Skwid

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

I've never much luck selling a language on cleat benefits alone, but I guess there's not many climbers in my department.

A little conflicted on this one. I firmly believe there is too much distracted driving going on right now. And yet, I find driving a modern car a hugely distracting experience.

On the assumption we cant roll back those distractions this is probably a positive step if well implemented, but I do feel like we're largely patching over problems of our own creation.

I still think mandating all physical controls, and nothing more complex than a radio would probably be a bigger improvement. Determinedly lousy drivers will subvert any system you add, I think it's a better use of resources to help the average 'good enough' driver stay on task than trying to engineer around the social problem of those that don't want to.

Obligatory new car anecdote: Last year on my first drive of a hire car the lane keeping 'assistance' misread some worn out road markings and violently steered me into another lane. It ripped the wheel right out of my hands, collision avoided only by the other drivers reflexes.

I do not appreciate the apparent lack of tradition reliability engineering in a lot of these systems. A single camera and computer vision has no business being in a life critical path with no redundancy.

You can do something similar in 3D with Luneberg lenses, as used on the AN/SPG-59[1]. A truly wild piece of engineering, as is the following SCANFAR system if you're into that sort of thing. I can only assume someone in the top brass had a skim of Arthur C Clarke's Superiority and forwarded it straight on to engineering with a big green approved stamp.

1. https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/content/techdigest/pdf/...

There's also the upgrade path of 2 dishwashers with a single 'clean' token moved between the two. Cupboards are an legacy product holding back progress.

Those I've used in the UK aren't so bad, they're cold fill only with a heating element in the sump. It takes maybe 15 minutes to fill and get up to temperature at the start of a shift, after that each cycle is ~2 minutes.

The hot water is recirculated during the wash, the rinse uses fresh water from the tap with the excess going out an overflow. A little sump water gets replaced every cycle, but enough stays that it's back up to temperature before you've emptied and refilled it. There's also a small peristaltic pump to top up the detergent directly from the bottle.

Not much benefit in a home setting unless you fancy having it hot and ready 24/7 though.

Well now I want an interactive LaTex UI framework in the style of NeWS

That's 2.5% more neutrons, surely that must be better!

As others have said, the crap resolution is to mask the crap repeatability. Better processing can help, but good enough processing fits in the cheapest of microcontrollers. ADC quality is more important, signal conditioning and sensor quality more important still. The biggest factor for accuracy is likely calibration though. A sensor that's 2% accurate with a 2 point calibration can easily become a 0.25% sensor with a 5 point, 3 temperature calibration. But that all takes time, and unless you're running huge batches it adds too much to the bottom line of a low cost product. Source: Designed strain gauge sensors and manufacturing processes for a living

Large pile of waffle incoming:

This was the way for me. I spent a good few years trying proper dumbphones, but I always needed an app for something. Carrying two phones didn't work, no off the shelf 'Smart, yet dumb' phone had the particular mix of features I needed.

The best half way house I found was a Nokia 2720, it runs Kai OS (Formerly Firefox OS), so very easy to throw a quick app together and add new features as needed. Unfortunately all the important apps were similarly thrown together, battery life was awful, calls, alarms and messages came through when they felt like it, the T9 predictive text was diabolically bad.

I went back to basic android for a while, tried all sorts of settings and methods to cut back, but I am just too vulnerable to their flashy attention grabbing tricks.

But the e-ink? Hot damn it worked. Everything I actually needed, and just enough friction that I don't use any more. The lack of colour certainly neutralises a lot of the attention grabbing tactics, but I think the real difference for me is the lack of fluidity. It's always just a device, and never reaches extension of self territory. It is truly refreshing how many times I've left the house without it and only noticed a few hours later.

As for manufacturers and quality, I went with a Hisense A9 as it seemed to have the best open source support at the time. It was a bit pricey considering the general specs, but when the screen is the bottleneck you don't miss the processor speed or camera quality. (I actually quite like the lousy photo experience, it feels a bit more like film, or early digital where you just have to shoot and hope it comes out ok)

Despite that, I've ended up sticking with the manufacturer ROM with just a few tweaks. Perhaps its selling all my data to the CCP, but it's rock solid and much more polished than any cheap android phone I've used previously. It's really well set up to get the best from the hardware too, in a way that the lineage port couldn't quite match.

If you think it might work for you, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try.

The main caveat I'd offer if you're trying to reduce your screen time is that it doesn't work if you primarily waste time reading. Reading is a joy with this, and I am much more likely than before to pick up an e-book or finish a long article I'd otherwise have skimmed.

Other quirks of the A9 if anyone is considering it: - The GNSS receiver is atrocious, it regularly fails to get a fix in clear open fields. - It's a small battery, low power phone. I usually get most of a week out of a charge, but one heavy background app can drop that to less than a day. Discord was the worst until stopping all background activity, WiFi hotspot is also pretty brutal on the battery. - The stock OS has a deliberately very limited notification system. Get used to intentionally checking for messages every now and then - Doesn't play nice with non-chinese carriers. Out of the box I had intermittent SMS, no VoLTE and regular call drops. All fixable via shuffling some files around over ADB though, see XDA for the how to - All specs are OK. The camera is OK. The speakers are OK. The processor processes. That's all you get. - Some apps are just not E-Ink friendly. Spotify and google maps are the worst I use regularly. Scrolling, full screen movement, contrast and dark themes are the enemy. They are both totally useable, but it can take more than a glance. - No IP rating, I don't go swimming with it but it sure rains a lot here and I don't like having to care + The 3.5mm output is gorgeous, sounds fantastic with any headphones I've tried. Easily the best of any smartphone I've used + It is very nice E-Ink. Lots of totally useable apps for the A9 would not be so on a lesser screen. + Though I rarely use it, the frontlight is very nice to have and intuitively controlled

pali pona a! ike mi wan li ni: suli pi sitelen lon lipu ni li sama ala e sitelen kama jo. ni li pona tawa sina anu seme?

Nice work! My only complaint is that the downloaded picture is lot bigger than the preview for me, is that as expected or is it maybe making some bad assumptions about DPI?

I do this once or twice a year in a borrowed/hired auto car. Usually about 10 minutes into the drive when I've got used to it, and started to drive more naturally. Approach junction, throttle back, stamp full uncoordinate force of left foot on to 'clutch' pedal, send passengers through the windscreen.