That’s an interesting thought.

thinks

Tax revenue would be less-frequent, and there might be potential to create a misincentive to encourage people to unsafely drive on threadbare tires longer than they otherwise would. But I could see that being done.

But is $130 actually fair?

Well, a flat fee doesn’t take into account vehicle weight or annual mileage, which the gas tax more-or-less does. And the road maintenance cost is a function of those two things. A flat fee would penalize drivers of infrequently-driven small vehicles.

But…I suppose that gathering that data would also add some privacy concerns and costs, like the government needing to record how many miles your vehicle has traveled in a year.

EDIT: The really obnoxious thing is that everyone else is grabbing movement data on vehicles to make money off. Automakers via integrated cell radios. ALPR network operators. I assume that charging station operators do too — fast DC connections like NACS transmit the vehicle’s VIN, and I’d be very surprised if charging companies aren’t monetizing that data.

I don’t think that they have much to do with the shortage one way or another. The companies described in the article aren’t AI companies or even memory chip manufacturers (I wouldn’t have called them “RAM makers”, personally). They’re companies that buy memory chips and assemble them into things like DIMMs.

EDIT: The mentioned seven companies all appear to be Taiwanese, but the American PNY is a company that also operates in this space that I could name off-the-cuff.

Gotcha. Yeah, the stuff in fstab is just a convenience; it’s equivalent to running a bunch of mount commands at boot. You might be able to just run “mount” again without the '-o remount" option. I was just listing that in case you were seeing some kind of errors in trying to manually mount it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE

Bobby: A hundred and eleven degrees? Phoenix can’t really be that hot, can it?

The family exits the car

Bobby: Oh my God! It’s like standing on the sun!

Peggy: This city should not exist. It is a monument to man’s arrogance!

EDIT: (For non-Americans, 111°F is about 44°C.)

That’s a neat tidbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling

The heat in the tunnels is largely generated by the trains, with a small amount coming from station equipment and passengers. Around 79% is absorbed by the tunnels’ walls, 10% is removed by ventilation, and the other 11% remains in the tunnels.[3]

Temperatures on the Underground have slowly increased as the clay around the tunnels has warmed up; in the early days of the Underground it was advertised as a place to keep cool on hot days. However, over time the temperature has slowly risen as the heat sink formed by the clay has reached its thermal capacity. When the tunnels were built the clay temperature was around 14 °C (57 °F); this has now risen to 19–26 °C (66–79 °F) and air temperatures in the tunnels now reach as high as 30 °C (86 °F).[3][4][5]

Nah, that’s good. What I mean is, if it’s in /etc/fstab, it should be possible to manually mount it without a reboot. Have you tried manually remounting it after power comes back?

The problem with new video formats is their performance requirements as that they generally assume playback via dedicated hardware. The catch is that it often takes years before such decoders appear in GPUs and processors, leaving all devices purchased before then without support.

This is one thing that’s kind of frustrating about laptops. With desktops, you can stick in a new GPU. With laptops, maybe you can do an eGPU, but generally you’re stuck with whatever the thing originally shipped with.

Sure, you get some other benefits from buying a new laptop, but the rate of CPU performance increase has fallen off a lot, and now GPUs are the thing that are advancing quickly. A CPU upgrade used to be the primary reason to get a new computer. Throwing out a whole computer if you’re basically fine with it other than wanting a more powerful GPU is kind of a bummer.

Last I looked — not recently — Facebook was one of the more-competitive Bay Area tech companies in terms of base salary (though there are places where people can do better in terms of equity compensation), so they probably have some leeway to ask their employees to do stuff.

searches

https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-salaries-revealed-how-much-engineers-researchers-made-in-2025-2026-4?op=1

This is only part of a larger list linked to above, but for 2025 engineering salaries only, base salary only, stock options and other forms of compensation excluded:

ASIC & FPGA Engineer: $299,880

ASIC Manager, Design Verification: $258,940.00 to $299,880

Director, Production Engineering: $354,123

Embedded Software Engineer: $169,313 to $269,081

Front End Engineer: $178,000 to $282,461

Production Engineer: $108,098 to $317,242

Production Engineering Manager: $258,524 to $309,797

Senior Staff Software Engineer: $311,029

Software Engineer: $124,000 to $450,000

Software Engineer (Leadership) - Infrastructure: $317,797

Software Engineering Manager: $200,907 to $328,000

Software Engineer Manager: $277,837 to $318,000

Sr Staff Hardware Engineer: $294,520

Staff Software Engineer: $258,524 to $263,803

Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue?

I don’t know why you’d need a reboot to remount the thing. Are you just not familiar with how to add something to /etc/fstab and mount it manually and are relying on some kind of auto-mounting system that only happens to run at boot, or is it giving some kind of error?

If an error, what happens when you do:

$ sudo mount -o remount /mnt/the-mount-point

?

I was going to mention that, but also that while I’m sure that it’d handle power loss while it’s unmounted the filesystem I don’t know what happens if the backing storage goes away while it’s in use.

social media creates a highly-competitive media environment

we learn that what comes out on top in a competitive environment is ragebait, and social media sees increasing amounts of it

It’d be nice if humanity were less attracted to outrage-inducing content and more to, say, catgirls or something.

I’m reminded of that recent incident where it was discovered that the South African regulatory agency responsible for writing rules for the safe and appropriate use of AI had used an LLM to generate the text they submitted and apparently not validated it prior to the submission.

https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2026/south-africa-pulls-ai-policy-after-hallucinated-citations-expose-drafting-scandal

why they’re letting so much heat energy out into the atmosphere

Surely at least some of that heat could be tuned back into electricity.

To harness useful energy from heat, you have to let heat flow from hotter areas to colder areas, to permit entropy to increase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. “High” entropy means that energy is more disordered or dispersed, while “low” entropy means that energy is more ordered or concentrated.

They might be able to harness energy from the flow from warmer to cooler areas, but whether or not they do that, at the end of the day, they have to let the heat go, just like a power plant that uses water-evaporation-assisted cooling. If they’re near the ocean, they can maybe stick it into the water instead of the air, and maybe to some degree, you can stick heat into groundwater. But they can’t just take a unit of heat and convert it into a unit of useful work and not have that unit of waste heat.

You can, in areas that have a use for heat, make use of that waste heat. For example, district heating can make use of the waste heat from a power plant — you pipe steam or something from the power plant that you want to be cooler to homes that you want to be warmer.

District heating (also known as heat networks) is a system for distributing heat generated in a centralized location through a system of insulated pipes for residential and commercial heating requirements such as space heating and water heating. The heat is often obtained from a cogeneration plant burning fossil fuels or biomass, but heat-only boiler stations, geothermal heating, heat pumps and central solar heating are also used, as well as heat waste from factories and nuclear power electricity generation. District heating plants can provide higher efficiencies and better pollution control than localized boilers. According to some research, district heating with combined heat and power (CHPDH) is the cheapest method of cutting carbon emissions, and has one of the lowest carbon footprints of all fossil generation plants.

If you live somewhere where that works, it’s basically “free” heating from an energy standpoint, which is cool. Much of the US isn’t well-suited to residential district heating, because we tend to have residences in low-density suburban areas that are pretty spread out and where it’s a pain to transport heat around, but we do have some district heating in city cores. Manhattan, which is one area where we do have high density, famously uses steam heating.

Today, Con Edison operates the largest commercial steam system in the world (larger than the next nine combined).[4] The organization within Con Edison responsible for the system’s operation, known as Steam Operations, provides steam service to over 1,700 commercial and residential customers in Manhattan from Battery Park to 96th Street uptown on the west side, and 89th Street on the east side of Manhattan. Roughly 27 billion pounds (12,000,000 t) of steam flow through the system every year.

For that to work, you have to actually have some use for that heating (and you probably only want heating some of the year, unless you’re up in the polar regions or on a mountain or something).

You can also use waste heat to drive industrial processes that require heat, but waste heat from a datacenter isn’t super-hot compared to, say, that from a power plant, so I don’t know how interesting that necessarily is. Lots of chemical processes that might require elevating something to a much higher temperature, but a datacenter — at least using current computing hardware — normally tries to keep temperatures from getting to something like the boiling point of water.

Some greenhouses will also use waste heat (in the case of power plants doing cogeneration, some of the waste carbon dioxide as well) to help boost plant growth.

I have GNU nano 8.4 on my system. Upon investigation, in default configuration:

• Control-Backspace deletes the last character, same as Backspace.

• Control-Delete reverse-deletes a word.

• Alt-Backspace deletes the last word. This might be what you want.

• Alt-Delete deletes the entire line.

I think that it’s probably because absent some kind of unusual extension, terminals normally send 0x08, the Backspace character, same as Control-H, for Control-Backspace.

On my system, in bash, using foot, Control-V Control-H shows ^H. So it’s sending ASCII 0x8, the Backspace character.

Control-V Control-Backspace shows ^H. Ditto.

Control-V Backspace shows ^?. It’s sending the Delete character, ASCII 0x7f.

Control-V Del shows ^[[3~. It’s sending an escape sequence.

Back in the day, some people had their terminals set to, when you hit Backspace, send either the Backspace character or the Delete character. Not a problem I’ve run into for some years, but I’d guess that nano probably has that behavior by default, treating both 0x7f and 0x8 as hitting the Backspace key, so as not to break on systems like that.

EDIT: I’d also add that Alt-Backspace (well, M-DEL in emacs parlance) is also what emacs uses for “delete word”, so a lot of software that uses readline, like bash, will also normally work that way out of box.

EDIT2: If you want to investigate ways to have terminals recognize more key combinations (so that you aren’t sending the same sequence for both Control-H and Control-Backspace and want to get down and dirty aiming to configure software to use different bindings for those different keystrokes), IIRC the kitty virtual terminal emulator has been exploring extensions, and some terminal emulators have implemented some of those extensions.

searches

Yeah.

https://terminfo.dev/extensions/kitty-keyboard-protocol

The Kitty keyboard protocol solves fundamental ambiguities in traditional terminal input handling. Legacy terminals cannot distinguish between Ctrl+I and Tab, Ctrl+M and Enter, or Escape and the start of an escape sequence — they all produce the same byte sequences. The protocol also enables key-release events and distinguishes between different modifier key presses (left vs. right Shift). Applications opt in with CSI > flags u, where flags is a bitmask selecting reporting modes: disambiguate keys (1), report event types (2), report alternate keys (4), report all keys as escape sequences (8), and report associated text (16). Keys are reported as CSI unicode-key-code : shifted-key : base-layout-key ; modifiers : event-type u. Adopted by Ghostty, WezTerm, foot, and rio. The protocol is progressive — applications can request only the features they need, and terminals report which flags they support.

That being said, I would guess that a lot of programs that run in the terminal won’t be set up out of box to rely on Kitty protocol extensions.

EDIT3: Also, I don’t think that fbcon (the default Linux kernel framebuffer console) or fbterm (the userspace virtual terminal), one of which you’d probably use if you switched out of Wayland/X11, presently support Kitty input extensions, so if you rig up programs to rely on said extensions, you won’t have those keys available in the plain ol’ Linux console.

Console video game players, I guess.

Well, now we’ve got Trump on the right imposing new regressive taxes:

https://www.hbs.edu/bigs/robert-lawrence-qa-trade-tariffs

And since tariffs are only levied on goods, and since it’s poorer Americans who spend a greater share of their consumption on goods than rich Americans, this is a highly regressive tax.

And Newsom on the left:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax

Because the rate of a sales tax does not change based on a person’s income or wealth, sales taxes are generally considered regressive…Investopedia defines a regressive tax as “[a] tax that takes a larger percentage from low-income people than from high-income people. A regressive tax is generally a tax that is applied uniformly. This means that it hits lower-income individuals harder”.

EDIT: As of 2025, California has the eighth-highest average combined state-local sales tax rate in the US, at 8.802%:

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/sales-tax-rates-2025/

He’s getting older. Maybe they just want a younger shot.

Middle of last year:

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linus-torvalds-calls-risc-v-code-from-google-engineer-garbage-and-that-it-makes-the-world-actively-a-worse-place-to-live-linux-honcho-puts-dev-on-notice-for-late-submissions-too

I mean, you can install each in a VM if you want to play with them.

Mistral AI’s CEO says Europe has 2 years to stop becoming America’s AI ‘vassal state’

Also on this page:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-xai-explored-collaborating-with-mistral-cursor-2026-4

• Elon Musk’s xAI recently announced a partnership with AI coding startup Cursor.
• The two companies have also explored a three-way partnership with French AI startup Mistral.
• Musk is looking to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI.

I mean, I suppose “know your audience”. If you’re going to the French legislature for money, you pitch accordingly.

“It will be decided in the next two years,” Mensch said during a Tuesday hearing on digital sovereignty and AI at France’s National Assembly, translated by Business Insider.