“No formulas ever” what? So you can’t even add numbers?

“Teehee, we’ve been hard at work squashing bugs to provide the best experience for you!” And then they’ve removed some useful feature, added more invasive tracking, added more ads, etc.

Stuck on a NEMA 5-15 outlet, can’t draw much more continuously. I think like 1200W is the highest continuous load you’re allowed on a 15 A circuit here in the US, but I am not an electrician so I could be wrong

At some point you realize that the slushee has melted in the face of your system’s 1000 W TDP…

What a mess. Fortunately, the frequency thing is less of an issue with modern power supplies, like my laptop charger is rated for 100-240V 50-60 Hz, so it Just Works. But I imagine that was more of a pain before these were widespread.

I have a Google smart speaker that I got as a freebie. I used to use it (>3 years ago) for timers, alarms, etc. and had few problems, I just stopped when I moved and didn’t set it up. I put them back up a few months ago and it sure seems worse to me. Always triggering on random conversations, or to dialog on TV. Anyway they are permanent residents of the closet now. They suck.

“If we confuse them now, we can get another contract in a few years to fix the naming situation again!”

Some consulting firm surely was paid a few million to come up with these names.

• Cyborgs every time a Windows update comes out

That name may be taken, depending on how you look at it! Game developer Tim Cain wrote an OS abstraction library called GNW (GNW’s not Windows). That allowed games like Fallout to be built for DOS, Windows, and Mac without major changes. I highly recommend his Youtube channel!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Uhhh, magnets, I assume. I’ve gone through the physics courses, scrapped through intro to electrical engineering, and I still don’t get magnets. So we’ll just go with those.

I just woke up with my phone on this. My assumption is that remembering that optimal packing thing just caused me to pass out, presumably to protect myself.

I feel like it may be more visually poetic - standing there, as a breeze blows dust past you, a dollar bill flies into your hand, somehow inexplicably preserved. Any archeological record of paper currency is long gone, so even if there was a human civilization, this strangely ornamented picture of a man’s head with various shapes around it would be alien.

Clearly the better choice. (Edit: vs. $5m in a year, not paper vs. a server.)

Spaceship Georg, whose body is 5.7×10⁹ miles from Earth, is an outlier and should not be counted.

(A portion of Clyde Tombaugh’s remains are on the New Horizons spacecraft about this far from Earth). Edit: but this of course is useless for place of death statistics.

Scooters definitely need more regulations. My experience as someone walking in a city with them hasn’t been very positive.

They’ve been frequently tossed on the ground after their use. It’s a rental, and people don’t care what happens to it because it’s not their problem.

They frequently block curb ramps for wheelchairs. Sometimes it’s even the company putting them there (all lined up nicely, just to block the way). Sometimes it’s just people tossing a scooter there after use.

My partner uses a wheelchair so scooters have been a pain in the ass for them.

Safety wise there are problems. The scooter app will tell you to wear a helmet and never ride on the sidewalk (to cover their asses) but no one wears a helmet on them.

A scooter rider hit my partner, then a stationary car once. At another time a scooter hit me and knocked me over (they were speeding down the sidewalk late at night).

But “stupid drivers” also applies to bikes, and cars. And the potential for harm with an F-150 is a lot greater than a scooter

Those World War 2 movies as well - like, we already had millions die during the war, and now we’re doing it again to make a movie out of it? (/s)

Since you’re in a roundabout, you just need a large funnel into the gas tank. Every time around, someone standing at the side pours a bit of fuel in while you pass, so you get a splash of fuel per lap!

Or, if you’re more fun, a giant wall of lava lamps! The coolest randomness in town!

(Cloudflare does this)

Even USB-C is a nightmare. There’s 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, which were rebranded as “3.2 Gen X” with some stupid stuff there as far as what speed it supports.

Then it can do DisplayPort as well. There used to be an HDMI alt mode too!

An Intel computer might have Thunderbolt over the same cable, and can send PCIe signals over the cable to plug in a graphics card or other devices.

Then there’s USB 4 which works like Thunderbolt but isn’t restricted to Intel devices.

Then there’s the extended power profile which lets you push 240 W through a USB C port.

For a while, the USB-C connector was on graphics cards as Virtualink, which was supposed to be a one-cable standardized solution to plugging in VR headsets. Except that no headsets used it.

Then there’s Nintendo. The Switch has a Type-C port, but does its own stupid thing for video, so it can’t work with a normal dock because it’s a freak.

So you pick up a random USB C cable and have no information on what it may be capable of, plug it into a port where you again don’t know the capabilities. Its speed may be anywhere between 1.5 MBit/s (USB 1.0 low speed) and 80 GBit/s (USB 4 2.0) and it may provide between 5 and 240 W of power.

Every charger has a different power output, and sometimes it leads to a stupid situation like the Dell 130 W laptop charger. In theory, 130 W is way more than what most phones will charge at. But it only offers that at I think 20 V, which my phone can’t take. So in practice, your phone will charge at the base 5W over it.

Dell also has a laptop dock for one of their laptops that uses TWO Type-C ports, for more gooderness or something, I don’t know. Meaning it will only fit that laptop with ports exactly that far apart.

The USB chaos does lead to fun discoveries, such as when I plugged a Chromecast with Google TV’s power port into a laptop dock and discovered that it actually supports USB inputs, which is cool.

And Logitech still can’t make a USB-C dongle for their mouse.

At least it’s not a bunch of proprietary barrel chargers. My parents have a whole box of orphaned chargers with oddly specific voltages from random devices.