It should also be mentioned that despite being the factory of the world, China's CO2 emissions per capita are nearly half of the United States and comparable to some European countries.
1,961 karma · joined March 31, 2015
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/e...
crude oil and petroleum products (37.7%)
natural gas (20.4%)
renewable energy (19.5%)
solid fuels (10.6%)
nuclear energy (11.8%)
So natural gas was just barely more than renewables in 2023, but according to the source below the line was crossed in 2025 and renewables now provide more than all fossil fuels put together:
https://electrek.co/2026/01/21/wind-and-solar-overtook-fossi...
It's not a website you go to — it's a little spirit that lives on your machine.
Not a chatbot. A tool that reads and writes files on your filesystem.
That's not a technical argument. It's a values argument."
Yes, different computers have different keyboards. Macs have had Mac conventions since 1984, and if you're not used to it you're not used to it. Instead of sticking to "the thing I'm not used to is wrong", I would suggest trying to be objective about which is the better UX.
I spent the first 25 years of my computer use being a Linux and Windows user and barely ever touching a Mac, so I've had to adjust, but to be honest, the truth is that Apple was always right and Microsoft made the wrong call.
Ctrl is meant to send control characters. This has been well defined since the birth of ASCII. In macOS, cmd-C is always copy, cmd-V is always paste. It does not matter what mode or program you are in.
Windows was designed for an IBM PC where the keyboard only had Ctrl and Alt, and when they copied Apple conventions (like cmd-X, C, V for cut, copy, paste) they made the wrong decision in using Ctrl for it. We've paid for this debt ever since. GNOME, KDE, XFCE, [...] devs continued this travesty by copying Windows, and so now on Linux Ctrl-C is copy in GUI apps, unless it's a terminal, in which case Ctrl-C will break out of your process, and copy is Ctrl-Shift-C. This is insane and bad UX.
The correct choice for a Linux DE would have been to use the "super" key ("Windows logo") for copy/paste etc, but of course they couldn't do that because 1) not everyone had that key and 2) it would confuse Windows users.
- Select with touchpad?? You must physically press its button like WTF
System Settings -> Touchpad -> Tap to click
- Mouse with backward/forward button?? Good luck!!
This is stupid. I will agree that Apple's insistence to not really support anything other than their own severely limited input devices is boneheaded. I recommend installing SensibleSideButtons.
(Weird side question: are you by any chance the Jason Farnon who wrote IBFT?)
You have to be able to get enough of the things made, too. A19 and A18 Pro are made on different TSMC processes, and most likely it's easier to get production capacity on the older N3E process.
https://youtu.be/c6yPoWrdjkU?si=hxvXTE6ZsdvJs5U9&t=1266
(roughly 21:06 into the video)
I get the sentiment, but I have to nitpick the details ;)
VGA isn't bitplaned. It's chunky -- to put a pixel on the screen in 320x200x8 VGA mode 13h you literally just write a single byte to the VGA memory. The Amiga, on the other hand, does use planar graphics.
(Maybe you're thinking of EGA, which is planar and a pain to program for)
This does indeed work in proper MS-DOS. Congratulations for figuring out probably the single most masochistic way of accomplishing text editing ;)
As someone who (mercifully) only occasionally has to touch Windows machines, I keep forgetting this, and then when I try to do stuff I’m flabbergasted that the operating system does not include a terminal text editor. (In a fit of pure desperation I even typed EDLIN into the Command Prompt — no go ;)
That was the case with Win11 about a year ago; if they finally started shipping EDIT64 then hey, that’s one positive recent change in Windows I suppose.
Do you think there is a possible world where TI would have swallowed their pride and considered not-invented-here options like a regular 8080/Z80/6502 as the CPU?
This is absolutely true. I'm saying someone should care, because it does matter.
Some linux users aren't going to stop this sort of thing from happening. If Chase Bank wants to only allow MacOS and Windows 11 computers to access their website, the 1% of their userbase that uses something else isn't going to move the needle, and 99% of their users won't care (or even notice).
For some businesses, losing 1% of your customers is actually a lot of customers and a lot of money, and all else being equal they would prefer to not lose them.
If this was going to happen, it would have already happened. The pieces are all there already.
No, they really aren't. Again, it's perhaps technically feasible to flip the switch, but it doesn't make business sense yet.
How many people are doing online banking without running on a fully cryptographically verifiable/attestable OS? This means everyone not using a TPM, Secure Boot, etc. This means grandpa with an old Windows 10 machine or an old Mac that perhaps he should not still be using but he doesn't care, he just wants to pay his bills. I don't have numbers of course but I bet you this starts looking like a hell of a lot more than 1% of the userbase.
There are web APIs for this sort of thing in all major browsers but no one is really using them yet. But they exist for a reason, much like Windows 11 requires a TPM for a reason, and this tech will at some point be deployed for things like online banking. Of course it will.
So fine, exclude me from all your platforms, there's nothing there for me. It's all bad content from bad people (or increasingly: not even people) running on bad software. I'm not giving up my freedom to partake in that, I'd rather just stop using your shit.
(But I would very much like to be able to pay my bills and buy my train tickets, so I'll play your game and have a smartphone. Fine. You win this round.).
But in places where that stuff isn't relevant, we already see a lot of locked-down devices like the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation based on BSD precisely because they can leverage free software but still lock it down. macOS with its BSD userland is also kind of like this -- the OS is getting gradually more locked down over time, but the frog boils slowly.
If you tighten the screws too hard and fast then people will scream and yell and maybe leave your business for a competitor -- even though it's technically feasible, that means you can't disallow access to banking websites for generic-browser-on-generic-OS now. But we are, brick by brick, building a foundation where that will seem inevitable.
The argument is basically that making it easier to lock down general purpose computing devices like desktop computers (by, for example, making a non-GPL drop-in replacement for GNU *utils) will eventually aid in making it happen. The powers that be will use tried-and-true arguments about security and think-of-the-kids etc to make it seem like running a mutable, untrusted OS is an unacceptable risk.
It won't, in itself, but it appears to be yet another little push forward on the slippery slope that probably will end where it appears to inevitably end.
Both true, which makes this an even more baffling choice -- why pick the more expensive, state of the art 16-bit CPU* that you're getting little or no benefit from + 16K of extremely slow-to-access combined video and system RAM? You could have used a cheaper 8-bit CPU and maybe for the same budget have fit 4K or 8K of system RAM on the bus + some amount of dedicated video RAM for the VDP. This would have been faster and more useful in nearly all real world applications, make for a much cleaner board design, easier development, and probably cheaper. That's what everyone else did.
Then again, what was this machine's target market?
Home computing, so yeah.
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/...
* The reason is probably that TI wanted to show off their state-of-the-art CPU tech and be able to point to the spec sheet and say "look, it's 16 bit! All our competitors are only 8 bits -- that's half as many bits!"
This only ever happens when the party trying to EEE is fighting a losing battle. If they have the upper hand, they will always get to the extend and extinguish part. Do we think movements for user freedom have the upper hand right now?
And then websites and applications stop working if you're not using a verified, attested, locked-down OS and you're stuck with your nice free software system that will not do your online banking, let you chat with your friends, or access your company resources.
Supposedly what happened is that the system was originally designed to have either an 8-bit CPU, or a 16-bit CPU with an 8-bit bus (cf. 8086/8088) like TI's own TMS9985, but at some point it was decided that they should instead cram their full 16-bit TMS9900 minicomputer CPU (!) into the thing. This decision basically tanked the whole architecture.
It was too late/too expensive to redesign the 8-bit support chips to 16-bit counterparts so they had to make some really out there decisions like "talk to the graphics chip and give it an address to read/write every time you want to use memory" and "software is written not in machine code, but in GPL (Graphic Programming Language), which is then interpreted by the CPU and turned into actual TMS9900 machine code"
Software on ROM cartridge for the system is stored in GPL and is fetched from ROM by the CPU (but wait! The ROMs are not in memory space like they would be on a sane computer; they are SERIAL ROMs read 16 bits at a time with memory mapped I/O) and interpreted to machine code. This is slow. When you write your own software in BASIC, however, this gets worse: now you're writing BASIC, which is being interpreted and turned into GPL, stored in video RAM, and then fetched back from video RAM and turned into machine code by the CPU. THIS IS EVEN SLOWER.
Needless to say, the BASIC on the TI99 is dramatically slower than the already slow implementations on other contemporary micros.
It DOES have a full 16-bit CPU which is theoretically much more powerful than a 6502 or Z80 but this wild-ass implementation of... well, everything, makes the system probably the least capable machine of the era.
It gets worse because the TI99 only has 256 bytes of RAM directly addressable on its 16-bit bus. All the other memory in the system is video RAM and is accessed 8 bits at a time through the video display processor. Oh, and you can only do this when the VDP is not accessing the memory. This is incredibly slow and severely hobbles the potential performance of the CPU.
Yes, this is a convenience argument, not a technical one. It's not that your PC doesn't have or could have more than enough storage -- it likely does -- it's that there are other factors that make you use Dropbox.
So now the question becomes: do we not believe that personal devices will ever become good enough to run a "good enough" LLM (technical barrier), or do we believe that other factors will make it seem less desirable to do so (social/financial/legal barrier)?
I think there's a very decent chance that the latter will be true, but the original argument was a technical one -- that good-enough LLMs will always require so much compute that you wouldn't want to run one locally even if you could.
If the personal computer of the 80s was good enough, why’s nobody still using one?
What people want to do changes with time, and therefore your PC XT will no longer hack it in the modern workplace, but the point is that from the point that a personal computer of any kind was good enough, people kept using personal computers. The parallel argument here would be that if there is a plateau where LLM improvement slows and converges with ability to run something good enough on consumer hardware, why would people not then just keep running those good enough models on their hardware? The models would get better with time, sure, but so would the hardware running them.
It's not that mainframes (or supercomputers, or servers, or the cloud) stopped existing, it's that there was a "good enough" point where the personal computer was powerful enough to do all the things that people care about. Why would this be different?*
And aren't we all paying for a bunch of silicon that sits mostly unused? I have a full modern GPU in my Apple SoC capable of throwing a ridiculous number of polygons per second at the screen and I'm using it to display two terminal emulator windows.
* (I can think of a number of reasons why it would in fact turn out different, but none of them have to do with the limits of technology -- they are all about control or economic incentives)