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

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

US plugs & sockets optionally have all of those features. And the fuse in the plug is because the UK allowed ring circuits, which cause house fires if the individual appliances aren't fused. It only blows if the appliance has already drawn too much current, which almost always means the appliance already has a fault.

It's nice that they're mandatory though.

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

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

for 99.5% potential buyers yes, it is, if it can't run bank apps (or other apps requiring GMS), personally I don't use banking apps on phone but I realize I am extreme negligible minority, which is why I said "pretty much dead", that "pretty much" covers that <0.5% users

we're quickly getting into "we're sorry, you can't access the site unless you verify with android/iphone" so yes, that would be essentially dead

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)