- Crypto-mining. Fuck off. No societal value there.

Indeed. They have the energy requirements of a medium-sized country.

As those are waning, we are seeing the rise in large energy use for "Deep Learning"... which may look much more benign but also has societal issues.

AI is looking to be the new cryptocurrency...
Not just in energy use, but in hype and investment. Previous cryptocurrency hardware companies are producing AI hardware now. For instance, out of Bitmain came SOPHGO.

You should print a sticker with an URL to a page that explains all the ways how QR code menus are bad for the customers, and then requires the customer to click a link to the original site.

Not only are QR codes hauling the work onto you, they codes are also a potential security risk. Malicious QR codes are a thing!
People need stop trusting any and all QR code they come across.

A few previous shells based on Python:

• pysh
• Marcel (The shell).
• Xonsh
• Tako

Apparently, Tako is a fork of Xonsh, but apart from that each has a different approach to embed Python in a shell. In pysh, commands become functions; in Marcel, Python is in parentheses, and in Xonsh, everything that is not valid python is interpreted as a command.

IMHO, I think that shells and Python have too different syntax, that it would be better to define a single syntax model and stick to it for everything instead of mixing. A shell is too powerful and crude: if you want to improve a shell, you should make it safer, not more ambiguous.
(Not that any of these don't have any good ideas, because they do.)

For an example of horror, see this Xonsh:

>>> ls = 44
>>> l = 2
>>> ls -l
42
>>> del ls
>>> ls -l
total 0

I thought "double tap" meant something sexual ...

You mean with the watch? Ewww....

The thing is that Norway is subsidising electric vehicles.

It can do so because it is rich on the incomes from its oil industry.

It is Qualcomm that has a licensing problem with ARM.

Qualcomm acquired the chip design firm NUVIA in 2021, which had a license agreement for designing processor cores running ARM code.
ARM is suing Qualcomm, because according to them the agreement with NUVIA did not allow the license to be transferred to a parent company.

What many are suspecting Qualcomm of doing right now is to sidestep this issue by adapting the NUVIA-designing cores to instead run RISC-V.
Only in these past few weeks, Qualcomm has posted two proposals to RISC-V International that would make that more credible: First they want to skip the C (16-bit instruction) extension from Application profiles (which is something that 64-bit ARM does not have). Second, they want to add new address modes, that look like they were picked straight out of ARM's manuals.

RISC-V has already been deployed in the many thousands, as embedded processors.
There are several RISC-V cores as microcontrollers for various tasks in every Qualcomm ARM-based smartphone SoC since 2019 or so.
NVidia has also been using RISC-V as the control processor in its GPUs.

You can get single-board computers with one or more 64-bit RISC-V cores right now, to run Linux on. Something equivalent to a Raspberry Pi Zero, with comparable performance for comparable price.

What has been lagging behind have been various large features for application-class processors, such as the Vector extension, and Vector cryptography.
RISC-V international has quite recently been working on Application Profiles to standardise which extensions should be included in application platforms. Google has also published quite an extensive wish-lists of extensions that are probably going to be required for Android smartphone SoCs, which almost line up with the latest official profile from RISC-V International.
And that's where we are today.

On topic, what many are suspecting Qualcomm of doing right now is to modify existing designs that ran ARM to be running RISC-V instead ... mostly because they have had a falling-out with ARM.

There have been a few stories about server equipment supposedly being modified by security agencies before being reaching the end customers.
This included server motherboards from SuperMicro being modified by Chinese agencies, and shipments of Cisco equipment (I'm unsure what, but they have made servers) being intercepted by NSA.

Right now, supercomputers are made of GPUs. The CPUs are there mostly to control them.
GPUs are used because they are massively parallel, operating on the SIMT model.

There already exist RISC-V CPUs with vector units as wide as the SIMD units on ARM and x86.
However, RISC-V's vector extension was designed to be scalable from the start, allowing the same code to run also on very wide vector units.
There has been talks about building GPUs based on RISC-V CPUs with vector units, as they are also capable of running code compiled for the SIMT model.
Very wide RISC-V vector CPUs could have the potential to challenge GPUs for supercomputing dominance.
The big benefit though might be that they are not restricted to the SIMT model, and therefore easier to program.

However, ARM was even earlier with a scalable Vector extension, and the first ARM chip with SVE was the Fujitsu A64FX chip -- which was made for a supercomputer.
ARM SVE is now standard in ARM version 9 chips.

You don't even need any Unicode-capable software to enter it. You could use the <sup> tag.

Yes, breaking other people's copyright.

Microsoft had been looking for years to crack the open source movement, until neural network technology was mature enough that they could create Github Copilot.

Agree about the laptop-sized ones. But I can't shut up about my Lenovo Yoga Tab 2 8" from 2015.

Takes no space in my bag. It can actually be used with a proper wireless keyboard when I need one instead of a crappy built-in chiclet that would only waste space.

16:10 275 PPI screen, SD-card reader, pen, built-in kickstand. Cost $200 when I bought it, which is.. eh. $250 today?
And yeah, it runs a real operating system, not Android.
Has worked well for eight years, until the WiFi failed two weeks ago. I'm going to see if I can repair it, because there is no valid substitute out there.

> we'd still be spectacularly screwed the coming decades.

The problem is that some jerks have been using that fact as an argument for not doing anything.
We still have power over how much the world will be screwed. We are at risk of destroying life on Earth, not just our own sustenance.

We also have to stop looking at this problem as being only about fossil fuels. There are multiple causes of CO2:
How land is farmed. How houses and infrastructure is built. Land clearing. How cities are laid out.
We have to be progressive on all fronts.

Nobody can pay to escape the consequences of global warming.
But some people just believe they can, because they have been surfing on top of society for too long.

> Seems far more the fault of the state/county for not blocking off the bridge to prevent such an event from happening.

Did you even read the article? The owners of the bridge are also being sued.
The barricades had been removed. The accident happened at 11 pm during a rainfall and there were no lightposts.
These are the conditions in which accidents happen.

I know not to trust Google maps to be accurate, because I follow the IT news on sites such as this, and so I know what attitude Google has towards map accuracy. The average Joe does not.
But is always being shitty a viable defence?