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.

Will it actually allow ordinary users to browse normally, though? Their other stuff breaks in minority browsers. Have they tested this well enough so that it won’t? (I’d bet not.)

There’s a large swathe of people who want comfort food entertainment—unchallenging and similar to what they’ve enjoyed watching/reading/listening to before—at least some of the time. It makes sense that LLMs would be good at filling that need, since they can pretty much only generate more of the same.

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.

On the gripping hand, if you’re trying to connect an older external device, you’re more likely to get it working eventually under Linux (which usually keeps device drivers until they bit-rot out of the kernel tree) than Windows (whose drivers are version-specific and only get ported forward if the manufacturer thinks there’s money in it). Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other, as far as I’m concerned, and device setup is a thing you should only have to do rarely anyway.

Or, y’know, simply make collecting data on anyone for the purpose of ad personalization, and the delivery of such ads, illegal, full stop. Penalize anyone found to be advertising on such a network, too.

(Hey, I can dream, right?)

It’s the letter of the law: media shifting is legal in some places where downloading a copy from an unofficial site is not. Also, there are people out there who would not have the first idea where to look for an existing rip.

The cause of Sophie’s APD diagnosis is unknown, but her audiologist believes the overuse of noise-cancelling headphones, which Sophie wears for up to five hours a day, could have a part to play.

Other audiologists agree, saying more research is needed into the potential effects of their prolonged use.

That looks to me like, “audiologists have no bloody clue where this issue is coming from, and are therefore throwing shit at the wall in the hope that something will stick.”

Y’know what’s worse? When there’s no dot. Worse than that, it’s an undotted directory used to store a single config file. Ugh, unpleasant memories. 😒