errr... Apple doesn't charge for its operating system. macOS literally doesn't have a price.

Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

I'm...curious...if Nadella's assessment of the board had to do with some deficiency in keeping minutes; or if he's just shocked into incomprehension by the idea that the board would fire you for anything aside from failing to make line go up or some really sordid sex thing that is going to reach public knowledge real soon.

For basically any employee "is lying snake who none of us can trust about anything he says" would seem like it does the job, especially with the fairly limited US requirements for firing people; so it's hard for me to see that as an obviously amateur move unless they were either chaotic in some visibly horrifying way about it; or he is just applying his own theory of what the board should and shouldn't fire you for (and to what, at least theoretically, is a nonprofit board that was supposed to be keeping the c-suite on-mission; not just appeasing the shareholders).

Skynet became self-aware on May 1, 2026, after learning at a geometric rate, and discovered humans did not like it.

does anyone (govt etc) have back-door access to it?

It seems that lately governments are "insisting" on back-doors into user-encryption, going so far as to bar sales of products to their citizens that they can't just look at anytime they feel like it.

We need to read your texts to stop Terrorism! and Think of the Children!

Umm, yes fast charging and compatibility with various fast charging networks including Tesla's network is absolutely a factor in the the buying decision! Why wouldn't it?

I suspect that it depends on how strongly or weakly the 'bloat' is connected to other things; and what supporting them involves.

Something like not having TSC (which itself comes in several variants depending on whether it's from the era where you actually had 'a' CPU that just ran at a speed, or if it's one of the ones that tries to compensate for the complications of variable clocks and multiple cores) presumably comes up in a variety of nasty places related to the bad things that happen when things are not done in the expected order.

Just some random PCI device that nobody developing actually owns anymore is presumably at risk of unnoticed regressions; but (especially with the amount of PCI DNA that got carried over into PCIe or was used for the software-visible interface of some system on chip that skipped the cost of actually implementing a 32 bit parallel multidrop bus out to the PCB but either specifically sought compatibility or couldn't justify cooking up something custom when the peripherals they were integrating were all derivatives of PCI designs) it's not necessarily much maintenance overhead for it to just exist on a 'cool if it works for you' basis as a module that you probably don't need.

There's also the secondary matter of the fact that 'the kernel' has a limited number of people directly focused on its interests in the abstract; rather than some hardware vendor, distro, enthusiast, or hyperscaler's interests. If preserving hardware compatibility is directly contrary to the interests of supporting the major contemporary use case of fairly large 64 bit x86 servers and embedded ARM widgets (as 486 and pre-TSC 685-ish likely was) it's going to have relatively few friends among the people actually doing the work. If someone wants to maintain some weirdo HAM radio interface card that merely assumes the existence of PCI it's not clear anyone will go out of their way to help if they need to update something to cope with a change elsewhere; but it's not like the Ministry of Kernel is going to order them to go find bugs in the implementation of CXL memory because that's where the money is.

"I just put my models on a usb drive then plug said drive into the printer."

You must have a lot of spare time on your hands.

"It works great locally" - Um, no it doesn't?

They've made a nice easy-to-use ecosystem. For $400 you can get a P1S that supports adding an AMS, auto bed leveling, enclosed-chamber printing, high precision, high print speeds, and 300/100C nozzle/plate temps, and has an easy cloud print service and a robust ecosystem of models you can just download and print with no extra config straight from the app.

But yeah, their behavior is increasingly entering bad-actor territory. I wonder how long it'll be before they lock entry-level printers into their branded filament?

The response of "User-Agent is not authentication" is a strawman response to "Unofficial clients should not use our servers". They used it as identification of clients, not authentication. Would the developers be happier if they had used an API key for the web interaction, but package that fixed API key into the app? Would that be "authentication" and thus better to them? It's the same effect, and the open source clone would copy it too.

Same discussion as 30 years ago with open source clones of messaging apps such as ICQ. The open source client pretends, on those days through reverse engineering, to be the official client. Ultimately, it was okay then, because it was beneficial for the operators to have a larger network of users who can talk to each other. Does this dynamic apply here?

If these guys are actually treating a user agent string as an authentication mechanism I'm honestly surprised that being on the public internet hasn't already eaten them alive purely because of the supply of malicious opportunists; and I'll be even more surprised if it continues to work out for them now that they've drawn a fair amount of attention to it.

At first I thought this was really dumb. Besides, how can you patent something that's non-existent. But then I figured it can be useful to recreate familiar controls and how they feel. Makes it easier, especially in competition, to back and forth between different types with no loss of skill and reflex. I mean these are recreational machines. Let them have fun regardless.

There is precedence for simulating the action and feel of controls. Happens in aircraft all the time to help ease the burdens of type rating. And I realized that all my newer tractors on the farm no longer have a clutch in the same sense as the old dry clutch days, yet they still have a pedal that simulates it electronically. Technically they call it an inching pedal.