Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

I'm...curious...if Nadella's assessment of the board had to do with some deficiency in keeping minutes; or if he's just shocked into incomprehension by the idea that the board would fire you for anything aside from failing to make line go up or some really sordid sex thing that is going to reach public knowledge real soon.

For basically any employee "is lying snake who none of us can trust about anything he says" would seem like it does the job, especially with the fairly limited US requirements for firing people; so it's hard for me to see that as an obviously amateur move unless they were either chaotic in some visibly horrifying way about it; or he is just applying his own theory of what the board should and shouldn't fire you for (and to what, at least theoretically, is a nonprofit board that was supposed to be keeping the c-suite on-mission; not just appeasing the shareholders).

I mean maybe he's right, but I would always take with a grain of salt a software package creator's opinion on how awesome his software package is.

You'd think an experienced speaker would be able to adapt to the crowd.

I suspect that it depends on how strongly or weakly the 'bloat' is connected to other things; and what supporting them involves.

Something like not having TSC (which itself comes in several variants depending on whether it's from the era where you actually had 'a' CPU that just ran at a speed, or if it's one of the ones that tries to compensate for the complications of variable clocks and multiple cores) presumably comes up in a variety of nasty places related to the bad things that happen when things are not done in the expected order.

Just some random PCI device that nobody developing actually owns anymore is presumably at risk of unnoticed regressions; but (especially with the amount of PCI DNA that got carried over into PCIe or was used for the software-visible interface of some system on chip that skipped the cost of actually implementing a 32 bit parallel multidrop bus out to the PCB but either specifically sought compatibility or couldn't justify cooking up something custom when the peripherals they were integrating were all derivatives of PCI designs) it's not necessarily much maintenance overhead for it to just exist on a 'cool if it works for you' basis as a module that you probably don't need.

There's also the secondary matter of the fact that 'the kernel' has a limited number of people directly focused on its interests in the abstract; rather than some hardware vendor, distro, enthusiast, or hyperscaler's interests. If preserving hardware compatibility is directly contrary to the interests of supporting the major contemporary use case of fairly large 64 bit x86 servers and embedded ARM widgets (as 486 and pre-TSC 685-ish likely was) it's going to have relatively few friends among the people actually doing the work. If someone wants to maintain some weirdo HAM radio interface card that merely assumes the existence of PCI it's not clear anyone will go out of their way to help if they need to update something to cope with a change elsewhere; but it's not like the Ministry of Kernel is going to order them to go find bugs in the implementation of CXL memory because that's where the money is.

"I just put my models on a usb drive then plug said drive into the printer."

You must have a lot of spare time on your hands.

"It works great locally" - Um, no it doesn't?

They've made a nice easy-to-use ecosystem. For $400 you can get a P1S that supports adding an AMS, auto bed leveling, enclosed-chamber printing, high precision, high print speeds, and 300/100C nozzle/plate temps, and has an easy cloud print service and a robust ecosystem of models you can just download and print with no extra config straight from the app.

But yeah, their behavior is increasingly entering bad-actor territory. I wonder how long it'll be before they lock entry-level printers into their branded filament?

If these guys are actually treating a user agent string as an authentication mechanism I'm honestly surprised that being on the public internet hasn't already eaten them alive purely because of the supply of malicious opportunists; and I'll be even more surprised if it continues to work out for them now that they've drawn a fair amount of attention to it.

What's the appeal on losing money to those with inside information?

If the 'AI' guys are anything to go by; probably get increasingly elaborate with their attempts to bypass whatever rate limiting is put in place. It's honestly sort of wild seeing the hottest, most heavily capitalized, elements of 'tech' wrap around so rapidly and with so little concern toward the sort of traffic patterns you normally associate with criminals as soon as it's in their interests. At one time I would have been surprised.

There is an intermediate situation that that case arguably illustrated:

Using violence against harder targets is more of an organizational problem; and solving that problem potentially skews your candidate pool; but what's very curious(particularly for a society whose overall violence numbers are very much on the high side by developed world standards) is how safe it apparently is to be widely notorious and a fairly soft target. Thompson was just walking down the sidewalk alone at a predictable time and location. Zero precautions. Something like the Sacklers were a household name for over a decade, with strong cases for culpability in at least low 6 figures worth of deaths sprinkled across a variety of walks of life; even the ones you suspect might be risky like deer hunters with dead kids and members of criminal organizations where internecine homicide is routine, and what came of it? Nothing. Not even any 'foiled at a late stage'/'shot and missed' level stuff.

That's the genuinely puzzling bit to me: not that there's nobody going after people who take the sort of precautions that would probably require one of the old-school 80s red army faction types to deal with; but that it's apparently really safe to be widely loathed and not do much about it in a country where 20k firearms homicides a year isn't considers terribly exceptional. If the people who can actually afford guard labor were having to make the onerous lifestyle commitments to living like someone's out to get them it would be relatively unsurprising that being able to afford competent professionals puts you ahead of angry amateurs much of the time. What is surprising is how often there's apparently no downside to not even bothering. We even have to import the lurid stories of 'crypto kidnapping' by purely financial opportunists from overseas to obtain them in any quantity.

It's essentially impossible to make a good argument for some uncached CI lunacy that has you outperforming the overtly malicious as a source of traffic; but if there's one thing that reliably upsets people it's getting called on convenient behavior that they can't readily justify; so I'm genuinely curious what the ratio of sensible adjustment to unhinged freakout by bro whose subsidy is not in fact a law of nature they'll see.

Obviously trump doesn't care; if anything the grifts that you can totally phone in are probably even funnier than the ones where you have to try; but I'm puzzled by why this sort of thing doesn't bother some of his enthusiasts more. Not the nihilistic edgelords and ethnic nationalists so much; but if you are actually enthusiastic about 'greatness' shouldn't it worry you that Dear Leader, who you trust to deliver national renewal, apparently can't puke up the sort of zero-effort ODM rebadge job that any garbage tier prepaid carrier does anywhere from multiple times a year to at least annually, depending on market conditions?

Obviously the phone itself is basically irrelevant; but it seems like the sort of project that would cause anyone not wholly immune to feel some degree of at least secondhand embarrassment about.