainline cargo trains - transporting car parts from one factory to another. That made sense, because both ends of the line already had cargo handling and warehouse facilities in inexpensive parts of the town, and only one loading/unloading cycle was needed. They needed no expensive inner city facilities and no further distribution.

But at that point, it doesn’t really replace trucks, it just removes the need to connect your factory to the mainline rail network.

Viennas government always was very proud of their public transport department, it’s one of their poster childs for showing off. I can guarantee you, if they could have made it work, they would.

Delivery cars are allowed in all car-free zones I’m aware of. And that’s just fine. I know what community we are in, but those simply are necessary.

Many cities tried cargo trams, and one would assume that the complete absence of them nowadays is for a good reason. Manual loading and unloading alone seems a complete nightmare. It’s not worth the hassle.

I simply wouldn’t take a job with a one hour per way commute. Takes me 15-20 minutes max, and one less work day a week sounds sweet.