Usually I sympathize with sentiments like this (“people use X because of uncontrolled circumstances”), but browsers are not one of them.

If you have a website that requires the use of Chrome, then just use Chrome for that website! It’s not an either-or thing – you can install both browsers and use Firefox as the primary one.

And some people will want to stay on Chrome.

And that’s what makes this statement so problematic. You don’t earn anything by staying exclusively on Chrome, when both it and Firefox can work alongside each other.

Are the streamed data stored in a local cache? Surely the bandwidth costs are going up to the sky with the server sending data to every single player.

I think there’s one key thing you missed: you have never bought a copy of the game on Steam! It’s always been a license. Valve simply made the fact clear now because of legal changes.

so the next question, is this retroactive

So the answer for this is a solid no.

In the past, fitness (and hence its proxy parameters like height and other beauty standards) correlated to the survivability of your bloodline. So it makes sense that people are programmed, to a certain degree, to admire things like tallness.

Nowadays because of technology the correlation no longer exists, or at the very least it is much diminished. But the programming is still there right in our DNA, so as a people we should artificially override this natural instinct because it no longer serves a purpose.

Well, tallness surely would be a preferable criteria back then! To a certain extent, it is a proxy parameter for fitness.

I just think we can actually use evolution to explain a lot of things that we do, it doesn’t mean we should do it.

Unfortunately not just America. Heightism is also prevalent in a big part of Asia.

This is most likely one of the quirks brought to you by Survival of the Fittest rule. Thanks, evolution.

For SSDs this has historically not been the case, there’s no way in hell you could buy a 1TB SSD within $200 a decade ago.

Hydrogen is troublesome as an energy storage. The roundtrip efficiency (electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity) is just… very not worthwhile compared to batteries. Then beyond efficiency there is still the question of “how do we store hydrogen safely?”

Storing energy indefinitely is not a problem for electricity storage, since we are pretty much guaranteed to use the stored energy up in a single day.

It is all quite complicated.

1. A renewable producer (e.g. solar panels) cannot produce energy 24/7. And when it produces energy, you are not guaranteed the production is stable.

2. A consumer cannot consume energy 24/7. And when they consume energy, you are not guaranteed the consumption is stable.

3. To make the issue worse, a producer may not be producing energy when the consumer wants it, and vice versa.

4. Currently, energy storage is not widely installed. Hence any produced energy must be consumed at the same time.

The factors above combined means that there will be a mismatch. If the production is too great, your electricity appliances will probably explode and whatnot. If the consumption is too great, you experience blackouts. Neither are desirable.

Now consider there is a middleman. The grid. Producers sell energy to the grid. Consumers buy energy from the grid.

At some point in time, due to the factors above, the grid will need (A) zero to negative prices to encourage consumers to buy & use more energy from it, and to encourage producers to produce & sell less energy to it. Or (B) increased prices to encourage consumers to buy & use less energy and producers to produce & sell more energy. A flat price is not realistic. (Residential users only have a flat rate because our demand patterns are more stable.)

But due to the production patterns of renewable energy and consumption patterns of our society, there is a not-insignificant risk that renewable producers will consistently face scenario (A) above making it difficult to cover back the costs.

There are a lot more ways to store energy other than lithium and hydrogen.

Pumped storage, vanadium redox battery, sodium battery, … I’d even say they are most suited for grid-level energy storage.

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Last time I asked around about this question, the answer was surprisingly “probably not much”! When a low-power x86 chip (like those mobile chips) is idling (which is pretty much all the time if all you are doing is hosting a server on it) it consumes very little power, about the same level as an idling Pi. It is when the frequency ramps up that performance-per-watt gets noticeably worse on x86.

Edit: My personal test showed that my x86 laptop fared slightly worse than my Pi 3 in idling power (~2 watts higher it seems), but that laptop is oooooooold.

It’s not just DNS. I have this rule in my firewall:

udp dport 15600 counter drop comment "Block Samsung TV shenanigans"

So far, it has blocked 20575 packets (constituting 1304695 bytes) in 6 days and 20 hours.

Anticheats can be very invasive, they can theoretically scan all the files inside your computer (whether it is practically done, I don’t know but it surely feels like it’s been done), take screenshots regularly, send your hardware information, etc. So yeah, if you are someone who takes security seriously…

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If you squint your eyes just enough, insurance is like gambling… You are betting that something is going to happen to you, the insurance company is betting against that. The insurance company can improve their chances by adding conditions to that something.

Gen Z’s are well aware of traditional phones. Smartphones were not really that ubiquitous (up until 2010(ish)), and by that time Gen Alphas were already born.

Ah you got my comment wrong! I didn’t mean to suggest Gecko is closed source. I just wanted another web engine that is also open source.

Servo was an experimental ground for Mozilla in some ways (like testing out a new CSS engine and porting it back to Gecko if it works). So it’s quite normal for people to be unaware of it, it was not meant for the public.

But later on it was abandoned by Mozilla and stuck in a limbo, until it got picked up by the Linux Foundation. Now it’s a standalone project and I wish them well. We really need a new FOSS web engine.

I recall reading somewhere the earlier compilers had a hard limit on the length of function names, due to memory constraints.