roryirvine

Have you deliberately connected your account?

For me, it was all clearly based on Amazon purchases from the last couple of years. I expected to be appalled by the privacy implications but, actually, it seemed fine to me - pretty much what you'd expect if you asked an LLM to summarise my recent orders.

The Gaurdian's liveblogger is almost certainly reporting this second-hand, most likely based on watching a livestream from some broadcast news channel. They're not actually at the court themselves.

The current models are much fancier but until 2019 they were using various variations of the old Alvis Wheelbarrow, which dated all the way back to 1972!

https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/collections/remotec-wh...

They were a fairly common sight on the streets of Belfast in the 1980s/90s, where carrying out controlled explosions on unattended vehicles proved to be a remarkably effective deterrent against illegal parking...

Yeah, I noticed they were recommending that users log in and reset their password - at a time when ASOS still hadn't said anything about the extent of the problem.

For all they knew, the attackers could have been able to subvert the reset process to collect plaintext passwords, so the Beeb's advice risked turning a disaster for ASOS into a catastrophe for their users.

Drax originally claimed that the imported wood would only be used while UK supply was built up. Needless to say, that never happened.

Then, once it became clear that the plan to source from the UK wasn't going to work, they claimed the subsidies should continue to enable them to fit CCS kit. Needless to say, that also hasn't happened.

Taken separately, you could probably squint a bit and say that either scheme was fair enough - worth trying, if only as a minor hedge against unexpected problems with more promising renewables + storage schemes. But taken together, it's hard to ignore the pattern of repeated failures wrapped in endless dissembling.

Time to pull the plug and turn the site (and its huge grid connections) into a giant battery storage array with a bit of useful solar draped over the top.

The European WEEE Directive forces vendors to take back old consumer electronics free of charge. And tech companies tend to offer fairly generous recycling schemes for recent-ish kit (so I'm happy to get a new phone every 3 years as I know I'll get a ~45% discount when trading in the old one).

Those are the sort of programmes which could be built on - so, for instance, you could mandate a floor on trade-in values so that manufacturers would have to pay, say, at least 5% of the purchase price to take back even broken, obsolete, or life-expired items rather than merely not charging.

Yes, that might need to be reflected to some degree in the purchase price for lower-margin goods, but there'd be a bunch of positive effects - making it worth the manufacturer's while to prioritise reuse and recycling when specifying components, reducing the risk of inappropriate disposal, supporting a secondary market for component reuse (as already exists in places like Shenzen), and reinforcing a less disposable culture.

Back in your supposed golden age of the early 2000s the cars were purely aero-limited, there were only a handful of overtaking moves for the lead during the entire season, and Schumacher would simply lead a procession to the finish in almost every race.

People moaned and moaned and said things were so much better in the days of active suspension, traction control, automatic transmission, and launch control. (But, of course, when those things were current people said life was better in the good old days with ground effect and massive turbos...)

Everyone always hates the current regulations, no matter what they happen to contain. But if you were to run a truly open formula the cars would be way too fast for any conceivable track and you'd see a casualty rate that would make the Isle of Man TT races look like a children's birthday party.

It's a pity that new media has never really thrown up a replacement for those sort of columnists, isn't it? Negroponte in Wired, Douglas Adams in MacUser, and (slightly more obscure!) Dave Langford's work in various Amstrad PCW magazines in the UK.

Slashdot did experiment a little with Jon Katz, most notably his 'Voices from the Hellmouth' series, but he was never really aiming to sound the same note of wry detachment as those magazine greats.

It's a pity - I'd rather read a monthly column of that sort than any amount of pointless bickering on Twitter.

And if the bubble does pop chaotically, the open weight inference providers will become even more viable as they'll be able to buy racks full of compute for pennies on the dollar.

Something very similar happened with the late 90s telecoms bubble, which collapsed a little before the dot com bust. There was a very nice living to be made by many small/mid-sized providers who were able to feed on the remains for about a decade afterwards.

Slightly nonsensical to apply modern discourse about European colonisation to events of 1,700 years ago, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Aksum#Religion

Mostly Britain, though Maxwell did also very briefly control both Prentice Hall and the American side of Macmillan from 1988/9.

Some of the (rather convoluted) history is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macmillan_Inc.#Mergers_and_end - but there's not much evidence for any conspiracy GP may have been hinting at.

(Cap'n Bob Maxwell was essentially the left-wing Rupert Murdoch - big on tabloid journalism and building media empires through fair means and foul. A hugely controversial character, but his involvement in textbook publishing was fairly incidental)

Yeah, I ran to find the product page - only to find that it "Fits 2026 Releases Only". Agh!

Also it only fits the Signature Editions and will only be available in March (in the UK, at least).

I'm still mourning the Oasis :(

Yes, Rolls Royce are making a similar sales pitch for their slightly larger (470 MWe) SMRs - they can be built on the site of decommissioned 1st gen reactors or paired to directly replace old coal-fired plants.

There's a chance that it might work out reasonably well, depending on how long they take to build and bring into service in practice. If it can be done quickly enough (RR claim 4 years) then it'd be a useful fillip while the renewable buildout is ongoing and the system is still grid-constrained.

In the medium term, it's unclear whether it can be competitive with the alternative of just turning those sites over to batteries, but it's probably worth a try as a hedge against some sort of unforeseen problem with scaling out storage.

The problem is that anaesthesia has proven difficult for non-medics to reliably administer.

(As demonstrated by this botched execution, which used pentobarbital - a barbituate used for anaesthesia)

Agreed. Mock executions are considered to be a form of torture. Botched executions are perhaps even worse, given the actual physical pain and severe risk of brain injuries being inflicted.

And this BWRX design is based on ABWR which turned out to be only 70% in practice.

You don't get much useful notice for unplanned nuclear outages either, whereas both wind and solar output can be forecast with reasonable accuracy 24h in advance.

I'd love to know what their actual plan is, the one they hope will allow them to manage a soft landing rather than a sudden crash when the music stops.

I mean, they must have one and it must be at least minimally plausible - otherwise the regulatory authorities would have stepped in long before things got to this stage... right?

I've often used this when staying somewhere I've not been to before - the version in the app is particularly useful as it displays the results on a map.

You can turn the animation off - but, when you do, there's still a ~2s pause when the workspace you switch to is dimmed and unresponsive so it feels just as janky.

There's simply no way to quickly flick from one space to another and then back again, which is something that could be done more or less instantly on Linux desktops back in the late 90s!

Sadly, the ABWR has also proven to be unreliable and uneconomic.

Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment) but eventually pulled out after 12 years with £2bn spent and nothing built.

Maybe the BWRX will have better luck - but I'd not want to stake any money on it myself.

On the other hand, I've noticed that posting anything even vaguely complimentary about FF will often get a bunch of upvotes, so I suspect there's a large base of silent supporters who are similarly baffled by all of the noisy hostility.

Sadly, I think some of the heat is driven by culture war issues so people feel the need to pick a fight rather than simply ignoring something which doesn't suit their needs.

It'd be much more effective to close the gaping loopholes which allow importing, selling, and servicing unrestricted and unsafe ebikes and escooters (currently you just need to have some small print informing riders that they should be insured, licensed, and only use them on roads where mopeds are permitted - even though no-one actually does that).

Ideally, you'd go back in time and do this before the problem really took off - but failing that, you could introduce scrappage/swap schemes to incentivise taking existing bikes out of circulation.

To tighten things up further, you might think about making safety certification mandatory, and force delivery platforms to take responsibility for ensuring that their riders are using only certified bikes.

Deal with the source of the problem rather than wasting police time on chasing down every teenage cyclist or bringing back sus laws.

I got yelled at to "stop being so bloody obstreperous" all the time as a child!

But, yeah. Add to that the tendency to use untranslated French phrases, which was pretty common in highbrow UK journalism even into the early 2000s. Pretty much everyone in Britain learnt French as their second language, but there are plenty of people who went to school in other countries who have no French at all so it was pretty exclusionary.

Ha, yes - he was often featured in their adverts on the back cover of a bunch of computer magazines.

I once heard a secondhand anecdote about an ad sales person at Dennis Publishing who had encouraged Novell to believe the ads featuring him were particularly popular and should therefore be repeated. Assuming that Novell were completely unaware of the UK meaning, that seems a bit cruel in retrospect...

I'd rather they concentrated on making them cold-resistant, as them going grey without ever ripening properly is so common in the UK.

Big supermarkets are the worst for it - they often seem to chill all fruit by default at some point in the supply chain. Bananas are so much better from a greengrocer or market stall (or even corner shop!), especially if they've been sitting for a while near a bunch of plantains which always seems to help kickstart the ripening process.

Learning the basics is fairly easy and many people find the process to be quite enjoyable...

For me it was the juxtaposition of apparently realistic descriptions of orbital mechanics with the half-arsed handwavy gibberish about biology.

Maybe it's because I know more about life sciences than physics and simply missed that the orbital bits were equally nonsensical, but at least they didn't manage to shatter by suspension of disbelief. But then some vague magical genetics and a brief mention of "yeah, they can eat algae" are used to solve a bunch of intractable problems - and both treated as being far less interesting than, as you say, pykrete!

Given the title of the book and the fact that the final third hinges on the biological bits, it felt incredibly lop-sided - like he'd spent all his research time playing with Kerbal Space Program and only got round to stitching the two parts of the book together on the night before the deadline.

Usually referred to as "fractional" roles - often used for senior advisors and executive board level posts, and for CxO roles that aren't central to the business (eg. CFO for non-finance companies, CTO/CIO for non-tech companies).

I wouldn't expect to see it for sales so much, as it would mess with the incentive structure and you kind of want your salesfolk to be "all in". Same goes for CEO or COO - they might have a small portfolio of non-exec board memberships (or similar) on the side, but it's hard to do a good job if your primary focus is split between multiple distinct businesses.

The only thing that might give me pause is that there's no conciliatory language coming from Mongodb to indicate that it was a negotiated exit, not even a bland "by mutual agreement".

In fact, they seem to have gone out of their way to minimise any mention of him which, to me, suggests that it might have been worded that way based on legal advice rather than for PR reasons.

Yeah, notice periods are typical at that level even in the USA where they're not often used for the rank and file. A star candidate may have had sufficient leverage to negotiate them away, but I don't expect that to have been the case here.

Sometimes a new employer will offer compensation for any loss of stock options and/or to indemnify against any claim for breach of contract or similar.

But it could also be that Mongo have simply agreed to release him - he was only there for 10 months, and might not have turned out to be a great fit. Their share price has been more or less level in that time whilst competitors have been rising so it's not as if he had notable immediate success in boosting their appeal to enterprise customers.