foldr

>they managed to do this without the thing that you're claiming is now necessary.

They managed to do it when none of their competitors were doing it either. It's a low margin business.

> And even if an event like this only happens once in 20 years, all of those savings evaporate.

I don't think the numbers on that actually track, if you look at the estimated damages that are available. At once every 20 years, you'd still come out ahead.

Less efficiently. Supermarkets compete with each other on price. Margins are very thin, and supermarkets are much more efficient than they were decades ago.

You're confusing different layers of encryption. The physical storage is indeed encrypted as bradknowles describes. Your iCloud-shareable keys ensure that only you can read your files. The hardware-level encryption ensures that an SSD can only be accessed from the SoC that it's paired with.

The quoted section makes sense to me. It’s like video decoding: the more you can do in hardware, and the fewer user mode / kernel mode switches, the less CPU you use and the less power you consume.

Like the sibling, I can't really agree with this. Google is now quite good at answering general queries and doing simple calculations, which is a big step up from its capabilities a few years ago. For example, you can ask

> What is the equivalent focal length on APS-C of 80mm on full frame?

and get the correct answer. It's not good compared to frontier AI models, but that's to be expected, given that you don't pay for it.

That's a bit of a false dichotomy, as you could pay ~$200 to get them assembled by one of the Chinese PCBA services.

I’ve found that PCBWay will do these kinds of checks, and I’ve had no problem communicating with them in English for basic stuff (contrast sibling comment about JLCPCB). Anyway, English <-> Chinese machine translation is getting so good that I can’t see this being much of a blocker for long.

A lot of it is moving small objects precisely from point A to point B while integrating expert domain knowledge and general awareness of what’s going on. This stuff can be automated in principle, but with diminishing returns after a point.

Agree with this. I used to do my own assembly almost as a point of pride, but the Chinese shops will do it so cheap now that you are really just torturing yourself to no purpose. (It’s fun the first few times, but gets old pretty quick.)

That should never cause a crash. You don't let one train go onto a section of track unless you know that there's no other train on that section of track. If train A has failed to move when instructed, then train B waits for it to move.

Aside from running local LLMs (which is tight on 32GB anyway), what on Earth are people doing that requires 32GB as a bare minimum? I have 24GB on my current MacBook Pro and never find myself limited by it. My work MacBook Pro has 16GB, and that is occasionally a bit tight. However, that's largely because the stingy 512GB SSD quickly fills up, leaving no room for swap, not because I really need more RAM as such.

That said, I don't believe that SSDs can feel pain, so I am quite happy for the OS to thrash them as much as necessary. The fear of SSD failure is massively overblown IMO.

In terms of performance, the difference is active cooling. That will matter to people who are regularly doing sustained CPU or GPU intensive workloads.

Right, but if you go too far down that table, then you get to countries that you don't necessarily want to live in because of poor civil infrastructure and public services. The US also collects quite a lot of tax revenue as a proportion of GDP by overall global standards. Mexico collects the lowest percentage of any OECD country. The UK and Canada are in the middle of the field.

https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-i... (page 8)

I think this is drawing the wrong conclusion. Humans can write assembly code too. The downside for a human is a greater time investment. For an AI agent, it's greater token usage. So, sure, you can get your agent to write assembly code directly, but just as for a human coder, all you're achieving is expending more resources for little or no benefit. You're burning tokens on problems (e.g. register allocation, stack manipulation) that can be solved more reliably with vastly less computation.

> the high taxes of Europe

Taxes in the UK are quite low by European standards. The UK's tax revenue to GDP ratio is similar to Canada's (either a bit lower or a bit higher, depending on year/source).

I used to switch between a MacBook Pro with a 120Hz display and a MacBook Air with a 60Hz display and never noticed any difference. I think I could probably have noticed if I'd put them side by side and compared the feel of the scrolling, but why would I do that?

There's a minority of people who really do notice stuff like this, which is fine. The problem is that for some reason, they sometimes have difficulty accepting that they're a minority.

As far as I can determine, the court ordered a two hour extension of the voting window across the whole country:

https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/eleicoes/zanin-prorroga-eleicao...

("Zanin extends voting until 7 p.m. this Sunday nationwide.")

As people have already pointed out to you, it can't be evidence even of that because both candidates asked for extended time.

Now you are just speculating on what would have happened in hypothetical scenarios. That's not evidence of anything.

Also, all that's achieved by extending polls for two hours across is enabling more people to vote. If that helps one or other candidate to win, it can only be because there are lots of people who want to vote for them.

The cubicle used to be the quintessential symbol of the oppressive and dreary nature of office work. Now you're romanticising it, which would have equally seemed absurd to people in the 90s laughing at Dilbert.

I mean, yeah? If you're talking about a particular country and a particular problematic national regulation, then name the country and regulation, so we can have a proper discussion about it. Otherwise this thread is just going to be generic moaning about how 'Europe' is over-regulated, which everyone has already heard a thousand times before.

That's not something that's required in 'Europe'. It would be a much better discussion if people could point to specific countries and regulations rather than talking as if the whole of Europe had a single regulatory regime for business.

I don't think it would be that shocking, if it's a conceptual confusion that's easy to make.

Ok, so you’re not talking about a specific UK political party.

You'll have to be more specific, sorry. Which political party, and what damage? I am not saying that everything is perfect in the UK. I'm just saying that the UK does not currently have an authoritarian leader making an executive power grab.

In my experience the trick is just to have a small caloric deficit. Then you just feel moderately hungry from time to time, and it's very bearable. The downside is that to consistently maintain a small deficit you have to track your calorie intake quite precisely, which is a pain.

I’d don’t disagree with any of that except lumping the current UK and US governments under the same “authoritarian” categorization. Trump is a classic authoritarian strong man pushing the limits of his constitutional authority. Nothing comparable is currently happening in the UK.

I think it would be more accurate to say that the UK and US have different problems when it comes to freedom of expression, and each country tends to notice the problems in the other one more readily than its own problems (especially because the US right likes to use the UK as a whipping boy).

From a UK point of view, what stands out currently is the cowed state of the US media. There is very little sense of a free press effectively holding the administration of the day to account. Extraordinary levels of corruption and incompetence are remarked on merely in passing.

Number of US media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with Donald Trump in recent years: 4 (totalling about $67 million).

Number of UK media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with a UK Prime Minister in recent years: 0†

† The last instances appear to have been Tony Blair in 2007 (who settled with the Daily Mail over photos of his family taken during a private holiday), and John Major in 1993 (who successfully sued the New Statesman over allegations that he'd had an affair).

France has had submarine-launched ICBMs with nuclear warheads since 1971.

That's not based on deep packet inspection; it's just low tech stuff like IP blocks. ISPs don't have the resources or expertise to DPI encrypted traffic (which is the majority of network traffic now).