Skwid

uxntal and varvara bring me such joy, it's that perfect complexity where everything feels like a fun puzzle you can approach one step at a time.

The first time I saw it years back I was skeptical. As foremost a hardware guy I saw instructions in transistor count and gate delay, all that spaffed away on 16x16 multiply and you couldn't spare one flip flop for an overflow flag? Preposterous!

But the software already written was cool enough to convince me it was worth emulating, and once you've got an emulator you may as well write some software. A few short programs and I was in love. It's not about running code efficiently, it's about making it fun to write efficient code.

No sharp edges, no corner cases, generally minimal machine state. The cognitive load is so much smaller than any real world assembly I've used.

I didn't mean to write such a lot of meandering offtopic fluff, but damn, I just love that little guy ( ⊖-w-⊖)

You don’t even have to look that far ahead, people area already dying every year due to the direct toxicity (Including radionuclide release!) of fossil fuel emissions. One relevant study for those not aware: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11301007/

I have no knowledge on the subject, but developing and testing on a distribution only Gnome developers will ever use does seem very on brand for modern Gnome

Optionally, aye, but not standard.

Yes, that is the intended purpose of the fuse - To stop a faulty appliance drawing excessive current and starting a fire.

The benefit of the per appliance fuse is that a 3A appliance can have a 3A fuse, rather than the full 13A the socket is rated to provide. No difference for a dead short, but easily the difference between fire and no fire for a stalled motor.

Can I ask why you think a ring main is more likely to cause a fire if overloaded? I think this could be a misconception, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts

The Attribution Assurance License is a particularly bold choice for a repo of code the author presumably didn't write

That is pretty nifty. I used an Anker A2669 for travel within the UK, a bit chunkier but also with folding pins.

I appreciate that they seem to put some effort into the design of their UK only products, instead of just shipping a US/Cn shaped charger with a BS1363 plug grafted on

u wot m8? bri'ish plugs best in the world, not that you bloody yanks would understand.

But in all seriousness they are comprehensively safer. The earthing and exposed live benefits are shared by most EU plugs, but as a bonus you've got:

- Built in fuse that can be sized to the appliance, not the socket

- Sliding gates on live and neutral that stop your 5 year old jamming a fork in there

- The gate is moved by the earth pin, ensuring it's long enough to make first contact

- An internal wiring arrangement that avoids floating the whole appliance at live if a cable is forcibly ripped out

Yes, it's a bit bigger but I can't recall this having caused even one dead child worth of inconvenience across my life.

They are however, even worse than Lego to step on in the night. I'll concede that as their one true weakness

My phone can't run any of my bank's apps, is it dead too?

I appreciate your intended point was probably more specific, perhaps 'will not be a mass market success in the west', but there is a great diversity of people in the world and many of them have different requirements of a phone

That was an interesting read. I don't use LLMs but I have been wondering for a while with trends in model size, RL and synthetic data if we'd start to see more obvious separation of functions.

Most of all though, I couldn't stop thinking about Wintermute and Neuromancer...

Possibly not what you're after, and possibly not available to you even then, but there is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MG_Cyberster

Better than I was thinking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent)

Entirely off-topic, but in British english the usual term would be combustion vehicle, or more commonly just Petrol/Diesel.

A thermic vehicle sounds delightfully whimsical to my ear, like some sort of victorian steam car.

For some reason the form thermic is almost never used in English, instead preferring Thermal with only one exception I'm aware of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_lance

I appreciate what you're saying. Commercial realities are very different to theoretical ideals, and of course you have to draw the boundary of trust somewhere to get anything done.

I don't think anyone is saying it's an app developers responsibility to ensure the user's bootloader is securely implemented.

There is a lot of space between verify everything and trust nothing, and I don't think it's unreasonable to question whether that trust boundary is in the right place.

I also think that the code compiled to produce the binary you ship is a perfectly reasonable place to put that boundary, would you disagree?

I'm sure that within the mobile dev world it is normal, accepted practice to include lots of unseen code. I don't begrudge anyone involve for taking the money and doing what's expected.

But I still think it's a mad way to run a business or community project, and it's worth considering how we got here and whether it really has to be this way.

I'm hearing an awful lot of "How could they do this to us?" and not a lot of "Wow, maybe we should have read some of this 3rd party code we bundled into 'ALLLL' of our apps"

Just an ignorant and naive outsider's take, but to me it paints a pretty damning picture of the state of mobile development.

The situations are not the same, but western nations are absolutely funding Putin’s actions through oil and gas imports.

Despite a lot of posturing, and a fair amount of presumably sincere effort, billions continue to flow.

Aye, quite so. I once wiped a drive with a whole bitcoin I mined myself on it.

I'm not that upset because I know for a fact I would have cashed out at the obvious peak of about $30.

The one that does cause the occasional pang of remorse is the million or so dogecoin I gave away, as by the time I realised it was worth anything at all it was worth more than my house

One of my favourite yak shaving adventures in a previous job was writing a parse in place UBJSON decoder for ~1MB of data on a device with about as much free memory. Fast (enough) access by key, binary search with a few shortcuts for the mostly numeric payload. It built an index of maybe 30 bytes to speed things along, but also to let it keep working on the tail of the old message whilst the new one was overwriting it's start.

Should the system design have required all this of a device with 4MB of memory? Probably not. But it worked, and I had a great time

They now require login for old.reddit.com. You can remove the subdomain and access the modern JS laden slop without an account unless they deem it 'Adult Content'

I hate to break it to you, but those guy's aren't far behind on the path of enshittification.

Remember this classic? https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

I've heard saluki as a genuine theory

Hey, stop it! If they do that I won't be able to buy basically new machines for £200 any more!

I only very recently upgraded from an X230 with X220 keyboard

It was a close call between a totally new machine and a display mod though

If you search those names you'll find most have a LinkedIn page proudly displaying their many "IBM Influencer" achievements and qualifications.

I realise LinkedIn is a surrealist caricature of corporate reality, but just imagine proudly displaying your #1 shill award for all to see

If anyone wants a lightweight, GUI, non-slopcoded spotify client I find spotify-qt[1] does the job nicely. Alas, it wears only the skin of your system QT theme

[1] https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt

For Aberdeen it shows me a bus to Shetland, quite an exciting prospect

Total energy is going to be comparable for aircraft with similar ranges, I don't think a lithium fire is any less unpleasant than a Jet-A fire for for anyone nearby.

Even if the batteries could be made entirely inert, the ability to deliver a plane sized slug of kinetic energy to a building of your choice retains most of the danger.

Even if that could be avoided, a plane must remain operational enough throughout all flights to avoid falling out of the sky.

It would take a large bomb to take out a whole bus load of passengers, a very small one to put safety critical systems of a plane out of action.

As much as I would appreciate this happening, I don't think electric planes are going to make it happen.

In the UK there is the not entirely dissimilar KTP.

Officially companies apply and are selected on the merit of application, in practice it's dramatically easier for companies already 'in the system' to re-apply.

The engineer (Mostly engineers, but also some scientists) is legally employed by the university, but typically spends all their time at the company. No tax shenanigans, the university's expenses are straight up paid by government.

They don't get a PhD, they just file reports and make presentations to the KTP org representative.

It's fairly common for them to enroll with the university during a KTP though, which sometimes can be paid for from the KTP training budget.

They also get a selection of training courses in business and management subjects, which curiously includes a large section on tax avoidance for small businesses.

I can't prove anything, but if you're keen here are the breadcrumbs I was was referring to:

Author Profile: https://psyll.com/elena

Author Image: https://psyll.com/assets/image/qzqgr7sazazf5o1iigkjtlbf-w84-...

The other site: https://sooryehan.org/

The full size image: https://sooryehan.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Face-1.jpeg

I notice you've submitted a few of these links, are you in some way affiliated with psyll?

Curiously, I reverse searched a few of the alleged author's images and did get one exact match. On that site they were an Anonymous beauty blogger in a testimonials banner. That site also had a larger version of the same image with plenty of early stable diffusion style artifacts. Curious to know the process here, is it really easier to steal someone else’s slop than make your own these days?

You can tell it's going to be a quality site when the article begins with a selection of PHP warnings. One link gave me a 410 which was a surprise, until I realised it returns 410 instead of 404 for every missing page.

Please don't invest any time in these articles, the whole site is a bizarre AI generated marketing scam