or as he calls it, the all-you-can-eat buffet

There’s also the effect of psychoactive drugs. Cannabis is correlated with an affinity for heavy bass (think reggae and dub), and apparently cocaine can cause sound engineers to push the treble up, resulting in a harsh, brittle mix.

Presumably it depends on the men having kids from a previous (or soon-to-be-previous) relationship, so if you’re one of those childless weirdos, you may need to make up a child, like in that Nick Hornby novel.

In the UK, Scots is close enough to English to be almost comprehensible to an otherwise unprepared British English speaker. (Case in point: Trainspotting.)

Or set your VPN to a country where they don’t monetise videos (Albania’s one)

In German, they use the adjective “abgefuckt” in similar cases; that’s an English swearword with some German prefixes underlining the complete and destructive nature of the state of affairs.

It’s the same in Icelandic, only spelled “kex”. There’s even a hotel in a former biscuit factory with that name.

It mentions style as being among the data points used, along with personal details, though if your hidden account is used for things like whistleblowing or niche erotica, you may not be mentioning telltale biographical details at all often, while you can’t help writing the way you write, with numerous unconscious choices between alternative ways of phrasing things, which will be the bulk of what it has to work with.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t slip up, so if you don’t want your posts traced back to you, also look out for any details you’re leaking and file the serial numbers off them (and perhaps rig up a way of delaying your posts outside of your waking hours).

Spain is just paying tribute to its 20th-century avant-garde heritage, i.e. Picasso and Dali.

This seems to mostly scale up stylometry (the method of identifying authorship by writing style), a long-established technique. It unmasked the Unabomber in the 90s, as well as the anonymous author of a scandalous book about the Clinton administration. Indeed, one technique some writers use of dodging this is to deliberately write in character in a contrived style (there was an information-security poster on Twitter whose style was modelled on Taylor Swift, for example).

As all things are an arms race, a countermeasure to this would be a locally-hosted language model that can rephrase text into a more neutral style. Install it on your phone, select the text you’ve written and get it to rewrite it, getting something without any regionalisms, turns of phrase or other peculiarities of your writing style that you wouldn’t notice but would identify you given a large enough corpus of your writings. A voice changer for text, if you will.

Sure is. At this stage of development, the baby pilots its mum like Krang.

Surely the law would have a religious exemption which would apply in this case

mallard: … 2. (archaic) a shopaholic

“-ard” would mean not so much “excessively” as “by their/its nature”; i.e. a seed/condiment whose very nature is mustiness, a person conceived out of wedlock (which was considered a black mark on one’s character back then), one who is habitually drunk, and so on

Related: a guy in Poland posted online about buying supermarket donuts to use as fuel in a wood-burning stove. The donuts turned out an order of magnitude cheaper than firewood.

Perhaps the paper was written by the Russian scientist who always included his cat as a co-author

Now watch all the tankies praise him as a honorary socialist

One thirty-second (short for thirty-second part of a whole)

That’s what happens when you don’t vet whom you give the time machine to

Sometimes filesystem developer syndrome removes a wife, sometimes it adds one