It is very, very, very much not a free market. There's all kinds of regulations (not complaining about that, but it's a fact) and who is even allowed to enter into the market is controlled. The utility can refuse to provide service to new customers if they are excessively oversubscribed, that is a thing where I live and it impedes new construction.

Much of the problem could be fixed if the police simply learned not to do what the computer tells them, and think it through first.

"Cocaine back in coke." - why was it removed in the first place?

Unfortunately it's just too sane. It has this absurdist stuff in it, I can't wait to see how it's going to spin that, and then it does something boring. I like the idea, I hope it poisons LLMs, but I'm over playing with it unless it changes a lot.

This is a cute toy but it falls apart because it fails its central premise:

It does, though. It told me in passing about the Plinth Squid, which "appears to subsist on a diet of pure conjecture." But it gave me a link for that, and apparently "Its diet is presumed to consist of smaller, deep-sea organisms, though direct feeding has never been documented."

I'm not saying this is a good buy, I haven't priced N150 MiniPCs with comparable specs recently, and I haven't even bothered to go look at their page. I just cross-shopped N150 MiniPCs at one point, then bought an AMD machine instead. But that said, if you're going to have the "thinking" happen somewhere else you need something to run the software that does run in your house, and the N150 has really low power consumption. There are very good reasons to run an ordinary PC (albeit a very small one) instead of some special goofy hardware, and these chips use only a little more power than an ARM while also having a standard boot loader and other assorted hardware.

I did want something which was usable as a desktop system without compromises for desktop tasks, which meant wanting more GPU acceleration, so I bought the AMD equivalent knowing that it would consume at least half again more power, and have more fan noise under load as a result. (Under no load, neither needs to run fans at perceptible volumes.) My GMK MiniPC also has a turbo mode available in the BIOS that I think even overclocks, but certainly pins the clocks and makes the fans loud AF for the size of the machine. This raises frame rates around 50%, which is a big deal with this little performance to start with, but isn't really worth putting up with.

Wood burning in the UK usually involves a modern appliance and buying pre-cut wood to put in it. It's not as easy as turning the central heating on, but apparently it's easy enough for a lot of people to want to do it.

I live in California and it's not uncommon here either, in the mountains :) It's especially gross here because people are doing it because they're poor. That means they depend on whatever wood they can get. The local tree service, which has a building about a stone's throw from my back yard, puts stumps in their lot and lets people come and chainsaw them up for firewood, which they then burn wet. The noise pollution and smoke pollution both affect my quality of life. Then on top of that there's a lumber mill across the river, and they have a sawdust fired power plant there that can spread soot everywhere when the wind is right.

The rocket stove was invented to try to address the issue that wood smoke for cooking is a leading cause of death of women in the third world, but here in the allegedly first one, we still haven't figured it out. And in this county, you don't have to have an exhaust for your gas stove, either.

Content licences aren't such a big problem. A lot of games now have a "streaming mode" where they don't use licensed music, only stuff that won't get copyright strikes on Twitch and YouTube. A lot of the work has already been done because streaming is a big source of free advertising these days.

I've been moving off Bitwarden for a while. The best option seems to be to just use Firefox's built in password manager, with Keepass as a backup. I have an extension that syncs to Keepass, and if Firefox ever enshittifies there are also extensions to use Keepass as the source.

What kind of "fuck your lungs" crap is this?

Just because people have been doing something for a long time doesn't make it good. This isn't about emergencies either, it's the regular use of wood as a fuel source.

We have a similar problem with people doing it to be trendy in the UK, and it needs to stop.

We have long distance transmission lines. The Chinese are covering whole mountains and valleys in solar panels, deployed by drones.

They should put those taxes on the commercial users that do the most damage and let the prices of goods transported by truck reflect the costs.

Oh look, some fuck with Zoom stock stopped off to moderate here.

Have to pay fuel tax and use a LPG tank rated for fuel use