Theodores

I will raise you with a Dell Chromebook, designed for eight year old kids, totally bulletproof and able to take anything thrown at it, with a seemingly super-long-range battery that outlasts anything.

It is practically a Panasonic 'toughbook' and it also has a homing ability, in that you can lend it out to people with a fair expectation that it will come back one day.

At home it might as well be a 'home data centre', with a full LAMP stack, serving web pages to the world, just fine.

I am not sure if it really has things like a CPU and RAM inside it, maybe there is just a team of four cockroaches hyper-threading away.

I am really not sure about the graphics, it can drive 4K external and its own somewhat indestructible screen just fine, albeit not for gaming.

The keyboard works great, albeit simplified Chromebook style, as does the trackpad. The keyboard is practically machine-washable, you can spill tea, coffee, water, ice cream, mild PVA glue solution in it with no long-term consequences.

Purchased refurbished, many aeons ago, I forget the price, but it certainly wasn't three digits, even allowing for inflation.

I am playing up the strengths of this lame Chromebook from yesteryear, however, such a device could be made today, to survive the Zombie Apocalypse just fine. As a ThinkPad I am sure that such a product exists, but you probably need £4000 for it rather than £400.

Curious, isn't it?

I don't order artificial food on apps or go anywhere near the golden arches, but it amazes me that the majority of the app orders are for these chains that sell utter garbage.

It is a bit like a phone, you could open a book to read classic literature or you could doom scroll AI trash all day. For some reason the latter option is invariably chosen over the former.

The money is also ridiculous, I am not sure of golden arches prices with delivery and tip on top, I just don't live like that. However, I always cook from scratch with no animal products, just stodgy vegetables, and I am sure that my weekly food bill is going to be less than one delivered cold and late burger meal of no nutritional value.

Also shocking as a cooking person is how few McDonald's orders are sit down with people. We have ended up with people eating with their fingers in their solitary confinement cars with the worst junk food possible, whereas we once had dinner parties with a proper table, home cooked food of nutritional value, valued company, crockery, cutlery, etiquette and prayers to an imaginary god.

Even stranger is that there is no free healthcare in the USA. Eat this garbage and you have a healthcare bill coming for the obesity, saturated fats blocking arteries, cancer and the rest of the chronic diseases that go with artificial food.

This situation is a product of American corporate ways of doing things and hard to unpick, but with these delivery apps now worth billions, there is now another barrier between healthy eating since this silly gig economy now needs to be kept in existence since jobs and corporate profits depend on it.

Once upon a time kids had train sets, however, other toys such as LEGO came along and train sets fell out of fashion. However, in time, the boomers that did have train sets retired and some of them built the train sets that their nine year old former selves could only dream of. The toy for kids became a hobby for retirees.

I wonder if LEGO is going to follow the same fate, to no longer be of interest to Roblox and Minecraft obsessed kids, to develop an increasingly elderly customer base, ending up with just retirees.

Daft Punk became a household name in the late 1990s, placing their core audience as Gen X, which is reasonably elderly, and well on the way for the kids to retirees pipeline. Expect LEGO to be grand-pa only in a couple of decades.

What remains of the train set business makes a token effort to appeal to kids, all of it is priced out of their league and not marketed to them in ways of yesteryear. Instead it is all about limited edition, very expensive and highly accurate models that get sold to a diminishing customer base, necessitating ever higher prices and further consolidation in the industry.

Imaginably, LEGO in twenty years time will be like this, making nothing but a token effort to sell to kids yet making money with expensive and even more elaborate reissues of models such as this one.

Hopefully this won't be the future of LEGO, however, they do need this adult market given how kids don't play with toys now they have tablets.

Dell have a different range for gaming, with the obligatory LED lights and whatnot. This is for 'content creators', which mostly means video editing, and it promises the benefits of the RTX Spark SoC with ARM-based CPU. This means extended battery life and being able to do editing in half the time.

Given that editing is a bottleneck and cost in the production process, this laptop, with its huge screen and Spark CPU is a no-brainer, however, there is also the ASUS ProArt range, which also comes with RTX Spark, but an arguably better screen, it is not as if there is anything new here for the 'content creator'.

But this does not answer your question, however, I am sure that FAFO applies, so you can expect a glitchy experience, up to the point of unplayable. Honestly, running an obscure North Korean linux on a Microsoft Surface gadget that has been specifically designed with closed source, Windows only drivers would be a preferable challenge to getting your games to work on this.

Therefore, dive in and be an early adopter, the prices will be double next year.

Thanks for your miserly comment. I am glad to have had that little put down from someone that has nothing to add to the conversation or possibly the world. This is because this serves as a reminder that I am not like that, as a rule, taking miserly pot shots at others, as some seem to do, including you.

Please can you add the colour names used by cars in the post war era.

For example, my father had a Ford Cortina in Saluki Bronze, which sounded better than Polished Turd, so the marketing men went with it, even though the latter was more accurate.

All of the automotive colours had imaginative names then, however, the colour was dependent on light, so a singular RGB value is always a bit naive.

Very impressive presentation, not sure it is a usable tool or a definite resource without Saluki Bronze though.

Recently I learned that only those with over-active immune systems survived the 14th century plagues. Therefore, inflammation is to be taken seriously, or at least understood in this historical context, depending on your ancestry.

As for the article, the findings come as no surprise given what we know about the risk factors in the post-smoking world. Nowadays nutrition, specifically saturated fats in combination with lots of sugar and salt, as found in today's artificial foods is showing up in the research (not paid for by 'big beef').

There is no need to over-think it, just stay off the corporate 'food' and cook from fresh ingredients, where you don't get 'HFSS' (UK government term for high fat/salt/sugar) held together with weird chemicals. Sure, nobody has time for that, but this is the frontier of public health, a.k.a. the 'obesity crisis', with a simple solution - actually bother to cook!

I would like to cheat at this assignment, using an SVG file that has the whole book as an HTML foreignObject, that just scrolls by in its special way, to simply name the SVG file as a GIF, knowing that browsers just read the headers in a file, ignoring the file extension.

My cheated assignment would fool humans because they would assume the SVG was a GIF binary.

The file size would be significantly smaller.

This skill in being able to deceive and brazenly stick to the lie would make me perfect for a top job in government, big tech, automotive or 'space'.

It has a small solar panel between the lambo doors for providing the electricity needed for the gas compressor /s

Team and driver for in 2026?

I am always on Team Hamilton even though I appreciate that he is a little long in the tooth and doing the classic retirement act in a 'stupid red car'.

I am obsessed with SVG and image compression/delivery, and I would like it if you could introduce the concept of an 'SVG sampler' to the world. This is very much inspired by embroidery samplers from the times when women needed to sew.

The point of the sampler is to impress, so as to get the work in, however, it is also a reference, with stitches to copy for lettering, numbers, religious iconography, sock-darning, button-holes and whatever else needs to be repeated.

With an SVG sampler the idea is to use the whole SVG toolkit, filters, masks, clip paths, symbols, views, SMIL, CSS and everything else.

Sure this can be done in Inkscape, however, the goal of the SVG sampler is to make it human drawable. For example, the search icon is a circle and a line, which can be done in a 45Kb export from Illustrator, with the circle defined as a thousand points, specified to NASA numbers.

Or it can be done in ten lines or so of SVG primitives, with the circle and the line using simple two-digit integers. The former is not something that a mere mortal could draw, whereas the latter could be.

Clearly some paths do need to be complex and imported from elsewhere.

SVGOMG will be able to mash the 45Kb Illustrator export into a tenth the size, however, it will not be as concise or as human readable as the 'haiku of the SVG sampler symbol'.

The SVG sampler does not have to be web-optimised, it can max out the CPU for the PC to go full China Syndrome and melt its way through your desk. However, it could be forked, culled of CPU-eater show-stoppers, to just have the icons needed for the next project.

Another way of seeing the SVG sampler idea is 'SVG golf', where you want to strive for maximal 'use' clones, maximal human readability, yet also an insistence on detail such as light/dark mode currentColor things, animating pretty much everything and using the primitives rather than paths, even if the code is longererer according to SVGOMG.

I think that SVG falls within an awkward gap where artworkers don't care for the code with programmers also not caring for the code, because SVG is artworker stuff, not for programmers, right?

In a typical team workflow there is no scope for this to change, the frontend developer is obligated to use the 'assets' churned out by the art worker and the backend developer certainly doesn't care.

Hence, an SVG 'sampler' competition of sorts, with some acknowledgement, could help Firefox win over some developer mindset to FF. Already MDN has the de-facto best documentation for SVG, I probably have a dozen MDN tabs open right now, maybe with all of them on some type of FEconvolve type of feature.

For the sampler, the IDE rather than the graphics program is how it works. Anything with 'sodipodi' type of extra markup can be considered not worthy of being an SVG sampler. Really it has to be a mostly text-only thing, under version control, and not needing CodePen or other. To go with the SVG there needs to be a 'sampler.html' file to show the sampler symbols in 'inline mode' as well as CSS, the favicon and as shown as an 'image' element. Scripting is allowed, but really the goal is to keep everything in the SVG file, to not need huge amounts of extra files.

Ideally comments outside of 'title' and 'description' should not be needed, the author should be able to explain their own code, hence an emphasis on 'defs', sensible id names and descriptive ids.

Since F1 is your thing, you are welcome to give the SVG sampler idea a F1 inspired ethos to it. If you think of the FW14C with the active suspension and whatnot, or the F-duct, DAS and other wonders, then applied that design rigour to SVG, think how good it could be. Added marks for everything good looking, however, there needs to be this solid human-readable underpinnings.

Please do something for SVG at Firefox, to inspire people to get into it rather than assume it is someone else's job. Maybe just have a competition, no prizes needed, with folks able to vote on awesomeness, sophistication, haiku-esque simplicity and how educational a given sampler is.

I see no reason why you can't call yourself 'uncle Bernie', to cosplay as the benevolent dictator that gives out a star prize for an SVG sampler (every time there is an F1 race, rather than monthly, as that would be tedious).

As for AI, Google suggest does offer up SVG code that never works, it gets a duff namespace declaration on line one, dooming any of its concoctions to never open. But where we are going with 'SVG samplers', we don't need no AI robots.

Jake's interest in F1 hasn't waned, which is good to see. I am presuming that picture of an Alpine/Renault at Goodwood is his 18Mb photo, but I could be wrong. Neither has his interest im image compression waned, which is also good to see. But why the move from Google to Firefox?

I am still on webp, thinking that I am on the bleeding edge in a world where artworkers are obsessed with pixels with JPG/PNG as the only formats they know, which is an advance on GIF.

Every browser advertises what formats it will accept and if it is in 'data-saving, low bandwidth mode', so I just configure the CDN to keep the names the same '.jpg' but to send the bestest format for the situation/browser, whether that be webp or AVIF, fetching super-high resolution files from the origin server, outputting them in 'retina' resolution with none of those 'picture' elements referencing half a dozen 'responsive' sizes.

In this way nobody has to care what image format is being served, and if it is deemed that everything is way too compressed, the CDN can be flushed of the cached images, quality increased, and cache rebuilt.

It looks like I will need to update my server configuration to use JPEG XL in the usual five years' time, given the lack of any revolutionary benefit.

Interesting how they have kept MS-Paint as simple as Notepad for three decades, when they could have 'embraced, extended and extinguished' every photo editing application known to man during this time.

This could have been done like a classic OS calculator, with simple/scientific/financial UI variants, with simple/artworker/programmer modes. Programmer mode would be like the image processing toolkit VIPS (or Imagemagick), where you could batch process images without opening them, or, as per the article, rotate a 10K x 10K image by 0.02 degrees around any given x/y origin. Presumably 'artworker' mode would be somewhere between Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop, with 'simple' being the MS-Paint that grandma can use to crop undesirables out of family photos.

Admittedly, this is not what an Operating System is about, however, over the years Microsoft have acquired and relinquished many a graphics application, including Softimage 3D and the Seadragon infinite zoom image viewer. It is almost as if they don't care.

Many thanks for your kind words. I do have plenty of stories from the cheese factory, not all of them negative, for example, our cups of tea were the best ever, with water from the mountains and unpasteurised milk from a 100ft 'milk jug' that reached into the sky (with a miniature tap in the bottom).

Nowadays there is absolutely no dairy in my life. No cheese, no milk, no chocolate and not even butter. Yet, as an white Brit, I have to acknowledge that my ancestors owe a lot to dairy and I probably would not be here, had it not been for dairy farming. The Romans documented how 'Celts' drank milk and were quite disgusted by it. The Romans were lactose intolerant, and from a warm climate where milk just went sour, so they could not believe what they saw.

The history of tin comes into it too, the Phoenicians brought the recipe for clotted cream to Britain ('land of tin') some three thousand years ago, enabling year-round calories for tin miners. They got their copper from Afghanistan to make bronze in the Levant, to found an empire on that.

In Europe and the UK there are many protected foods, including many region specific cheeses. All of them have fabulous history stories, really well written, and in public domain documents. For example, 'Orkney Cheese' is a WW1 innovation, when many ships were based there, with many sailors to feed.

If you want to avoid processed foods then it helps to know about the protected foods. For example, a 'Cornish Pasty' is available in petrol stations and other 'food deserts' where your options are limited. However, a 'Cornish Pasty' can't contain any junk in it, if it has 'Cornish Pasty' written on the packet.

"You must be joking.."

I can fully understand the love of cheese, however, there is a hidden cost to it, that I have experienced but only recently acknowledged.

The places they show on TV and in articles such as this is analogous to showing posh West End made-to-measure tailors and pretending that those SHEIN garments from Bangladesh are made the same way, with no 'slavery' involved.

I worked in a cheese factory as a student, taking up the job with an attitude that it must be 'women's work'. How wrong I was. Twelve hour shifts, with 'every object' weighing (or wheying) upwards of 25Kg and every one of your senses brutally assaulted, always with the potential to lose life, limb or another finger in a moment of lapsed focus. Just surviving became the intellectual challenge, with many not making it past two hours before throwing in the towel. Mastery was my goal and I put in the sleepless 'nights' with relentless 'tennis elbow' to get there, achievement unlocked.

Because I was a student, this was not a forever job, and there was a higher tax threshold for students, making it financially tough but worth while.

On a trip down memory lane I looked the old place up, to discover it had shut down due to numerous health and safety violations, which made me chuckle. That was the culture, and the rule, for example, those chemicals that have huge warning labels, to read such a label after getting nervous ticks after using it, would be moral cowardice. Or, if you needed someone's attention, because the machines were so loud, you would casually throw a 25 Kg object at them (a cheese or a bag of salt) as a 'gentle tap on the shoulder'.

On reflection, there is this small matter of the human cost to cheese. PETA might shock people with cheesy animal welfare issues and cardiologists might not be entirely positive about the consumption of 'saturated fat laced with salt', however, few have experienced the harsh reality of working in the industry, to have the strength to write about how extreme and ultra-violent the production of this harmless product can be.

I am not saying 'boycott the product', just 'value it more'.

Everyone wants to drive their Lambo on the moon with Montana plates thanks to social media clowns, and it has been this way since the blockchain craze of a few years ago.

I wonder if the Montana plates 'loophole' would be as well 'exploited' had it not been for the fictional world of YouTube.

On the day that the war in Afghanistan started in 2001, I visited Trafalgar Square with my sister late at night to place a singular paper crane in each of the two pools below the fountains.

I have liked paper cranes ever since, hence I commend your crane-themed fashion 'statements'.

This would make sense for me, as a long time Jetbrains user and not desiring to use AI for anything apart from single line code completion, which the current Jetbrains tools do quite well.

I have used their support before, to be extremely impressed. This is an area that they could differentiate themselves in.

IMHO this is Beginner Level, basic enjoyment, at the cost of cardiovascular health, due to those saturated fats that the man in the sandwich shop never tells you about.

To up your sandwich enjoyment game, what you want is a bread making machine, ideally by Panasonic, with plenty of flour in the cupboards and a well-rehearsed routine of putting the bread on.

Here you get delayed gratification since it takes three minutes to load the machine and four hours for it to bake a loaf. You get proper bakery smells, which is a bonus, and the freshest bread in town (the second you unload the machine).

Freshness is a hack with any bread you buy. It is usually harmless additives that keep it 'fresh', but there is no need for the 'harmless additives' when you have a Panasonic machine. You won't find yourself adding weird chemicals, but you could find yourself adding, nuts, seeds, berries and other fruit to your bakes, to suit your whims or preferences of your guests.

Sometimes some people notice your fresh bread and insist on telling you how much better their sourdough is (that they made once in lockdown) or how that their local bakery makes far nicer bread than your pathetic little Panasonic machine. So you get an extra 'last laugh' from having to endure these ad-hoc lectures on sourdough that is just not in the same league as your favourite bread made effortless by your lovely machine.

You might miss out on interactions with that sandwich store (they rob you slowly, hence the staff will know your name and preferences, if a regular), however, people outside the sourdough cult are always impressed by home made bread, even if you insist it was effortlessly made.

Making your own bread connects you to our history of making bread, plus you get a much healthier product, arguably real bread, unlike that nonsense that is commercially sold as 'bread'.

Eating a sandwich now, haven't bought one for maybe five years.

Looks like a realm of 'I bit off more than I can chew' when it comes to results. Good to see OpenSeadragon in the wild on Flaming Spork's site (for prsenting images). It is a rarely ploughed furrow of artistic endeavour, and I suspect that is for good reason (of difficulty).

My plan was to experiment on the canal towpath with bicycle and basic android phone. I think I need a proper camera and the train.

Many thanks! Those trains are beauties. Looks like I had best get out there, giving it a go. It is canalside that I want.

I suspect there is more to this story. Post pandemic, I wonder if there are more people drinking on their lonesome as a coping strategy with fewer people drinking socially because it is too expensive to do so.

My father was in the former category, and ultimately it was alcohol that killed him. He thought he was a moderate drinker, not an alcoholic, and I doubt he would have self-reported drinking 'heavily' with his beer-goggles on. As far as he was concerned, he had always enjoyed a glass of wine with a meal, to have spirits as a 'night cap' and beer on sunny afternoons.

I saw the progression, and I went the other way, from 'enjoying' a drink on special occasions, always socially, never home alone, to complete abstinence. I decided that I no longer wanted to enable the alcohol dependent person by drinking, or have the health complications.

Looking back on the drinking I have done over the years, it was always people that brought me pleasure, not that vile alcohol stuff that brought us together. Motivation for going to the pub was meeting certain people, not drinking particular beverages.

As you can imagine, I am going to gleefully report 'I never touch that poison' to a pollster, whereas my father would never report drinking more than he used to, because he didn't see what was going on with his liver (and wallet).

I have a long-standing dream to use a line scan camera from a moving train, assuming everything would be easy, if I had the camera. Little did I realise how much work is needed to tidy up the imagery!

Your work is extremely beautiful, and I am truly envious of your work, the aesthetic is awesome. I want to do it on the cheap though, with a regular phone as camera.

I think you have given me the directions needed to make some bold steps towards getting what I want out of the 'medium'.

"Chinese whispers" - a Chinese colleague teased me about using that phrase in a meeting, which made me question whether I needed to use that phrase in other contexts (e.g. conversation with family, in my home town, or with close friends).

I am not ready to use the Americanism, 'teh telephone game', since nobody knows what that means, yet everyone over a certain age knows what 'Chinese whispers' means.

Congratulations on going down the SVG 'rabbit hole'!

There are also interesting inheritance rules with SVG, so you could define the basic shape of a key, well, several shapes, just as rects in the defs, with no stroke or fill specified.

Then, at the group level, you can then specify stroke and fill, so there could be a group of normal keys, another group for modifiers, function keys and so on.

Then there are the keys themselves, how do you clone a shape and put different text inside each clone? There are many ways to do this but I think you are on the right track using the clip path approach, albeit using the rects in the defs.

What is interesting about SVG is that artists don't care for the file format, they just see text as shapes on a page. Then programmers don't care for SVG as that is a graphic designer/artworker thing. So SVG sits in this witch-space, with only a few brave enough to wade in and do cool stuff.

Given your application, and given the fun that could be had with SMIL/JS, you could make your SVG files interactive, so you press a key and a popover tells you more about what that key does. You can even get audio working in SVG, as well as HTML popovers (in foreignobjects, as buttons, but working, nonetheless).

'Views' is another interesting SVG feature. I have a sprite sheet that uses a lot of views, where you are projecting your SVG into some type of virtual canvas, taking a 'picture' of it, and then incorporating that in something else, maybe a CSS variable.

One 'deadly addiction' is animation. Filters are another 'deadly addiction'. Why have a static and actually useful diagram, when you can animate it, move the 'camera' and add the equivalent of 27 Photoshop layers as filters to everything?

For example, supposing you wanted to show what keys to press, with there being modifiers and a sequence, e.g. 'Hello World!'. The animation for one letter could be what triggers the animation for the next 'key press' and so it goes.

My top tip of all: reposition the origin (0,0) to where it makes sense. Many objects have symmetry, so you can define one side, clone it, scale it (-1,1) and do it all around 0,0 to then translate the results to somewhere sensible.

I have found the JetBrains IDEs to be extremely useful for SVG, the preview feature is very helpful, as are the code hints.

AI sort of knows SVG, so I have had some suggestions from Google on how to build filters. These never work, but they do get you thinking. Say you wanted to use filters to add specular highlights and animated shadows to the keys, that would be fair game for AI hints on how to do it.

50% of consumer spending is by the top 10% of consumers, with that 10% generally being Apple ecosystem people. Anyone with ecommmerce stats can confirm this, Apple consumers just shop and consume more, particularly at the high end.

This gives the impression that Apple are even bigger than they are.

Impressive! I had to peek at the SVG file and it superficially looks good, however, as is the case with everything AI, the more you look, the more it doesn't make any sense.

By now AI should know of the DRY concept. But no. Hence the keys have a rounded rectangle for the key shape and another rounded rectangle for a clip path, to prevent text overflow. There are 72 * 2 = 144 identical rectangles, when just one would suffice (in the defs), with this being cloned once for the clip path, and 72 times for the keys.

I would not expect SVGO levels of optimisation (rounding numbers, that sort of thing), however, the human, if writing out the same thing for the 72nd time, might think 'is there a better way', to get the manual out. A graphics program such as Illustrator would not do that, but AI 'should' because AI.

The above is not criticism of your work, just an observation regarding AI SVG capabilities.

I was spoilt by SGI and their wonderful interface, where every detail was awesomely cool. The Sun machines were just old-fashioned at this superficial but important level of how it all looked, but only if you knew better, and that meant experience of SGI. In the world of IRIX, we had CPU-eater desktop wallpaper, meanwhile, on Sun, you had some badly drawn window decorations.

I imagine this to be the awful GUI that you speak of.

I say look and feel is superficial, however, when you have to learn a variant of UNIX with slightly different command line switches to the UNIX you know, with an interface worse than even Windows (3.11), for it to run dog slow, a lot of copium is needed. A poor interface gets in the way of what you are trying to do, a cool interface just lets you get on with it.

In Europe we had this minor disagreement in 1914, which we would prefer not to talk about.

One consequence of this was the decimation of skilled craftsmen. Millions of them were sent off to become machine-gun fodder, to never return to their respective trades.

Along with them was their craft. The next generation of apprentices never had the mentors they needed, hence that was that, the end of what you might call traditional architecture.

There was another minor disagreement that began at various times depending on one's nationality. In the UK this meant 1939, and with it a second 'double tap' on the skilled craftsmen that the building trade used to rely on.

Many of the survivors did get to work on war memorials, and every village has one, carved in stone, and often kept in immaculate condition to this day.

In my local station there are two memorials, and I struggle to hold it in as I walk past. Needless to say, we lost a lot of good railway workers too. Sad.

There wasn't a lot of money after each of these minor disagreements and heavily blitzed cities still bear the scars. There can be a wonderful parade of shops with flats above, with wonderful craftsmenship, which is truly wonderful considering they didn't have motorised vehicles as we know them, or cherry pickers, or any machine that is big and yellow (JCB in the UK).

Nowadays there can be a huge 1870s building, with four storeys, all with big rooms and high ceilings, next to some 'rubbish' that was built in the post-disagreement years.

Some places were physically removed from the map. A 500 bomber raid on the special crane used to hoist big guns onto the ships of the Royal Navy happened one night. They completely missed the crane to destroy the entirety of Clydebank, a district of Glasgow. People are sore about that to this day.

The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me.

So yes, you are correct, but there is more to the story than just a Modernist story of cheap mass production. The limit was not resources as you can see the quarries that were abandoned after the first minor disagreement, and there is enough stone in any given mountain to make millions of homes. The limit was the loss of men as well as the loss of European colonies, on which the wealth of European cities came from.

Moving swiftly on, I am no Ferrari fan under normal circumstances, however, Lewis Hamilton currently drives for their Formula One team and he is a hero of mine. Hence I am willing to defend the loathed Luce!

The Luce does have Mr Ive's design input and I don't think anyone is critical of the interior. It is well understood that serious tax avoidance vehicles need to stay away from having big screens on the dashboard since they are not going to age well (and F1 cars don't have such things). Having four seats rather than just the two makes sense to me, since the car needs to have some length to it for high speed stability and there is no need for a massive red V12 engine in the middle of the car.

The Luce brings much from the world of F1, including high performance cooling systems that cost 100x the price of the radiators in your car. People like older cars because they can tune them, the Luce is the first EV that is what you might call tune-able, with the owner able to set the car up for a given track or just the road, with them also able to do what they want with it.

The aerodynamic package is ahead of its time, and, as such, it will draw criticism. We have been here before, notably in the UK with the Ford Sierra. This was a 'jelly mould' shaped version of the three-box saloon that had gone before, the Cortina. Initially the press hated on the Sierra and people did have genuine misgivings. However, it did not take long before the Sierra rose to the top of the sales charts to set the trend for the 'jelly mould' look, these being the 'peak car' maintainable vehicles that people wish they had today.

Fortunately I will never be a customer for Ferrari, however, if I was a tax-dodging benevolent dictator with the wealth to put together a motor museum, I would not hesitate to buy a Luxe for the collection, to go alongside an OG Tesla Model S, with the faux grille, and a Xiaomi SU7. I would like to add a Ford Cortina and a Ford Sierra too, however, millions were made and millions rusted away, leaving none for my fantasy museum, particularly in the desired Saluki Bronze colour.

Groups such as Extinction Rebellion are easy to steer off course by the state into taking meaningless actions such as gluing themselves to London Underground trains.

Perhaps this is just as well. If Extinction Rebellion really wanted to take down the entire transport network, they could do so by 'accidentally' touring the big stations with a leaky rucksack filled with lead paint fragments or ground up asbestos tiles, to then tip off the press. This would probably reveal an unfortunate truth, that there was plenty of aforementioned toxins already on the network, from brake pads and paint of yesteryear. Nonetheless, some closure for the guys in hazmat suits would be needed.

Almost all magazines go though an arc of success, plateau and decline. Audiences and writers move on or retire.

I very much like and use CSS-Tricks, however, in itself it reflects a somewhat dated frontend design process and rarely uses any CSS tricks to clothe the Wordpress core that enforces dated design processes.