The moment that Amazon not only blocked my account from ordering after some payment hiccups, but also that of my girlfriend, who was living at a different place at the time, was the moment I disabled my Amazon account completely.

I at the time also had a look into what I could find in the settings about what they still stored about me:
They still had my detailed order history dating back to 1996, when I first used the service to buy books, giving a nice, very personal overview about what topics I had been interested in over the decades.

This has been in 2011 already, so unfortunately nothing new.

I have another one that is not on the list, because the reason it was considered unusual has been slowly fading away.

It’s a neighbouring town called “Alf”.

During the Alf-TV-series craze in the 80s, the town sign regularly got stolen, similar to the Fucking one.

That was a serious problem, as those are standardized, but custom made signs, and are not only quite expensive, but serve multiple functions besides naming the town (e.g. setting the speed limit to 50km/h).
So they are mandatory to have installed (you also can’t just replace it with huge rocks or so, like the Shitterton people did).

So I fully understand the Fugging people for renaming their town.
Other options are just too expensive (and also dangerous, think of the speed limit function, which is similar in Austria as in Germany) in the long run…

People seem to certainly react differently to different types of mosquito. I never had much with Aedes, I mostly find them really annoying. I do react a bit more to Culex, though.
Other people I know of started to react a lot more from the beginning, but many seem to have adapted by now.

My son showed similar reactions as shown in the pic in the article during the first two or three years after the Asian Tiger Mosquito arrived in our neighbourhood.
During Jule and August he couldn’t get outside without getting severe reactions to every bite (and this species bites a lot, as they use multiple sequential tiny bites instead one huge bite).
Luckily, his immune system seems to have adapted by now and effects of the bites is again in a normal range you would expect…

Hot take:
Any direct exposure to interactive apps, no matter how short, is too much for a five year old.

Just occasionally say something to them in the foreign language once in a while, effect will be greater without getting them hooked early on to interactive media with addictive properties.

Well… your read the part about the 2nd largest wine exchange in Europe? In a town with a few thousand inhabitants? ;-)

The historic database I consulted didn’t tell.

Apart from the 1942 incident, when the bath supervisor of the town (accidentally?) discovered the tiny chamber in the rock (during a high water period), found the bottle of wine put there during the 1920 draught and tasted it.

But given that Traben-Trarbach around 1900 was one of the largest wine trading centers in Europe (second only to Bordeaux), I guess that each inhabitant got its share of wine during the celebration… :-)

Exactly the point.
We are currently 100x speed running a similar change in a densely populated area that has an order of magnitude more people living in it than have ever lived combined in the Sahara region since the start of time.
And while Europe for now seems to be the most directly effected continent, the rest of the world is following only a few steps behind.
This totally is unprecedented.

The first thing that came to my mind also.

This sounds like another privacy nightmare put on top of the already more than questionable Flock installations.

Well, the numbers for 2026 are not in yet…

And given the fact that basically all the rivers here have reached record breaking lows, often by huge margins, the new observation count might be interesting…

A slightly less dreadful Hungerstein story:

I looked up the nearest Hungerstein to my hometown, a few km down the river (in Traben-Trarbach at the river Moselle).

It had no inscriptions, but the inhabitants of the town made a kind of event out of its infrequent appearance starting from the mid 19th century:

They entombed a bottle of wine in it during each draught, to be ceremoniously retrieved the next time the Hungerstein showed up again and exchanged for a new one.

This fits somehow, as the people of my home region have a talent to find obscure reasons to throw parties…

Little did they know that a few hundred years later the meaning has changed to:
“If you see me each year, you screwed up.”

Meh, how often do you really do some serious work where you’re not on your own hardware?

As a SW dev in a predev lab / tech demonstration environment: Unfortunately much more often than you would perhaps think…

I have to reserve the limited keystroke remembering capacity of my aging brain to more crucial stuff, I am afraid…

Also, the tiny time span passing while mindlessly holding down the “*” key is a welcome pause to clear your mind, take a short breath and gather your thoughts on what the heck you are supposed to be writing in the comment body following the /**********/ line. ;-)

What evolitionary pressure could there be for left- vs. right-handedness?

That’s exactly why I was initially so intrigued by the heading:
“What on earth could be the mechanism that a bug could have caused this??”

But then I realized we were talking about entirely different kinds of bugs… ;-)

Thanks, actually sounds like a useful feature!

Although as a SW dev I do regularly depend on the repeating character behaviour, but usually not for normal letters.
But typing stuff like:
/*********************************************************/
is pretty common for me and would be annoying without auto-repeat of the respective character…

How does macOS discern between wanting to use diacritics and just trying to write the letter multiple times in a row?
And how do you choose the version you would like to use (I assume by selecting the numbers printed below)?
And yes, I have never used a Mac in my whole life up to now and am therefore completely clueless ;-)

Legit possible solution.
But I normally omit changing the behaviour of the standard keyboard as it will bite me the moment that I am not on my own computer.

Only exception:
I use a similar approach to disable the Tab-Key (and in one case, on a machine with a stripped down keyboard missing the “Pos1” and “End” keys, use Tab and Shift-Tab to emulate these).

I at first was assuming this post was to be about natural selection and the reasons for the current prevalence of right handed people.
Like today’s uneven distribution of blood types caused by different susceptibility to some diseases in former time, like e.g. the evolutionary advantage blood type 0 gives you against Malaria.

So I was initially very confused when the author started rambling about the design of his Wordpress blog instead… 😆

And here I was wondering for ages now, who in his right mind would have chosen the incredibly cumbersome to type triple backticks combo as delimiters for code sections in markdown…

And now this article just told me that the backtick is just another normal key outside of Germany…

But serious question: How do you type characters with the back accent above them? Or you just don’t?