Yes, because those are totally a real thing.

My ZX Spectrum booted in the time it took to flash the screen (less than 1 second I'd say).

If you had the Interface 2 it could boot directly into a game (via ROM chips that overrode the memory bus to present their data), so even faster.

Framework laptop.

Not long at all.

The restart/reboot is ridiculously fast.

Resume from suspend/hibernate is ridiculously fast.

The BIOS transferring to the bootloader? Seconds.

Honestly, it's like being in the year 2000 again. And my computer does what I say. Mostly because it's Linux.

I can say without fear of ambiguity or modesty that I am very much after reinventing the wheel. In fact, I've lost count over the number of wheels I've reinvented thus far, and I don't think I'm done yet.

I have a personal project where I'm building clones of 8 bit computers (Apple II, Commodore 64 and such. There's even a YouTube channel). It's an FPGA the gets loaded with a core containing a RiscV CPU (running a custom multitasking OS) and an 8 bit CPU running whatever the original computer did.

It takes about 40ms for the core to get loaded into the FPGA. From that point, it takes about 6ms until everything is initialized, the 32 bit OS gets loaded into memory, and the 8 bit computer gets put out of reset and begins its boot. The Apple II needs about 300ms to complete its startup routine, the vast majority of which is taken by issuing the "beep" it does when turned on.

The output is to an HDMI monitor. That takes around 3 seconds to sync on the image, which means that by the time any picture appears on screen, the computer has long finished boot. I'm seriously considering manually postponing the 8-bit startup just so the user has a chance to catch it happening.

As I said before elsewhere:

How are you going to detect anything but, say, a handful of well-known STLs? And then draw attention to those by banning them?

How are you then going to stop people doing the inevitable thing: Printing innocent-looking prints that can be broken down into useful parts for "banned" items?

People will literally take the latter as a challenge, and build weapons, etc. that use nothing more than standard replacement parts from other devices so you can say "Oh, that's just an X part from an innocent Y item", but when you combine them you make something banned.

How are they ever going to detect that? They're not.

It's going to be one of those laws they pin on you AFTER the police raid your illicit gun workshop to pin extra charges on you, and will require INTENTION rather than just the action itself.

But what will actually happen is this will quietly die a death somewhere because everyone realises that it's basically unenforceable.

You are not telling the whole story here.

I'm currently in the middle of a $15,000 purchase dispute with a Chinese vendor (for a CNC system). The device arrived non-functional, the merchant's customer service is wildly non-useful and time consuming, and after 3 months of dikking around I've decided to send it back.

I have clear E-mail evidence from the merchant acknowledging the problem, the CC company yanked back the payment and is forcing the merchant to issue an RMA for the device.

The credit card company isn't on my side, nor are they on the side of the merchant - they are on the side of honest transactions, and they police those transactions for me.

Twice I've had my CC info stolen at a restaurant(*), the CC company detected fradulent purchases, and issued me a new card. A couple of times they incorrectly detected fraud, and a quick phone call sorted that out.

All of this is value added to using a credit card.

It's not *just* rent seeking on transactions, it's also providing a service: "peace of mind" in your purchases.

If anyone is interested, ask ChatGPT about the Fair Credit Reporting Act as regards to dispute resolution. If you receive a defective product, you have 60 days from the statement (not the purchase, but the statement) to initiate a dispute, and there are several "states" the dispute can be in, such as "vendor is working with the customer to resolve the issue".

It's not just rent seeking, the extra 5% CC fee for the purchase is for "peace of mind".

(*) Don't let the CC out of your sight. If the waitress takes the CC away from your table, she can easily write down the number and security code before bringing it back.

I'll eat it.

Plenty of people will eat it.

That's not the problem.

The problem is: Why would I pay more for something worse than just cheap meat?

It's the PRICE that needs to change. I'll eat synth-meat if it's half the price of normal meat, and doesn't result in malnutrition if I eat a lot of it, no problem at all.

It's only when you treat datacentres or AI as something special that the problems start.

It's just another app, why does that mean they get free reign on polluting rivers, or first dibs on power provision, or are able to override planning laws that have been in place for a hundred years? It's nonsense.

It's not AI that's causing those problems. It's people literally corrupting the law for quick profit, as always.

If there's no power / permission / water for a new hospital? Guess what? We shouldn't be authorising that for a datacentre in the same place either.

The more you look, the more you'll find "wrong". It doesn't mean there's actually anything wrong, because we just don't look at healthy people and then leave something that looks "wrong" untreated.

It's why the House-style diagnostics of rare conditions is so complex and specialist, because everywhere you look you'll find something wrong and you have no idea if that's a symptom, a quirk, or nothing at all.

It's part of why cancer diagnoses went through the roof. Because we started routinely screening for cancers. Of course, that's a good idea, and early intervention in critical. But there's no real ethical way of knowing how many of those interventions were entirely unnecessary. But cancer-detection goes through the roof, so why aren't we doing anything to treat this rampant epidemic of cancer, so we treat every minor case, and actually... all we're doing is finding more things that we think we need to "fix" in everyone we look at.

The most dangerous things are conditions that need to be treated before symptoms present. Because what happens is we perform surgeries and treatments - we have to - but we have no idea what would have happened if it hadn't. For everything else, we just wait until the patient bothers to say "Oh, and I've been having trouble with my shoulder". Because without symptoms, most things aren't really that important.

It's the symptomless STDs, cancers, etc.that turn deadly before we can find them that are the most dangerous conditions, and not only kill us but actually force us to take risks to detect and treat them because we just can't take the chance.

I have to say, that I'm fortunate enough that I live my life by symptoms alone and things work out for me. If something were to hurt or change significantly and unexpectedly, I'd be going to my doctor. But otherwise I don't bother. My immune system bats just about anything away. I don't have any long-term conditions. I'm on no medication whatsoever. Hell, doctors just keep de-registering me because I don't use their services often enough (last time was for a COVID vaccine and I had to sign up with a new doctor just to do that).

But I'm sure that if I went to a doctor and made enough of a fuss, and especially if I got to that "hospital full of specialist diagnosticians" stage, I'd discover that I have a bunch of stuff wrong with me. We're biological animals under physical and mental stress, ageing enormously compared to our historical cousins, in a horrible, stressful environment (toxins, dangers, repetitive movements, physical strain, etc.), with easy access to grotesquely unhealthy food, pollutants, toxins, etc. in our daily lives. Of course there will be variations and things wrong.

But we can't stop looking because of that. We just have to learn when things need treatment and don't. And that's on the medical community to realise. Maybe if certain places didn't hold them liable for EVERY TINY LAPSE, they'd be able to get some science done on that.

The problem is that if you're going for a day out in the country, then finding a little old pub is difficult. And the more difficult it is, the more likely you are to go somewhere else where you know there is one.

And rural pubs are no longer "the local" where people drink every night. It's just far too expensive to do that. Not when five minutes down the road, there are cheaper options.

And when you lose that social culture - when even the ramblers are not popping in for a half-way house, or tourists stopping off for a spot of lunch, and the locals have fled... then it puts even more people off going to them, and makes them even more rarefied.

The pub that's literally opposite my house has been through 3 owners in the 3 years that I've lived by it. I've been in it once. When you see the "passing trade", when you see the lack of ANY car in the car park, when you see that of an evening only a couple of old couples from the village bother to traipse over there and maybe have one beer and one glass of wine... you begin to see why. That pub culture is dying.

I won't drink in any pub that has sky sports, for example. Or live music. Or quiz nights. That's not why I go to a pub. Pubs do those kind of things because they think it will bring in crowds and it might do... for one night... of the kind of patrons that put me off going into them. But it's going to put off a lot of people who just want to drink and chat with their mates.

With one of those 3 owners, there was a running battle with the village because they stopped serving food, after having been famous for their food. People were commenting on it all over, asking on Facebook, asking if they had plans to serve food again, etc. etc. It took that owner selling up and another taking over and - no exaggeration - huge signs outside on the road saying "We serve food!" to bring people back. But by then your clientele have found another place to have Sunday lunch or whatever. If you're out for a drive in the countryside are you really just going to stop at a pub you've never been to, have an alcoholic drink, and then carry on your journey? You have to offer them something.

Honestly, I wouldn't touch a pub as a business nowadays (my dad worked for breweries all his life, my father-in-law used to run his own pubs and restaurant, and they both say the same). They're dead. They hit a critical mass of problems some time ago (not least drinking culture, rent, breweries abusing their franchisees by tying them into long expensive leases, etc.) and they're just declining. If I go out with a friend or family, a pub is among the last places I consider. Even trying new ones can be a crap-shoot.

But the thing that has changed... no more are there a dozen local regulars propping up the bar wherever you go. It's so expensive even the alcoholics can't afford to do that.

In the towns and cities, maybe they're thronging. But, again, that would just put me off. Outside of that... they're dying off fast. You'd have to be a millionaire retiree who owned the place outright to "enjoy" running them and only getting a handful of customers.

True story: My family and I decided to try another pub near me for the first time last year. Just for something different. We drove there (it's that far), parked up, got out, walked in. The guy inside was shocked. Mainly because they were closed for 2 months for renovations and hadn't bothered to put a single sign outside, and we were the first people to walk in expecting it to be...a pub. Nobody else had noticed that there were no signs, or indications that it was closed, so anyone could just innocently in if they wanted to. And nobody had. Until we did.

I went past a few weeks later, and still it wasn't clear if it was open or not. You'd expect at least a "Now open for business" or similar, even if it was just a chalk sign outside, but nothing. No indication on their website even. When you can just close for 2 months and nobody notices... maybe you're doing something wrong.

And if I was to drive to the 3 pubs that are nearest me, in a circular route, then I would pass at least half a dozen that were former pubs, closed up, "under renovation", etc. just on that one journey.

Guess what happens when AI trains on an Internet of people trolling others.

A maximum of four small cups a day caffeine-wise, different if you're going to push sugar, milk and other stuff in it.

Gosh, if only there were RDA's and medical recommendations that have existed for decades, and it were obvious if you're consuming the same thing all day, every day...

I was saying this when UAC was a thing.

If you want me to do something to the OS, rather than to my user account, make me flick a switch to do it, which puts the computer in an entirely different mode.

Now the only virus that can infect my bootloader is one that I actively participate in installing.

Multi-user computer? The switch is a key.