In some boroughs of London (Westminster for example) there are chargers on many if not most lamp-posts. Very cool.

I've always wondered about that sig. So I asked AI to write me a little story about it...

The annual "Fluffiest Pillow" competition was in chaos. Not the usual, genteel chaos of competitive pillow fluffing, mind you. This was⦠viscous.

Barnaby Thistlethwaite, a man whose mustache resembled a startled caterpillar, was weeping. His prize-winning goose-down pillow, "Cloud Nine," was now a gelatinous, trembling mass. Across the hall, Agnes Periwinkle, a woman who communicated exclusively through interpretive dance and kazoo solos, was attempting to sculpt her shredded memory foam pillow into a replica of the Eiffel Tower, with limited success.

The source of the pandemonium? Fisheye Fred.

Fred, a man whose left eye perpetually drifted towards the ceiling, had brought his âoerevolutionaryâ pillow-fluffing machine. It resembled a chrome-plated octopus wrestling a lawnmower. Heâ(TM)d proudly declared it would âoerevolutionize the very fabric of the pillow-fluffing paradigm!â

Heâ(TM)d plugged it in, pressed a large, ominous red button, and the machine had erupted in a symphony of grinding, whirring, and the distinct sound of something being violently pureed.

Now, feathers, stuffing, and the occasional errant spring floated through the air like morbid confetti. The walls were splattered with a disconcerting, lumpy paste. The judges, a panel of bewildered squirrels wearing tiny bow ties, had retreated to the ventilation system.

Barnaby, his mustache quivering, pointed a trembling finger at the machine, now emitting a faint, gurgling sound. "Fred," he whimpered, "what...what have you done?"

Agnes, mid-kazoo solo, paused, her eyebrows forming a question mark. She pointed at the ruined pillows, then at Fred, then mimed a blender.

Fred blinked, his good eye focusing on the chaotic scene. He scratched his head, dislodging a stray feather that floated lazily to the ground. "Oh," he said, his voice a low rumble. "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"

Nod as as a wink to a blind man

Say no more

It still does in aviation. I just filled up with 100 "low lead" aviation fuel yesterday. The commercial business case for unleaded aviation fuel has never been made, hence it has never been produced in quantity.

I run a software company which uses MS SQL Server and .NET Core for our app development. My lead developer had a problem with a SQL script which was stubbornly slow - he was querying a huge table with an index that really wasn't helping the performance. He created a prompt to ChatGPT to ask how to optimize the query and it came back - instantly - with a subquery approach that moved the filtering logic from the index into memory. It ran significantly faster.

I have a feeling that GPT had somehow scraped some obscure Stack Exchange posting to come up with this but of course there's no way to really know.

Both of us were simply amazed at how efficient this approach was and we're going to try to use AI on other troublesome queries going forward.

So, yes, AI can help, at least in our limited experience with it.

I seem to remember it being extraordinarily costly to use back in the day. Can anyone remember how much it cost?

UK resident here. I use a power company called Octopus and every couple of weeks, they send me an email saying "free power between 1-2 pm" or some other time. This isn't a joke or a scam, they actually explain it as having too much energy in the grid and they need to burn it off. Because I have a smart meter, they can simply not charge me for that time.

They also have a night-time EV charging tariff which is 7p/kWh as opposed to the 35p/kWh which is again enabled by the smart meter.

What makes me slightly surprised about this whole thing is that I had assumed that the whole grid was pretty smart. Turns out not to be the case.

PS/2 = "Personal System for Two?"

Sounds romantic!

This leads me to an observation that magic, AI and 1,000 people in India are all indistinguishable.

Isn't the 8-inch floppy write-protect system the opposite of 5 1/4" - you take the tape *off* to write protect them, right?

I'm the unfortunate recipient of many "DocuSign requests" as part of my job. Between duplicate messages, constant nagging to create an account and weird senders that aren't in my address book, I find the product to be unnecessarily complex and overwrought for what I can easily accomplish with Preview.app and the signature tool on a PDF.

How this company manages to employ (for the moment) over 7000 people is beyond me. I only found this out when I read about the layoffs. I figured it might be a tiny little startup with 100 people max, but seven THOUSAND. Bonkers.

This is the obvious evolution of this seminal app.

https://www.engadget.com/2017-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That movie looks AWESOME. And the tagline is fantastic: "They'll dam you to hell!"

I'm an unfortunate Mac user of OneDrive on Mac. It has a very irritating issue that whenever it updates itself (which it does silently) it somehow removes itself from the login items list. Which means on the next reboot it's not running - a situation you don't notice until you realize that your files aren't being backed up.

So you re-add it to the login items, make sure it's running and once again forget about it. Which sets it up to remove itself from the login items list again. Rinse and repeat.

Awful product. And I hate it even more because you can't turn on Autosave in Office without saving to one of its folders.

Except that the opposite is also true. If you have a great global roaming package and want to move your eSIM to a new phone while traveling - you cannot. You must be on your home network to activate an eSIM.

I've had this exact issue happen. It's a nuisance, but I put up with it because I have a non-US iPhone that still has a SIM slot so I could at least use one of my plans while overseas. US users would be hosed though.