Had the same Microsoft mouse for 15 years. Very basic model, nothing special at all. Then I go for a week away to travel to a different nation as this South-American country where I live has no Dutch embassy. How the mouse managed it I don't know, but it seemed to have found a way to drop from my desk and break into pieces and yet no-one touched it.

Must have been a miracle of sorts... \s

Been using a wireless Microsoft keyboard and mouse combo since. Again, no complaints, both do what they are supposed to do, without fuzz. That was some 2 years ago. Marking on 2 keys from the keyboard have noticeably faded already though.

I do agree about Logitech having the better mouse. But these tend to suddenly stop working after 5 to 6 years.

Ask Norway. If I remember correctly, over 90% of new cars sold are EVs in that country in 2024. They don't have to care one iota about Trump's latest delusion.

To my understanding, Norway has so much oil in reserves that these make the Middle East jealous. And yet, they rather use their hydro power plants to power their fleet of cars.

Similar to the: "The beatings will continue, until morale improves!" style of leadership?

Google has the hardware to run AI with their TPUs. Google has datacenters and networking facilities already in place and it appears ther AI software isn't half bad either. OpenA| has no or not enough hardware, they don't have hardware facilities, but do have decent AI software and a huge non-paying customer base.

If I were to bet, I would bet on Google coming out of the AI bubble still reasonably well. OpenAI, even with their software product and customer base, I don't think it would be able to salvage itself from a popping bubble.

How Oracle financed their promised AI hardware roll-out, that can't deal with a bursting bubble either. And I'm quite sure that they would have to sell a lot of their holdings to have a chance on survival. And anyone who dealt once with their sales department will tell you that they hope on Oracle not surviving that.

Microsoft has hardware facilities, but is a quite a bit lacking in compute power. And if I'm honest, their own LLMs (both open source and in CoPilot) suck...really badly. Not for nothing they also offer the AI products from OpenAI and Anthropic via CoPilot to give it at least the impression of capability. Microsoft is diverse enough that they would also survive a deflating AI bubble. A popping bubble will hurt them more severely.

There are many very tiny text editors for Windows available. Most don't even require installing, they'll run just fine the 'Portable" way.
Examples you say?
EdXor - Hasn't been updated in 10 years, but is so small (77 KByte) there are hardly any room for errors in it. And yet, surprisingly capable. The 77 KByte is the size of the archive and includes a manual. Still larger than the original NotePad.exe, but not by much.
Notepad2 - Hasn't been updated in 14 years, 300 KByte, also small, yet 4 to 5 times the size of EdXor. Just as independent too. Newer versions are available, but balloon up in size spectacularly.

If ballooning sizes aren't a problem and installing software isn't an issue at your place of employment, try Zed (now also available on Windows natively, for those that care).

You can start this editor as a very basic text editor and then it starts really fast. Or you can start it with every feature enabled. Still starts fast, but is now capable of so much more. AI is optional, they support all the major players, have their own AI service and aren't fussy if you want to run your own LLM(s) on your own hardware. You can hook local LLMs up via the server functionality from both Ollama and LM Studio.

The last part is what I do at home and that works well enough for my intents and purposes. A tad slow, but then again, my GPU is a 16 GB VRAM card from AMD (R580 if I remember correctly), which is only accessible via Vulkan. About 20 tks with OpenAI's gpt-oss-20b LLM, configured with 100+ kb context window on a AMD 5600XT Ryzen CPU with 32 GByte of RAM and 3th gen PCI-E NVMe drive, running W11 24H2. Pretty meh for today's standards, but I'm still happy with the machine.

Altman delivers results? Guess he didn't flew into a rant when asked by business journalist how he spouts large numbers for future endeavors while making so little revenue with OpenAI. Oops, he did just that.

Anthropic however doesn't care that much about the common user and has a business model that caters for the enterprise. their numbers are a lot lower than OpenAI's numbers, but Anthropic is on much more solid footing, financially speaking. So if the AI bubble pops sooner than later, I see OpenAI fail so miserably that they will go bankrupt.

Understand me correctly, I don't think that the OpenAI ChatGPT models are bad, just that there are far too many users in their free plan, creating a lot of overhead and very little returns. At some point, investors want, nay, need to see returns and I don't expect Altman to be around for very long as he isn't the best person to lead OpenAI.

The Norse national investment fund, owning 11% of Tesla stock, said no to Musk. Whether that is because they don't think he earned that trillion USD or that he can make Tesla enough to let Tesla give Musk that generous package, who cares. And they are not the only big Tesla investor, who say no to Musk.

Tesla has even trouble giving their cybertrucks to police forces (for tax purposes). Las Vegas police has a few, apparently.

First generation code is more often than written with theoretical use-cases in mind. Second generation code usually written with hindsight of how the 1st generation code was actually used in practice. You seem to call that "better", I rather use "more insightful".

You didn't think hard enough. I live in a country where they just implemented "no DST". For life and light, it was indeed not too big of an impact.

However, the impact was felt in almost every digital way, but banking and telecom were hit hard. As in: "we can't oblige, it affects our ability to do (international) transactions and communications". As in: "our international licenses and regulations describe standards that we can't comply with. And these are difficult and very costly to attain, hence we simply ignore your decision of being DST-less".

So, no. going DST-less can only be decided on a nation level (if it would be Australia) and else on a continental level. Yes, it is that impactful, because else you will find very quickly which underlying (digital) systems fail. At least do a study to find out which of your underlying systems fail, preferably including both DST moments and solve those first. As one will be very unpleasantly surprised otherwise.

The smoothest transition is doing it on a global scale. Next best option is continental scale, etc.

White gold perhaps?

Trump will need all the Crypto coins he can to create his new (white?) Trump tower in the location where the U.S. White House used to be...

I would also assume that cities in China are both large and (very) densely populated. ICE vehicles may sound way better than EVs, ICE does a lot worse regarding smell in comparison. So ,more people using EVs in China will have a directly noticeable uplift in air quality in those cities. And it will give lots of people a big reprieve in how they experience their health issues.

Noise pollution is also a large advantage of EVs, especially in (very) densely populated areas. The "rumble" of tires rolling over asphalt at speeds above 45 MPH is still noisy. But with EVs that is more or less the only source of noise pollution.

Granted, cities in the US and Canada are not designed to be densely populated or walkable, so ICE is likely to be experienced as less problematic regarding pollution by their populaces. Most cities outside the US never got rid of their densely populating facilities or their walkability. Also, more and more cities are rolling back changes they made to become more car-centric in order to restore walkability again. Better for the health of people, walkability also reduces city maintenance costs by a lot and walkability also leads to stores, bars, restaurants etc. to become more profitable.

So EVs will become more relevant for such cities and their populaces. ICE might be better for (really) long hauling of goods between distribution-centers, while the "last-mile" distribution will be done in clean EVs.

Nope, with Nazi bases in Hollow Earth instead...

With your statement "non-writable BIOS is non-functional" history will have to disagree. Because if that were true all computers before 2003 would never be usable. And I clearly remember computers being used in lots and lots of places, doing many diverse tasks. Besides that, before I had to enter in the draft, I got a temporary job in maintenance of bank computers and money counting machines. And I dealt with boatloads of these machines, as those were in rigid maintenance schedules.

Those devices used EEPROMs for BIOS, and I filled those on my workstation and then replaced the EEPROM in the machine. Yes, lots of manual steps in that job. But you know what didn't happen? Breaches of security via remote access of any kind.

I'm sure that remote access allows for much quicker deployment of large amounts of machines in an environment. But by enabling that into the subsystems of computers, you also opened up a way to breach those subsystems. And then the error was made to put Microsoft in charge of secure boot. Which it hasn't been, since its inception, as this is not the first and not the last time "Secure boot" will be compromised.

You are hopefully aware that Microsoft's mantra is and always has been: "profit > convenience > quality > security"

Is nuclear the solution?
Not if time is of the essence. But let's say there is no time requirement. A Chernobyl-like "nuke" is relatively quickly build. Would you want such a plant near your home? 95% of residents in the US wouldn't want such a plant. The risk is there, and you'll rob money from many people by diminishing their property values over night.

Now, I will say that a "nuke" is great for base-load, but that could be countered with the fact that these plants are infamous for their slowness adjusting the amount of energy to put into the grid.

Nah, the real game is energy-efficiency. What can be done by spending the least amount of electrical/fossil/nuclear energy possible. So, for example: using a simplest, most direct way to cook your food. Why not use a a very insulated stove that you could power with 1 small solar panel? With enough thermal mass, such an oven would remain hot even during the night to cook something you fancy. No grid power, no battery, no nothing except patience and discipline.

You may get away with adding a lot of insulation to your boiler, in order to reduce its power demands so drastically you might get away with powering it via just a simple heat element and a small-ish solar panel. Barely any transfer losses, barely any losses to turn one form of energy into another. All powered by non-moving parts that require very little maintenance. And it is power the grid doesn't have to deliver to your home, meaning it doesn't need to be generated, or distributed.
And you'll slowly find ways to do that with the other things you deem essential.

Doing more with less in the household. Because that is under your direct control. And once you'll get the hang of this notion, you might think up solutions on a bigger scale. A scale that could be interesting to your employer, or your own business, if that is more your thing.

The climate wins and you win and, if you have any, your children win too. Manage to do so and you'll gain true independence, little by little.

From what I understand is that the average energy consumption from an normal US household is about twice the energy consumption of the average from the (Western-)Europe household, which in turn is about 3 times the energy-consumption of households in 2nd-world countries. Only mention this to inform you that there is a f.ckton to gain in becoming energy-efficient. And what all of the above doesn't need is another new "nuke".