David has been drawing the Pepper and Carrot webcomic for well over a decade now and his style has been pretty consistent.

He makes them all in Krita as well.

This has been my favourite tech story for the past few years, I hope the train company gets put in its place properly this time.

Edit: This article is from July last year.

Microsoft Azure 365 Premium Plus for Business

I hope every single corpo goes out of business and we can fix the world’s problems instead of perpetually transferring all our money to the ultra-rich and the elderly boomers who destroyed the world so they could vote for more racism and despair.

Unless you have evidence that supermarkets are artificially inflating prices this isn’t going to fix anything. Goods cost money to make. Shoplifting doesn’t pay for the production of goods. This isn’t a sustainable way of supplying people with food. It raises prices for customers. It exposes shop workers to violence and abuse. It funds criminal gangs.

And then to top it all off people like you come swanning in thinking you’re supporting Robin Hood and his merry men and that just a few more shoplifters will cause Tesco to collapse and that whatever replaces it (because you haven’t actually thought about what replaces it) will be some Star Trek utopian paradise compared to the devilry of having to pay cost + a margin. (Hint: Robin Hood gave to the poor, not sold to the poor).

What you may notice about Co-op and Waitrose (one being a consumer co-operative and the other owned by a trust on behalf of its employees) is that they are on the more expensive side of supermarkets. They aren’t transferring your money to the ultra rich. They aren’t funding the campaigns of right wing would-be dictators. They are paying a fair price for the goods that they sell, and they are paying a fair wage to the employees who work there. The other supermarkets are often cheaper on many items. Mass shoplifting isn’t going to help this.

The real problem is that the cost of many goods is too high. The real causes of this are climate change, international conflict, brexit and other tariffs, labour related costs, and to some extent, profiteering of the part of the producers. Notice how shoplifting doesn’t address any of these issues.

Edit: Me again, Fine Print has just published this video on youtube exposing the food producers artificially increasing prices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f63qalvQADc notice how shoplifting from Tesco won’t fix this.

Microsoft are also toying with renting people cloud desktops they will never own. They’ve already got cloud gaming, and they’re as much in on AI as anyone.

By all means shop at Coop and Waitrose then, but you’re missing the point: this is making things more expensive for everyone else. Shops have to raise prices to offset losses and investment in security.

If everyone bought stolen goods the legitimate shops would go out of business and the shoplifters would have nowhere to steal from. Your cheap goods are being subsidised by honest customers.

Producer - has already been paid by legitimate shop for goods, isn’t affected by theft.
Legitimate shop - pays for goods then doesn’t get paid. Is affected.

Most of the price inflation is because of global supply factors, such as war and climate change driving up the cost of wheat and cocoa, for example.

Shop attendants are absolutely affected as the number of violent and abusive confrontations was estimated around 1300 per day in 2024.

My local shop is stealing from me?

It doesn’t affect them: they’ve already been paid. It’s the shop who takes the loss and the average customer who ends up paying more.

Because the targets of theft then have to invest in more security while making less money, raising prices for customers.

The shop that bought the item legitimately has to pay the full price of the item from the manufacturer / distributor. They have to sell the item at cost + VAT + a percentage to make money

The thief can sell at whatever price they like because they have no costs and don’t pay VAT on the sale.

The second shop has to sell the item at the new cost + new VAT + a percentage to make money. They save twice, on the cost of the item and the amount of VAT they pay.

The people who lose from this are:

1. The legitimate business owners who pay full price and make nothing.
2. Legitimate customers who pay increased prices

If the legitimate shop goes out of business then the whole system fails. Your cheap coke is being subsidised by honest customers.

You would watch criminal gangs strip your local shop of high value items to resell for profit, and then offer to pay for it? We’re not talking about someone in need stealing essentials here.

This isn’t people stealing chocolate because it’s expensive, it’s people stealing chocolate, cuts of meat, and alcohol etc. to resell. They aren’t ‘rebalancing’ anything, they are organised groups who are stealing in bulk to make a profit. This actually increases prices of those goods for everyone else.

If you see someone shoving six bottles of whisky in their coat, yes you did.

There’s a difference between stealing for survival and stealing for profit.

Fairly slim: there aren’t a huge number of royals to begin with, only Andrew had a reputation for partying, only Andrew had ties to Epstein (there is enough evidence with Andrew in that any other royals with Epstein ties would be in there somewhere too), and at the end of the day it’s not their decision.

Who gets to be in the line of succession is a matter for parliament, not the royal family.

None of what is considered ‘AI’ is actually AI, it’s just a rebrand of machine learning tech that has been around for a few years now (and is genuinely useful in certain circumstances). It’s all ‘AI’, only the generative AI is worth getting mad about.

They could stop paying their CEO so much and hire a few more devs, refocus their identity on privacy and performance (their offline ai translation is actually really useful), and actually give people the sense that their donations will be well spent.

Asking an llm isn’t research, he might as well have been consulting a magic 8 ball.

All I see is *******?

The sandboxing is part of the point, having a permissions model that puts the user in control of what programs are allowed to do is critical.