It was not entirely based on how academic you were, it was also based on how many places existed and were funded. There was a cap on university placements to fit within the funding. A key part of the thinking for the tutorial fees (which I am personally against, but for this post will argue its rationale for existing) was to remove that cap and have placements based on demand.

Student loans came in early 90s rather than mid - I'm from the first year ever to have them, and I gradated in 1992.

Where's the standard comparison to well known buildings? I thought it was required for such types of articles. ;)

I'll add that the iconic Tokyo Tower, once the tallest structure in Tokyo, is 333m.
Bing tells me the empire state building is 453m.

That's pretty impressive for a windmill.

Speaking of language, I'm reminded of a Youtube video of some language nerd going around Rome speaking Latin to random people. (I forgot which strain of Latin--there are apparently a couple still currently used. It was something like the one used in church and one used in academia or something like that.)
It was everyday stuff like "How often do you come to the park?" He got >50% rate of regular folks understanding the gist of what he's saying and being able to respond. Of course, he could have edited it, but the apparent motivation was to figure out what the rate was, so it sounded legit.

I thought that was interesting.

That was my reaction as well. They'll be one of the last to be buried in the cesspool of AI crap. In fact, they may see the other countries being destroyed and maybe even successfully stop it in theirs.

I've been creating YouTube videos since 2006 or so and I have a cupboard with about 20TB of archived video and project files on external USB hard drives -- most of that has been created since I switched to recording in 4K about four years ago. With the move to 6K or even 8K raw footage, 30TB is *not* a lot of storage -- although I would be nervous about committing so much data to a single drive in a non-enterprise environment. At the very least you'd want a redundant RAID setup which would mean buying multiple of these drives.

Since my storage requirements don't mandate "online" storage, just archival, I'll stick with cheap USB-connected hard drives in the meantime where any loss is limited to about 4TB maximum.

Not sure about these particular devices, but in general devices will still be fine. You add via a QR code, HomeKit stuff is local only. But even with this - it's Matter/Thread that's the current hotness, not HomeKit/Google/Alexa-specific. If a thing supports Matter and Thread, *properly* (i.e. hubless), then you're fine. If it doesn't, or it does but needs a hub in the middle before it spits out Matter out of the other side...be wary.

This is a good example of why you pick things that work natively with what you want. In this case, if you've connected them via HomeKit then they'll carry on working without issue. In future cases - buy the standards, look for Matter (and preferably Threads) integration to make sure you don't need this kind of reaching out to servers.

YouTube's only concern these days is revenue and profit.

They breach their own community guidelines each and every day by running scam ads that continue to run despite hundreds or even thousand viewer-reports. Those ads run until the advertiser's spend is exhausted -- however if a creator (the life-blood of the platform) is falsely accused of "scams or deceptive practices" by YT's AI then they're gone in the blink of an eye.

They also allow AI spambots to post endless comments linking to porn pages/sites and claim that their AI can't automatically detect such things -- although that same AI, when unleashed on creator's videos, constantly demonetizes anything that is deemed to be unsuitable.

I hate the AI dross that is overwhelming YT as much as anyone but I really have doubts that YT intends to do anything effective to stem its flow. You see, so long as AI-generated videos are getting eyeballs on ads, YouTube will be happy because they'll be generating revenue and profits.

Let's face it, YouTube is actually *encouraging* the use of AI on its platform. AI suggests ideas for new videos and will create thumbnails for you. VEO3 will even create shorts or entire videos on demand. Google wants to sell its AI services and is pitching them at YouTube creators so they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot are they?

This is why I'm moving to self-hosting my own videos on an instance of PeerTube and I encourage other creators to do the same. When you self-host you have *FULL* control and you no longer have to worry about censorship or losing your entire community just because one of YT's AI bots has runamok and identifies your cute cat videos as CSAM.

Although the literal answer to that is "yes" since people have definitely rewired houses before, the more relevant one is - this isn't a completely different system. Your light bulb remains a light bulb. It screws into the same sockets as the last ones did, and is operated by the same switches.

In terms of protocols, I've already got several protocols running in my house and they mix and match without issue. Gradually switching over to emphasises one of them (Matter/Thread) more than the others won't affect the overall setup at all.

Many aren't doing Matter properly unfortunately. Take Switchbot for instance - it uses a hub to expose its devices over Matter. Aqara did too, though not sure if their latest stuff needs it.

Many people did Matter as "take our Zigbee kit, run it through yet another hub, and we'll push it out the other side as Matter". Not ideal.

Interestingly I've found that there are good deals...just not at Amazon. It's from stores making sure they can compete/are still relevant during Prime day. For example I'm a musician who's into synths: this is a good deal on a well-regarded (if a bit controversial) synth. There are other examples for other niches - I get emails from smart home tech manufacturers for instance and they seem to do ok.

And no-one has ever replaced a light bulb in their house before. No, not ever in the history of the universe.

As others have pointed out, so that they don't have to keep producing the old chip that is now "outdated". Everything else they will be producing will be M4 or later, so it makes sense to take advantage of the economies of scale.
Also, presumably, each iteration of their M series gets more power efficient for the same unit of computation, so they can get more battery life out of it, or even possibly get rid of the separate battery pack. Lower power will make the thermal design easier, which could also lead to a lighter unit (weight being one of the more prominent complaints.)

Was torn between moderating and replying - am replying. Yes, it is and by 'backwards' I'm guessing you mean that as a good thing. Ives did fine with most hardware, but when he got his hands on software and produces macOS Funereal Edition (aka 10.0 Lion) stripping all colour and joy from the interface...yuck.

Bring it back, that's what I say. People still talk about BlingOS, Snow Leopard, as their favourite incarnation. There's a lot of functionality added since that I'd miss and I'm not totally sure on the 3D dock base, but I certainly get where they're coming from.

So what, we plunge to oblivion because we didn't hit good? If we're in a minimisation game, so be it. But we should still try to minimise.