(that 16 is 16 of my NiMH AA devices, part of the 20 "nicd/nimh cells")

According to my notes, I have here:

9v: 13
AA: 13
AAA: 17
AAAA: 1
C: 8
D: 2
coin: about 30
SLA/FLA: 5
LIFE: 4
lipo/nimh pouch and pack: 25
lipo cell: 9
nicd/nimh cells: 20
sealed plug-in charged: 16
sealed usb-charged: 27
uncommon disposable: 3

Those are not battery cells, those are devices. So for example, 16 of my AA devices use six AAs. (I have a crap-ton of NiMH AA, well over 100) and all of my C devices use at least three cells. So, sadly for me, there's a huge amount to keep an eye on. I realize I'm somewhat of an edge-case here, but that also makes me a good "how bad can it really get?" case study.

We are living out the TV show. Everything in that show is coming true (if it wasn't already).

If you haven't seen it, it is very entertaining, and now almost seemingly prophetic.

I reviewed all the gadgets in my house that have batteries. Not just non-replaceable or rechargeable, but ALL batteries. I'm a bit tech-heavy here so I was expecting there to be a lot, but the final count still surprised me. (and I'm still finding stragglers from time to time)

The "biggest offenders" I have are flashlights. I've got a few cheap "webcam" lights, as well as several house flashlights that all use built-in lipo pouches, which I can replace, but not the average consumer. And I've had to replace my car GPS batteries several times over the years. I'd bet 98% of these are thrown away as soon as their battery gets marginal. I like to maintain and repair my stuff, and it "grinds my gears" to see these made to be thrown away.

The other thing that annoys me is that most of these gadgets have almost no "battery management". When you plug them in, they charge to full, and hold at full charge if left plugged in, which will inflate a lipo pouch in a few months at most. And many of the others will allow their battery to deep-discharge to the point of battery damage or even placing the device in an unrecoverable loop. My Garmin GPSs are terrible that way. If they get too low, they'd be bricked for most people because they always boot up when their dead battery gets a little bit of a charge in it, which isn't enough to boot the device, and then the boot process crashes, draining the battery faster than it can charge. Recovering that requires removing the battery and manually charging it, which most users can't do since the battery isn't "user" removable.

And then I have the related problem of dozens of infrequently used devices that I could easily go a year between uses on, and when I get them out their battery is dead and probably slightly deeply-discharged. And I can't leave it on charge because it'll cook off the battery by the next time I need it. Which again is really frustrating.

Then there's the "big ticket items like the exploding (pun intended?) market on rechargeable yard maintenance. Be it a hedge trimmer or a mower. Nobody knows how to take care of their batteries, they don't tell you in the manual, and few have management, so they leave them on charge over the winter and the battery is half cooked by spring. Then after another winter on charge the battery is totally cooked and they have to replace a $40-$150 battery. It's quite the scam! Along with removable batteries, built-in management needs to be legally required for batteries over a certain price. Even my quad (DJI Spark)'s batteries are smart and will self-discharge to 65% if not used for 10 days straight - so it's not difficult to do even for smaller batteries, they just refuse to do it because they want to sell you new batteries regularly instead of making the batteries last.

Clearly we're all terrified now, so I'd say their job is done.

They can just sit back and relax and watch us all live in fear.

Use BlastEm, a Mega Drive/Genesis emulator by Michael Pavone whose nightly builds recently grew support for 32X, an accessory that bolts two SH-2 CPUs onto the Genesis.

If your web browser didn't store a session identifier in a small file called a cookie, how would Slashdot's server know that you're logged in as ArchieBunker (132337)? Otherwise, I'm not sure where you've mentally drawn a line between cookie storage and "a filesystem" proper.

Before Rust can save Linux from AI, wouldn't someone need to save Rust from AI first? The Open Slopware page claims that LLVM's LLM policy requiring a human in the loop is overly permissive.

I guess we can add a whole new category to the Darwin Awards.

The second link (pharmacyknowhow.com) redirected to an advertisement for "Lust Goddess", which appears to be a lewd video game. I opened the link again and it redirected to a page on Amazon selling a cultured pearl necklace.

Prescription medications sometimes do harm. Even so, many drugs prevent far more premature deaths than they cause. That's why we have national drug regulators: to evaluate evidence as to whether each new drug is safer on the whole than leaving the condition untreated.

POTS lines use very little power nowadays. Decades ago they still used very little power, except when ringing. Those electromagnets hitting big bells did take some juice, but the actual power required once you lifted the receiver is very low. Modern (transistor-based, with piezo tweeters for ringing) are much more efficient, all the time.

This is about them having to continue to keep tabs on and maintain equipment that they've been maintaining for decades. This isn't about additional costs, it's about them wanting to cut costs by ditching gear that's expensive to maintain and gets far less use than it was designed for. (it's efficient at scale, and the scale has gone)

I can't say I blame them. Imagine your old house got central air a decade ago, and you still have a window air conditioner in the living room, and you'd like to get rid of it, but the city is saying you can't remove it, and have to keep it maintained and working, and pay for annual inspections.

The only reason we still see around 4% landline usage is simply inertia. Old people don't want to give it up because they don't like change or learning something new, younger people that have it don't have a reason to get rid of it and see it as a cheap "just-in-case" backup, and there's a really small percentage of people (I'd venture a guess at under a tenth of a percent) that have a good reason to keep it.

So the question is "at what point do we tell that tenth of a percent to look elsewhere?" There's tons of other good examples, how about leaded gas? or R34 freon coolant? or businesses accepting cheques? or something closer to home on the issue - pay phones on many street corners? Technology moves on, and the longer you wait to move on once the writing is on the wall, the bigger of a personal hassle it's going to be. (I see this all the time with computers, upgrade people! get rid of that ten year old doorstop! I don't care if "it still works", you need to modernize!)

so the TL;DR of my rant is "it's not about the power use, but the telco doesn't want to come right out and call you a hold-out that needs to get with the times so we can all move on." Power savings looks like something that's "good for everyone" instead of pointing fingers at the stubborn few.

I hope nobody's complaining that it got publicly disclosed because "they only had two and a half years to fix it but hadn't gotten around to it yet"

IMO, "responsible disclosure" taps out after six months. Anything that happens after that is entirely on the devs for not bothering to plug holes that they were privately notified about.

I'm slightly more willing to give a pass to Xorg applications because it's not a monolithic environment supposedly under the control of a corporate entity that should be able to enforce its own standards.