The only thing you can be sure of is that every couple of years, you'll get different advice on the health effects of coffee. I'll stick to my two mugs in the morning, and green tea the rest of the day, that's what feels good to me.

On the old machines, graphics were done by writing to memory addresses, I'm not sure if that is possible to do that anymore in Windows. Machine language was great at that.

That's a system architecture thing rather than a CPU thing. Yes, with the ZX Spectrum for example, there was no graphics accelerator or graphics memory, you just wrote to a particular block of main memory with the CPU, and the video DAC read out that same block of memory to generate the display. You could build a system like that with a modern processor if you really wanted to, or conversely you could make a Z80 system with a graphics accelerator - probably somebody did. But yeah, the simplicity of those systems was great for learning, you could really understand what you were doing end-to-end, without dealing with a whole bunch of frameworks and APIs and abstraction layers.

> It's a nice idea, but who equips their trailer with this to save money for the stranger hauling it around?

Fleet operators, where they don't have strangers hauling around their trailers; e.g. USPS, Amazon, FedEx, UPS.

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> Once, the one time 5% is spent the state will have to figure out how to do the one time 5% more than once to keep feeding the spending machine.

The money to be raised is already budgeted as a separate fund for a specific purpose. It is not intended to be general funds nor is it intended to be ongoing funding.

Think of as a bond. When the government wants to raise money for a project or investment in the future, they will often issue and sell bonds to raise that money. Bonds mature and pay back with some interest, and are not recurring or factored into the normal budgeting.

This is functionally the same thing, except instead of borrowing via bonds and paying back with interest, it's just a straight up tax on billionaires.

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I have a physics degree and I was aiming for a +1, Funny. I guess since we're joking about global warming, it counts as "dark" humour.

It's particularly bad because as we all know, dark surfaces absorb more heat than light ones.

How does a society treat its citizens, specifically parents and children?

Autism -- is human psychology being maladaptive because of this situation. Parents aren't there for their children to imprint-upon. The psychological distress is real. Depersonalization is a result.

This depersonalization happening during acute childhood development phases, exacerbates the problem of social disengagement.

People should be treated as people, not chattel.

75%

+1 for "Language x isn't just for country x". In my favourite example, I spent a week in Hungary where nobody spoke English (this was a smaller town in the 1990s) but everyone knew German. So my rarely used knowledge of German came in handy, probably more than ever since. It meant I could hang out with the local teens in my off days, instead of hanging on to our guide for translation.

Yep, I once worked with NIR spectrometry in the paper industry around 2000. The company developed a kind of robot that measured various qualities of pulp and paper in realtime at paper mills. I was more on the hardware side, and I was kind of annoyed when they wanted to switch to spectroscopy for everything and ditch our nice old mechanical robots, parts of which I'd developed earlier. But at the same time I was excited about the ML and pattern recognition bits.

I've also been thinking along the same lines. To me, using computers is all about automation, and people in the know have been doing it since before the mainframe era. But to a lot people who got into personal computers in the 1980s and later, a computer is just a fancy word processor, fancy calculator, or a fancy tool for making art. Nothing wrong with those, but it's not exactly automation. To me, automation is something like telling the computer to edit 1000 pictures in a certain way, instead of editing them manually one by one. So in a way, AI is making the scripting/programming part more accessible (though it usually does so very inefficiently).

+(|Funny> + |Insightful>)/sqrt(2)

Are you suggesting that Shor's and Grover's are the only possible quantum algorithms? I'm not holding my breath for commercial QC either, but I don't like being overly pessimistic or conservative either. Quantum computers now are a bit like the early electronic computers of the 1940s — proofs of a concept but not exactly commercial success stories. Sure, with those computers people could do the same old calculations much faster, but the really interesting and useful applications involved a bit more vision, and those didn't appear overnight.

While many people associate QC with breaking cryptography, in the end it's just a faster way to do classical math. There's a whole world of pure quantum problems that are more naturally solved with quantum computers; this is what Feynman meant when he conceived the idea of QC in the early 1980s. So instead of getting hung up on the number of qubits, consider for example what D-Wave is doing.

Find an independent EV specialist. They can probably get or build you an aftermarket LEAF pack with more modern guts.

There's a ton of aftermarket support out there.
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> Might be. But it is not far outside the window of actual expense

"Yeah the evidence is fake but that doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong."

That's basically politics in 2026 in a nutshell, I guess.
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