AnyOldName3

Don’t give JK Rowling ideas.

I can get a board from AliExpress with an ESP32-C3 on it with free shipping for £1.10, so I’m not inclined to believe the £0.765 unit cost for a 5000-part reel from Mouser is really the cheapest way to get them in bulk as the other parts on the same board and the shipping have to cost something.

The cheapest hygrometer that Mouser sell is £0.748 per unit for a 10,000-part reel, and its datasheet says not to leave it for more than 60 hours in greater than 80% relative humidity (which is a pretty likely scenario for a dehumidifier) as it’ll drift, and if it happens often, it’ll age faster. You need to spend more to get rid of that restriction. I’ll concede that the accuracy penalty if you cheap out isn’t as bad as I thought - I’d not actually looked at a datasheet to see how badly modern hygrometers would drift, I just knew that they did - so plenty of manufacturers wouldn’t care, but the parts are still comparable prices, not a factor of ten like you’re claiming.

The built-in hygrometer’s not necessarily going to be as good as a well-designed home automation system, especially if the fan’s not running all the time, so it has to wait for damp air to diffuse into the machine. It also lets you do other things, like not bother turning the dehumidifier on if there are open windows if you’ve got some way to detect that, or report the humidity to something that will graph it. It’s not stuff that most consumers will care about, but a microcontroller with WiFi like the ESP8266 or ESP32-C3 costs less than an accurate hygrometer chip, so it doesn’t make much, if any, difference to the final price, particularly if the product was going to use a microcontroller anyway.

The same site says things like:

Between 1901 and 2024, the Nobel Prizes and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel were awarded 627 times to 1,012 people and organisations.

which pretty clearly makes a distinction between the Nobel Prizes and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

There’s no such thing as a Nobel Prize in economics. Economists got salty about this and came up with the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and rely on the media shortening it to something that gets confused with real Nobel Prizes.

If it works like real WoW64, then 16 bit applications won’t work ever but 32 bit applications that don’t work will be because of fixable bugs.

That way they can sell it as Crab Product rather than the much less appetising Crab Flavour Fish Product.

You can’t make an LLM only reference the data it’s summarising. Everything an LLM outputs is a collage of text and patterns from its original training data, and it’s choosing whatever piece of that data seems most likely given the existing text in its context window. If there’s not a huge corpus of training data, it won’t have a model of English and won’t know how to summarise text, and even restricting the training data to medical notes will stop mean it’s potentially going to hallucinate something from someone else’s medical notes that’s commonly associated with things in the current patient’s notes, or it’s going to potentially leave out something from the current patient’s notes that’s very rare or totally absent from its training data.

Sandwich cake is already a term that means the same thing as layer cake. The classic combination of two layers of Victoria sponge with strawberry jam and whipped cream in between is called a Victoria Sandwich. Anyone arguing that a layer cake isn’t a sandwich is just illiterate, not a defender of semantic specificity.

Like a real powertool, if you unscrew the safety features because you feel they’re getting in your way, they no longer provide safety. Having the guard from a chainsaw in your back pocket does nothing to protect you from the chainsaw you’re holding.

You can’t starve children to death in self defence.

I guess this is slightly less disturbing than the previous approach to cyborg cockroaches where their antennae were snipped and enamelled wire was inserted into the stubs to directly stimulate their nerves.

Variations of this meme get posted every week, but I’ve never experienced it, despite having had tens of grub updates murder-suicide the Windows boot loader and grub itself across five or six different machines. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to rebuild a Windows boot partition, but the frequency that I’m hit with this problem is one of the major reasons I avoid using Linux. Eventually I’m going to have to switch, but that’s driven mainly by Windows getting worse rather than any of the pain points I’ve had when trying to switch full time in the past having been fixed.

It depends on the kind of acceptance. If you accept that certain things will be harder for some people and make reasonable accommodations so they can get on with their lives, then people can get on with their lives. If you accept things will be harder so use that as an excuse for people never doing anything without removing any of the obstacles stopping them doing things, they’ll never get anything done. It’s really just addressing the problems versus deciding the problems are inevitable and giving up. That said, giving up can be a lot less miserable than refusing to acknowledge problems and yelling at people when they don’t keep up.

It’s pretty plausible that a bunker buster would do that - if you’ve got an accelerometer like every phone does, you can just add one every time it records a sudden force - but it’s no help against bridges.

Ducks are omnivores. When they stick their heads underwater, they’re trying to catch prey like small fish.

Ducks and chickens aren’t the same animal. They’re both birds, but plenty of birds eat other birds from other species.

Unfortunately, I’m not the right kind of software engineer to answer in more detail than that.

I think for something like this, you’d rent cloud servers as you’d expect the number of concurrent users to change over time and ideally would be able to spin up more capacity when you need it without having to have those machines available all the time. You still need some kind of system that decides when to order more capacity with enough warning that it’s actually available (you can tell AWS you want a VM immediately, but it still takes a couple of minutes to transfer your data onto it and boot it up, which is longer than people want to sit in a loading screen) and decides which servers to assign to which users.

There’s a strong argument that the server architecture needed to be better at launch, but then the game sold more than an order of magnitude better than it was expected to, so no one would have noticed that it scaled badly had the player count been in line with their design and testing.