Russian sites like Yandex, Rutube, VKvideo... are great to find porn. But if they go down, I'll take the minor inconvenience for the sake of Ukraine.

More seriously, Yandex has been throttling queries rather aggressively lately, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with their compute going up in smoke due to Ukrainian drones.

That's increasingly true here too (UK). I'm on an EV-focused tariff which guarantees me up to 6 hours cheap EV charging per day, and in addition there are lower, cheaper overnight rates for the electricity.

What's been noticeable recently is that these periods are now tending to be different. I've been driving EVs for eight years and on roughly the same tariff (the 6 hour cap is new), and usually the "cheap EV charging" and "overnight low rates" coincided. Now however, I've noticed that if I plug in the EV during the day it pretty much starts charging instantly and you're right - I could say that's 100% around lunchtime. My usage means I can't really take advantage of that much since I commute in the day and plug in in the evenings, but it's still a noticeable pattern for the days that I am either working from home or its a weekend.

Completely agree, however this should just be rolled into the "how much does a data centre cost?" bill. Add the solar, add the necessary battery storage...that's your cost. Not "we'll build it without anything and hope everyone else will give the power instead".

It's not, but that's where home batteries come in. I'm a new'ish convert to solar, having had it installed in March and so this will be my first winter with it. I also installed a 12kWh battery to go along side it. The combination pretty much takes care of all my daytime home usage, although it does not take care of my full usage since I also have an EV.

I charge the EV overnight, plus top of the battery on cheap overnight rates. Result is barely any daytime usage for me. How that translates to a 24 hour data centre of course is a question in its own right, would they start affecting the overnight rates? Hmm.

War department is Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth doing their fascist circle-jerk.

The DOD/DOW have been working on this for a while. They discovered, early on, that the device had a propensity to cause permanent nerve damage.

It's very unlikely the US have fixed that, as they'd largely sidelined the work as a failure. However, at 36%, Trump needs something he can call a win, no matter what the long-term consequences.

USB-C? Apple were laughed at for only including USB-C on their laptops and there are still weird antique societies around keeping USB A kicking when it should have been buried over a decade ago.

If you mean only the world of phones - Apple changed their charging and connection standards three times. 30 pin -> Lightning -> USB C. Each one lasted about a decade, which is what they always said. Lightning came out in 2012, USB C didn't even exist as a standard until 2014. Should they have changed yet again after two years, thus annoying everyone?

Meanwhile, over in the rest of the world you had an assortment of barrel connecters, USB Mini, USB Micro, USB C. USB C emerged the winner (although you still get these hateful USB A->USB C power-only cables. I hate the USB C 'standard', never know what cable you're picking up), and yes Apple was arguably forced to change but then so were others. I'm still plagued by more USB Micro devices than I am USB C, a connector that Apple entirely skipped (thank god).

What can go wrong?

I wonder if the control room technicians will be allowed bathroom breaks...

Funny thing is, enshittification is actually more of a longer term strategy. Sell your product/service at a loss (or give it away) today, and tomorrow once you have grown a user base that's locked in and/or you've driven your competitors out of business, start the monetization (aka the enshittification) phase.

Though nowadays people use enshittification as more of a general things-got-worse thing.

They wouldn't be talking about this stuff if they weren't trying to scare people into giving them regulatory capture.

Instead, the people running the AI need to be charged for any crime it commits and go to federal prison. Then these random little "rogue AI" incidents would stop instantly.

Yes, but they are very late to this. People have been complaining about this bloat for years. And it truly is bloat. It is bad programming and poor UI design all in the name of trying to monetize the systems because Microsoft has been slowly trying to convert to either SaaS and/or adware/AI-ware financed. So it is more important to them that their agents run in the background watching everything you do on your computer so they can monetize your information and show ads to you in unnecessary widgets than it is for having clean, efficient code. All of this uses more and more resources from the physical system, and causes these requirements creep as they continue to stack item after item into the system. I don't want my computer system's OS effectively spying on everything I have my computer do and transmitting it back to Microsoft so that they can train AI agents and generate "user information" for targeted advertisement campaigns.

Some of us have been there since the start (and looking at your uid, I'm guessing you have too). My name is in kernel commits from around the 98, and I was using Linux before then of course. I was even a Minix user on my ST at university.

Torvalds was anti source control. Others weren't and yep - started using Bitkeeper. Linus considered this "problem solved - you use what you like, I don't have to". Then he started using it. Then the reverse engineering debacle and then the "Well I'm not using any of the others, I'll write my own then" thing with git.

It certainly isn't down to him that people then started using it as the "if all you've got is a hammer" answer to everything - he's completely blameless in that. But I'm talking about the same kind of people that overused the Design Patterns book (one of the authors of which I've also met, although to my shame I can't remember which one - this was a corporate course and lecture being given at IBM Watson), the same kind of people that turned the very simple agile principles into the corporate behemoth Agile process-ridden abomination it became...those kind. They used git because of the hype, not because of the use case.

I'm going back from before he used Bitkeeper. There was a long period of time he didn't want to use source control at all. Bitkeeper wasn't used by him until the 2000s.

I mean, that's exactly what Linus did with git. A lot of his criticisms of existing stuff weren't justified (he went on misplaced rants about how version control software was bad in concept for years), and people have essentially cargo-culted git into areas it wasn't designed for because 'Linus is cool'.

Quick reminder that most commercial software doesn't actually have the problem that git was designed to solve - multiple masters. It was designed to be able to share kernel source trees between Linus' own, Red Hats and I think two others (Yggdrasil and SUSE? It's a long time back and I may be misremembering that). They all had their own quirks and patches, and they wanted to be able to handle commits to any of their trees and accept/reject as per their own preference.

This is pretty much the opposite of what most commercial software wants to do. It wants a single master, with known commits, so that a single known version gets shipped in the end. This is the exact opposite of what git was meant to be, yet it gets used there anyway. I notice the summary talks about a centralised system - yep, that's what you want for commercial, not a distributed multiple master.

This quote from Torvalds shows exacly who is using AI and why.