Sorta yes and no. T-Mobile US is its own corporate entity, but their majority shareholder is Deutsche Telekom, and they take their name from that company’s mobile service brand.

Architect, so in the neighborhood… I mostly interact with UL in the context of fire-rated assemblies, though.

I recently switched phones and forgot I didn’t have an adblocker installed yet. Clicked on an article and holy shit the modern mobile web is a toxic hellscape without it…

In fairness(?) Ford bet big on small cars in the wake of the Great Recession, and that worked well for a while, but by the time they decided that the only non-truck (from a CAFE standpoint) that they were going to keep selling was the Mustang, they were losing money on every Focus and Fiesta they sold.

A lot of that was their godawful automatic transmission that was forcing them to spend zillions in warranty repairs, but at the end of the day the margin on economy cars is so slim that you can’t afford to make mistakes. Rather than bet on perfect execution in a market that was already shrinking in the US, they decided to focus on higher-margin products… and that’s fine in the short term, but as you mention it’s going to leave them exposed once nobody can afford to spend $50k+ on a horrifically overpriced big pickup anymore.

My family’s first computer was a 68k Mac, specifically a Quadra 605. I tried (and failed) to teach myself C++ using that system at the tender age of 9, but eventually moved over to Windows PCs. Had a Linux-based web server running on spare parts as a teen, though, and did succeed at teaching myself PHP and later Python well enough to hack together my very own blog software. Not very good blog software, mind you, but the critical thing was that it worked! Even spent a few years as and SMB sysadmin even though my degree is in [building] architecture.

Since then I’ve drifted away from the very deep end of tech world, but I would never say that first Macintosh stunted my skill.

(100% autistic tho, so ymmv)

Still is, at least to an extent. Bought a house 10 years ago for $110k, and while I’ve paid down about $30k of that between my modest down payment and 10 years of mortgage payments, the house has appreciated ~2x, meaning that I could potentially bring a $100k down payment to a new property. Even with everything else appreciating in the meantime, that makes viable many more options than I would have had if those mortgage payments had been rent checks.

In AEC work we’ve moved almost exclusively to a competing PDF tool called Blubeam, which is proprietary but very worth the price, with tools for scaling, dimensioning, and producing material takeoffs from PDF drawings. Much of what you’d use Acrobat for in a more typical office environment are absent or limited, though.

All the people mentioned in the article are alt-right lunatics and/or Trumpworld grifters. The only other place they might conceivably take their schtick is Truth Social – this is really only interesting as confirmation that the thin-skinned and insecure FrEe SpEeCh AbSoLuTiSt running that shithole is absolutely willing to silence anybody who annoys him, over the pettiest of disputes, regardless of political affiliation.

That’s far too realistic a lab for stock photos. Stock photo labs have clean benches save for a handful of test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. Real labs have equipment on every flat surface and boxes of shit stacked up to the ceiling on the shelves.

Weirdly enough, I recognized a publicity shot of a lab I’d designed being used as a stock photo recently… in an article about how scientists are trying to flee the country. …Hooray?

It took several violent landgrabs and wars of aggression before Russian oligarch money wasn’t welcome around the world, and those guys were all but openly affiliated with the Russian mafia from the days of the fall of the Soviet Union. I fully expect American oligarchs’ money to be happily accepted just about everywhere for at least as long as it takes Trump to get around to trying to take Greenland by force.

Fair point. My thrust was more that the reason why things like system boot times and software launch speeds don’t seem to benefit as much as they seem like they should when moving from, say, a good SATA SSD (peak R/W speed: 600 MB/sec) to a fast m.2 that might have listed speeds 20+ times faster, is that QD1 performance of that m.2 drive might only be 3 or 4 times better than the SATA drive. Both are a big step up from spinning media, but the gap between the two in random read speed isn’t big enough to make a huge subjective difference in many desktop use cases.

The trouble with ridiculous R/W numbers like these is not that there’s no theoretical benefit to faster storage, it’s that the quoted numbers are always for sequential access, whereas most desktop workloads are more frequently closer to random, which flash memory kinda sucks at. Even really good SSDs only deliver ~100MB/sec in pure random access scenarios. This is why you don’t really feel any difference between a decent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive and one of these insane-o PCI-E 5.0 drives, unless you’re doing a lot of bulk copying of large files on a regular basis.

It’s also why Intel Optane drives became the steal of the century when they went on clearance after Intel abandoned the tech. Optane is basically as fast in random access as in sequential access, which means that in some scenarios even a PCIe 3.0 Optane drive can feel much, much snappier than a PCIe 4 .0 or 5.0 SSD that looks faster on paper.

Elon in his Cave Johnson era and we’re here for it

Look, I’m in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren’t “make my website prettier!” feels very much like a bunch of “webmasters” dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren’t looking and rebranding as “developers” whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.

Point me towards systems that don’t have a human in the loop, particularly any that utilize fully-autonomous swarms, and I’ll agree. Scary as the former are, there’s a world of difference between a handful of FPV suicide drones, and a cloud of HL2-Manhack-esque things operating on face-recogniton-guided autopilot.

I’ve low-key started to think the only reason we haven’t seen autonomous hunter-killer drones yet is that nobody’s willing to break the seal, and I’m scared for what happens when somebody finally does.

Bird flu isn’t what circulating generally right now. That’s just the regular seasonal flu. Avian flu is a whole other can of worms in that it’s running rampant among birds, it hasn’t (yet) shown the ability to readily spread in air between mammalian hosts. The longer it hangs around, though, the more chances it gets to evolve that capability – and in fact if the leaked CDC papers that made news recently are to be believed, some strain of on it might have done so.

Yeah. We can quibble over the moral dimension of public servants getting out vs staying in to try and stop the coming insanity, but any HUMINT asset on assignment outside of friendly first-world nations would be stupid not to take early retirement ASAP. Even if Trump doesn’t burn them like he did to so many last time around, there’s a drug-addled oligarch in debt to several foreign countries who’s leading a squad of college-age numpties from department to department on a mission to extract all their confidential data and put it on unsecured servers for nebulous ends. Somebody’s gonna leak or lose or sell their names, guaranteed.

I was the last of my immediate family on Facebook, and I only stuck around to keep in touch with a couple hobby groups. I decided to cut the cord once Zuck went mask-off, and honestly I haven’t regretted it. The family group text is still chugging along fine, and most of the people I actually want to talk to are on other platforms at this point.

I don’t blame anybody who feels like they have to keep Facebook to stay in touch with loved ones… but man, it feels good not to have that spammy time suck on my phone anymore.

I design labs, and my current employer serves primarily higher ed and government clients. This is gonna blow a massive hole in our bottom line, and fear that something like this was coming is why I’m starting to look for employers with an international footprint and/or more private sector clientele. Even if this freeze is only temporary, it’s going to kick off a massive wave of brain drain from universities and federal labs to private industry and foreign institutions, and I don’t blame the folks making those choices, but it’s also gonna impact how much demand there is for my services.