Viewing profile — roryirvine

HVDC cables aren't landed at datacentres. (And even if it were a fibre connection, those usually have dedicated Cable Landing Stations which are mostly concerned with separating th…

That's not quite true - there's a 5 yearly Health Check which is offered to those over 40 with no other known health issues (in England, but Scotland/Wales/NI have similar schemes)…

That process has likely already started, with the long term trend towards consolidation having accelerated over the past five years. In the UK, for example, the number of petrol st…

Sadly, I suspect there are also a lot of culture war aspects driving some of the most vocal Firefox hatred. (There's a steelmanned form of their argument - that Mozilla ought to be…

uBO 1.7.3 was released just 3 days ago, so it would be more accurate to say "better" rather than "older".

Of course not - and, in fact, ruthless prioritisation almost always makes for a better product.

Even the most desperate jobhunter would be ashamed to post that sort of sloptastic nonsense on LinkedIn. How utterly cringeworthy.

Did you forget the Earth Summit and its Climate Change Convention? Or the Kyoto Protocol? Both sat at the top of the news agenda for months! Not to mention years of features, long-…

What about the hundreds of journeys you'll inevitably disrupt? Should your fellow passengers perhaps be free to use lethal force against you in return?

The same technical fixes were proposed for cameraphones in the late 2000s - lights, shutter sounds, etc. Most phones in that era experimented with various implementations, but pret…

Quite apart from the extreme sloppiness, the person who runs it is a "Development Strategist" in Palantir's sales team. I'd suggest being extremely wary about signing up with them.…

Really interesting! Might be useful to expand the full name of each model somewhere (perhaps with a one para description and/or or a link). On the trends tab, would it be worth zoo…

Yeah, my impression is that even the best LLMs are pretty bad at analysing big data directly. It's not even the hallucinations that are the biggest problem, it's more that they're …

This is approval for the Wayve/Uber service but ApolloGo/Lyft and Waymo are unlikely to be far behind. I've seen both the Wayve and Waymo being tested on the roads where I live. No…

...and sometimes it stops charging the device when you clear the dialog box. Not always, though, which actually makes it worse because of the uncertainty. And, yeah, I solve it by …

Continuing the political link forged by Margaret Thatcher, who worked on the emulsifiers used in Lyons Maid's Mister Softee soft serve product. And that was very much not the golde…

Process heat would be a good use case for SMR nuclear if the economics turn out to be favourable (a big if, admittedly). Also potential for using green hydrogen (though the economi…

Kermit initially competed with xmodem which was very primitive (but a lot smaller/simpler). By the time zmodem became popular, the biggest remaining selling point of Kermit was the…

Part of the answer is dividing programmes up into smaller chunks to attract a wider range of bidders. The problem is that, even when divided up, they're still often "build and run"…

In the twentieth century, government regulation was used to encourage corporations to provide these sort of quasi-public services alongside their more profitable lines of business,…

I don't think anyone has previously been crass enough to require it for job interviews but, yeah, there've been a couple of previous waves of "skinvertising". The first, in 1999-20…

Wow, the return of skinvertising. Almost as if the dotcom bubble never burst...

Very much a two-way street, that. The "economist" faction in the British government (that is, those who wanted to fight a limited war, sparing men and materiel) semi-deliberately f…