It’s my understanding that “category 5” means “total destruction”, which is why this hasn’t been done in the past. However if it helps to get the point across about climate change, it would be helpful for marketing purposes.
Readit Newsorev commented on Hurricane category 6 could be introduced under new storm severity scale livescience.com/planet-ea... · Posted by u/geox
There’s an important generational component that’s getting missed here.
Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.
To switch to Microsoft Office means adding a cryptic, unnecessary-seeming extra step. I imagine it feels something like having a laptop that's designed to be shut down before closing.
You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is — and those are the kids who actually want to work with computers. Now step back to the next generation of lawyers and nurses and novelists and think about their lifetime experience.
Microsoft is just chasing the puck.
> a laptop that's designed to be shut down
For the people who do shut it down, they do it by holding down the power button for 10+ seconds, because that’s how phones do it. On Windows at least, that causes a forced/crash shutdown.
orev commented on Standard Thermal: Energy Storage 500x Cheaper Than Batteries austinvernon.site/blog/st... · Posted by u/pfdietz
These are cool ideas but there's always an asterisk.
The issue here is: the "stored energy" isn't electricity, but heat. Converting heat into electricity is quite wasteful.
They’re using the stored heat energy as heat, not converting it back to electricity.
And if it’s very cheap, does it matter if the conversion is wasteful?
orev commented on Standard Thermal: Energy Storage 500x Cheaper Than Batteries austinvernon.site/blog/st... · Posted by u/pfdietz
Seems like a case where directly going from sunlight to heat would be a better approach for this, instead of converting to electricity first.
How would you move the solar energy into the piles of dirt? You’d need something like an array of mirrors focusing the rays, which has definitely been done already but has drawbacks. Electricity can easily be moved to where it’s needed.
As far as I know, same here. The only thing I do is grab a ground lug from a electrical outlet before handling chips and boards. Which may be superstition and ineffective. I may be doing the right thing or I may be using up my luck and one day fry something expensive.
I doubt this is doing anything. Static electricity is the difference in latent charge between two things, and if neither of those things is attached the the actual ground, touching the mains ground (which is attached to the actual ground) isn’t doing much.
I use KDE every day. It's totally fair if people notice that stuff; I have many friends who do, but not everyone does (like me). I care more about functionality. In which case KDE is just about fine.
I guess the people who use KDE don't maybe care about this sort of polish enough, which is why it doesn't get fixed?
It’s very easy to become blind to UX issues even after just a few exposures to it. Once you “figure it out”, it’s not a problem anymore. The thing is that you can easily lose many potential users who don’t want to give any time at all to “figuring it out”.
orev commented on Tested: Microsoft Recall can still capture credit cards and passwords theregister.com/2025/08/0... · Posted by u/rntn
I'd like to know why the competitors, customers and suppliers of Microsoft are all completely at peace with sending their email through outlook, discussing their operations through teams, and running the entire stack on windows with built in telemetry features. I've never had a better result than blank incomprehension when raising that as a risk with IT teams.
That “blank stare” isn’t lack of comprehension. The IT teams already know this, but are powerless to prevent it because the Business-people want IT to “just make it work”, “every other company is using it so obviously you’re just being paranoid”, and “we don’t have time for an in-depth risk review because our competitors are going to eat our lunch while we’re wasting time on this instead of running the business”.
That blank look is “this is inevitable and I’m doing what I need to do to keep my job”.
orev commented on 'A black hole': New graduates discover a dismal job market nbcnews.com/business/econ... · Posted by u/koolba
Bit confused by the mentions of 50k and above salary but can’t afford to move out because rent is above a grand
Last I checked a year has 12 months so that should easily work no?
Salaries are usually quoted in before-tax dollars, while paying rent happens after tax. Any place where rent is around “a grand“ also requires a car (and insurance) to survive. That 50k gets used up quickly.
It reminds me of “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place” (Brian Kernighan).
If you use AI to write the code, did you ever make it to the 1x level to begin with? How can you be 2x smarter to debug it if you didn’t reach the 1x level initially?
My story is similar. I’ve been programming nearly every day for over 35 years and don’t see myself stopping any time soon.
Occasionally someone (usually at work) will ask “why do you know that?” or “how did you learn how to do that?” (where “that” is typically something outside of my direct job responsibilities).
I’ve been programming for so long and have dabbled or seriously worked with so many parts of the computing landscape - mostly out of simple curiosity and love of craft - that I admit to being somewhat annoyed at questions like this. I have trouble connecting with the premise.
But I don’t want to offend, and it’s not my place to judge when it feels like my interlocutor works in my field simply because the money is there. So I came up with a succinct way to answer those questions.
“I like computers.”
> Occasionally someone (usually at work) will ask “why do you know that?” or “how did you learn how to do that?”
This comes up a lot from business people, and I think at least one answer is because learning to program is a master class on how to break down a problem into actionable parts, while also considering as many failure and unexpected scenarios as possible. For many business jobs, that might be a full time job for one person who focuses only on one specific area. When someone trained in programming just “gets it” right away, it can be unnerving.
I think this is one reason there can be so many disconnects between IT and Business—the stuff IT does is just so magical they can’t understand it at all, and as a result don’t care if that magic comes from a local employee, an overseas one, or an AI.