Does that mean it might be possible to trick Musk and company into investing in steak sauce instead of AI? Even if we end up with a whole bunch of unwanted condiments we then have to destroy, that strikes me as a win.

Alas, this doesn’t cover the ancient-but-amusing case, “Your washing-machine-sized hard drive is boogeying it across the floor like it thinks it’s at the disco.”

You’re assuming they’ll ever release you.

Some people are uncomfortable with it being closed-source. It’s more of a philosophical objection than a criticism of the browser’s functionality.

If the storage all belongs to one machine, yes. If it’s spread across multiple machines with similar setups that share a LAN, then you need to put in a little thought to make sure that there’s only one copy for all machines, but it’s still doable.

In this case, we’re talking millions of machines with different owners, OSs, network security setups, etc. that are only connected across the Internet. The logistics are enough to make a hardened sysadmin blanch.

If the data has value, then yes, duplication is a good thing up to a point. The thesis is that only 10% of the data has value, though, and therefore duplicating the other 90% is a waste of resources.

The real problem is figuring out which 10% of the data has value, which may be more obvious in some cases than others.

Can you power it off from the command line without SSH? You may have a hardware problem that’s keeping the board from responding to soft poweroff at all.

Provided the machine isn’t writing to disk or holding unwritten data in a disk cache at the moment you press the button, you’re unlikely to damage anything with a hard poweroff.

If your requirements deviate in any way from the common use cases envisioned by the designer, you will spend more time wrestling “it just works” into doing what you want than you would have spent on the setup of “flexible, but requires a little setup”.

There are alternative sources for these . . . but the US has pissed all of those countries off too.

Massive deduplication across all accounts on all servers of image, audio, and video data would theoretically be possible, but ain’t gonna happen. Or we could just discourage people from posting cat videos and bad memes (even less likely to happen).

Sturgeon’s Law in action again.

:cough: “Twins HinaHima” :cough: (Admittedly only about a third of a feature film in runtime, but that’s close enough for me. However, I haven’t been able to find any English-language information on just how much of the work the AI was responsible for.)

Appliances have potentially serious failure modes that don’t involve battery fires. (We had one here a couple of weeks ago, which would have flooded out our basement if I hadn’t been able to cut power to the pump involved.) Being able to cut the power completely and instantly is not negotiable for a lot of appliances. I wasn’t even taking battery fires into consideration when I wrote about failure modes—I was talking about things that already happen to plug-in appliances right now.

Yes, the added weight and complexity are likely not all that significant here, but they’re sufficient that, even without the power-cutting issues, they outweigh any benefit of attaching a battery to the appliance directly. It’s just not a particularly useful idea when you get pretty much the same benefits with none of the downsides by incorporating the batteries into the building’s power system separately.

Adding batteries to a device has one advantage: portability. It also has mutiple disadvantages: batteries add weight, add design complexity, and make it more difficult to fully shut off power in an emergency.

Major household appliances aren’t portable, and are subject to failure modes where you really do want to cut all the power right now and make sure it stays that way. Thus, the disadvantages of adding batteries directly to an appliance outweigh the advantages.

A power wall using this new battery tech would be great, though.

Clarity is not normally something headlines are all that concerned with (some are intentionally opaque, but this one is just joking around). Anyway, I think the “[foo], [bar]ed” structure was a lot more common some decades before the Internet—I had no trouble parsing it, but this marks the first time in a while that I’ve seen it, and I can see how it might be unfamiliar to some audiences.

Quebec always marches to a different drummer. Nevertheless, I expect they will be dropping the Tesla vehicles from their list sooner or later. They may just not want to make any more adjustments so close to a launch.

It’s more a matter of crazy than stupid, I think.

Hmm. Considering the number of packages in a Gentoo base system and what package.provided does, [anything]->Gentoo shouldn’t be that difficult. Of course, whether “work your way through about twenty packages one at a time, then just uninstall the rest of the old system and reinstall everything using Portage” violates the spirit of the challenge is another question.

The peripherals were mostly dead before it reach the end of support in windows.

Not my experience at all—I have stuff 20+ years old that’s still in working order. Maybe you’re particularly hard on your peripherals.

Whether or not an older machine “runs well” is highly dependent on what you’re using it for. I only very recently (like, after the new year) retired a 16-year-old laptop with 2GB RAM that was running Gentoo, when I got a good deal on something that would compile gcc in a reasonable amount of time rather than needing to be left to run overnight. However, most people don’t need to compile large software on a regular basis, and the old machine was still doing okay in its role as a large-screen-coarse-resolution pseudo-video-iPod, ssh client, quick lookup device for Perl manpages, emergency Internet query device, and general backup/light-use system. Worthless for gaming and somewhat sluggish on the Web, naturally, but that wasn’t what I needed it for.

I’d expect anything with 4GB RAM and 4 CPU threads to produce somewhat acceptable performace on most individual webpages (multiple Javascript-heavy sites might be a challenge, though, so stick to 1-2 tabs at a time), which would make the main issue most people would have with my old laptop disappear.