DrBazza

Which are the US made computers? Start by excluding all the ones with Korean LCD panels, and Taiwanese motherboards, and Chinese parts.

If you mean assembled then there are lots of very small European companies that make custom build PCs.

Economies of scale in the US, a single language, and cheap transport, mean that the US companies grow very big internally, very easily. And then go international without much effort. The same is not true in Europe, so there's not a huge Dell, HP, or IBM equivalent.

In 2026, the only country on the entire planet that can likely make their own computer with 100% their parts and labour, and is actively trying, is China.

If you work in finance, you've probably just bankrupted your company.

Nanoseconds matter.

Clean code tends to equal simple code, which tends to equal fast code.

The order of items in memory does matter, as does cache locality. 32Kb fits in L1 cache.

If of course you're talking about web apps then that's just always been the Wild West.

If we're talking about fitting a quart into a pint pot, it would be remiss not to mention Elite fitting into a BBC Model B, 32kb, and the excellent code archaeology of it, and variants by Mark Moxon here: https://www.bbcelite.com/

Same. I watched last night, UK time, and I couldn't shake the worrying feeling. I was relieved that they got into orbit. Now I can be a little bit excited until re-entry. That worries me for the same reason.

In the UK as a kid, when Challenger happened, our children's news programme reported it before the mainstream TV.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/sci_tech/newsid_2701000/27...

C++ isn't the first language to do things, but was/is often the first mainstream language to do things.

And then people complain about C++ for doing it wrong, or its complexity, and show language 'X' that does it better/right, but only because they saw C++ do it first, and 'not quite right'.

I expect contracts to be similar - other languages will watch, learn, and do version two, and then complain about c++, etc.

It took 'quite a while' to get rid of auto_ptr, for example.

If it wasn't for the fact this is a language feature, it would be better off in boost where it can be tested in the wild.

> better API documentation and conventional coding tools

Agreed, and it depends on the language I suppose. I'm a C++ developer and when you start working with templates even at a non-casual level, the compiler errors due to either genuine syntactic errors or 'seems correct but the standard doesn't support' can be infuriatingly obtuse. The LLM 'just knows' the standard (kind of, all 2k pages), and can figure out and fix most of those errors far faster than I can. In fact one of my preferred usages is to point Codex at my compiler output and get it to do nothing more than fix template errors.

Kotlin, for example, is much more in your face, in the IDE which does a correctness pass, before you even invoke the compiler (in the traditional sense) and the language spec is considerably leaner with less (no?) UB, unlike C++.

There are still large untapped known fields in the North Sea within UK waters adjacent to the same that Norway are still profitably using. There is also vast swathes of UK waters that are unexplored, and are currently artificially expensive to do so due to UK taxation on fossil fuel companies.

The price of petrol at the pump is at least 50% Government direct tax - fuel duty, VAT (which multiplies the duty value - very cheeky). Then the other parts - wholesale price, retailer profit, delivery costs, have their tax implicitly priced into that. That probably makes the overall Government take something like 70% of the price you pay.

As for coal, there's apparently about 600 million tons of accessible usable coal left, which at current UK usage is good for quite a few decades if not more.

Today is abnormally windy in the north of the country, and sunny, so this is not unexpected.

By their own data, today is about 18GW for wind, and this time last week it was 3GW.

No candlestick maker? I'm disappointed ;)

My local highstreet also had several betting shops where none previously existed. It's quite depressing really, and gambling invariably targets the poorest in the community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub-a-dub-dub

> Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.

Here's one story about gambling in the UK: the TV advertising is relentless and out of control after 9pm due to legislation passed in the early 00s. Gambling can quite literally lose you your house, friends and family. But apparently it's totally fine to advertise as long as HMRC get ££££. On some TV channels, every second advert, or worse, most adverts, are gambling. Bingo? Slots? Poker? Sports? All of the above.

The biggest UK tax payer for several years was Denise Coates.

Tobacco advertising, on the other hand, is totally banned in the UK, but won't lose you your house or family and friends (unless of course you die).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Coates

Most of the other replies to this hit the nail on the head.

A human writing some poor, but working code that is supposed to be a demo, goes to production 9 times out of 10.

Then it becomes critical infrastructure.

Then management cannot understand why something working needs a rewrite because there's no tangible numbers attached to it. The timeless classic developer problem.

We were here ^^^^ up to 2024-2025.

Now, with LLMs, you can at least come up with a vibe coded, likely correct, likely faster, solution in a morning, that management won't moan at you about.

> memory bandwidth is always the bottleneck

I'm hoping that today's complaints are tomorrow's innovations. Back when 1Mb hard drive was $100,000, or when Gates said 640kb is enough.

Perhaps some 'in the (chip) industry' can comment on what RAM manufacturers are doing at the moment - better, faster, larger? Or is there not much headroom left and it's down to MOBO manufacturers, and volume?

> “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”

Modern politics by a different name. The parallels are obvious, along with the Peter Principle and so on.

Lots of people on here saying 'that's not me', but probably say 'ping me back' or 'learnings' which is very much one end of the spectrum of corporate bullshit that infects everyone. Some of it is stupidity (the English language has a word: 'lessons'), some of it is natural language evolution, and some of it is 'global' English: 'please revert', and some of it is very intentional management waffle. As the (unviersity) saying goes, 'if you can't blind 'em with science, baffle them with bullshit'.

And when we've somehow stopped using fossil fuels for electricity, what next?

Guess what a lot of plastic is made from? And how planes fly, and boats move?

And there's lots of countries that aren't at 'Western' living standards. So we have decades of those countries building and emissions to come.

Plus of course there's a lag in CO2 emissions to climate change. The next couple of decades are going to get a lot worse, before they get better, if at all.

https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...

I'm old enough to remember when 640k ought to be enough for anybody.

Maybe? The judge, and the lawyers involved have the right to reject jurors that might prejudice a trail.

> I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power in the late 20th century. And this clearly set us in the wrong direction as far as reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

I don't have much time for Greenpeace. Much of their activism has never been science based, and usually involves criminal acts against property. History will not be kind to them.

Their only highlight is 'saving' the whales. For a while.

The claims were for defamation and incitement:

> A Morton County jury on Wednesday ordered Greenpeace to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, finding that the environmental group incited illegal behavior by anti-pipeline protesters and defamed the company.

> The nine-person jury delivered a verdict in favor of Energy Transfer on most counts, awarding more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer and Dakota Access LLC.

It seems like the jury did its job on the evidence presented.

Because it comes 'free' with an Office365 subscription. Embrace (<<you are here), extend, extinguish.

It's usually 'management'. The same management that won't pay for developer tools (including Slack) because 'why do you need that when you can do 95% of your work in VSCode?' It's also usually the same sort of management that can do 95% of their documents in... VSCode and markdown. Or LibreOffice.

We usually hear about the US and Canada losing power mostly due to freezing rain across a continent sized area as most of the power cables are on poles.

How does that compare to Norway?

It took several decades for the language server protocol and debugger server protocol (or whatever it's called). Is there a common 'agent' protocol yet? Or are these companies still in the walled-garden phase?

It's just missing the inevitable 'desire paths' that are the routes that people really want to walk, not some wibbly wobbly path that a junior planner drew.

Don't forget the old sales technique, £3.99 < £4.00. What a bargain!!!

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience with explorer.

And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual Studio is on its splash screen.

And another that has written a debugger with the same performance.

And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust opening in just under 2 seconds.

Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance. Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable future.

Yes. I don't want to know the politics either, but on at least one occasion, for me, it gave me a very good and correct indicator of when to jump ship and saved me a lot of uncertainty (i.e. unemployment).

Yes, as pointed out, I was mistaken, but then in my defence, I've only ever set up one Mac, 5 years ago, so I've only seen 'that screen' once.

I didn't know that. Thanks. Setting up my mac once in 5 years means it isn't a screen I've seen very often!

I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all know what a squarified mess that was.

Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me.

For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.

Knowing more about your company and how well your employer is doing allows you to plan your exit strategy.

If you get stressed about that, imagine finding yourself redundant by close of business today, and job hunting from tomorrow.

Interesting. Something to think about. Thanks.