Comedy prediction: SD2 releases overseas, but Australia is used to sell remaining stocks of SD1s for a few years before the SD2 is released here.

Took me a few tries to understand.

This is something HP should have handled.

If a bad update is rolled out then it's the responsibility of the software maker partner (HP) and the distributor (Microsoft), not just one or the other.

Those laptops are THEIR products, not Microsoft’s.

Both Microsoft and HP have branding on their laptops and a responsibility post-sale for the reliability of their systems. Hardware, firmware and OS responsibilities are all party to this chain of failure.

I assume you're joking, but if not: the 4MB of flash you see is not mapped 1:1 with 4MB of actual flash on the SD card. Instead there might be something like 5MB, but your OS only sees 4MB of that.

The extra unallocated space is used as spare sectors (sectors degrade and must be swapped out) or even just randomly if it somehow increases IO performance (depending on the firmware).

Erasing the 4MB visible to your OS will not erase everything, there still may be whole files or fragments of your files sitting in the extra space. Drive-vendor specific commands can reliably access this space (if they exist and are available to you, which they mostly are not). Some secure erase commands may wipe the unallocated space but that's vendor specific, not documented and I don't think even supported over the SD interface (although I might be wrong on this last point).

Encryption and physical destruction are your best bets.

Thanks Jacob for the illustration, it's interesting to see your take on this. I approve of the double-decker carriages (hail from Sydney!) and I think the little tunnel under the tracks is a neat detail.

Your infrastructure seems to be a mix of industrial and residential in a very remote location. The workers living here would need to rely on food brought in on the trains, their field would not be enough, let alone materials for repairs and other mechanical supplies. Perhaps this is a "company outpost"? I hope they pay well, it could get quite lonely if the only outsiders you talk to are train drivers. The only way I could think of fixing that would be to turn this into a platform with a cafe (and that creates a myriad of other problems). I hope someone else has a better idea than me.

I have some random practical thoughts that could affect how things look. They're written off-hand, so don't assume they're completely true :)

Spills management:

• NaOH and KOH are not particularly bad pollutants because they eventually break down into mostly harmless things.
• They will still however kill all the grass and plants wherever they spill (and discolour the dirt), both temporarily (hydroxide attacking the organics) and long term (K & Na salts salting the earth).
• When moving 5 tonnes from one container to another it's likely that small spills will occur all of the time.
• It would be worth putting the solar concentrator on a concrete pad with small (30-50cm, depending on climate peak rainfall) lips/walls all around, to act as a containing bathtub. Otherwise leaked NaOH/KOH will wash off every time it rains. This is known as bunding and looks like this.
• Leaks on the tracks won't be as obvious (due to the ballast rocks under the traintracks) but it still might be worth expanding this ballast to be wider where you expect the engine to stop.

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Handling hydroxides is messy, potentially dangerous ("I'm melting! My eyes!") and annoying:

• It might be better to design a boiler that can be craned off the train and onto the solar concentrator (and visa versa). No chemical handling, if it leaks then you tag it for repair and place it on a bunded pad until it gets picked up.
• You could keep a line of pre-dried boilers handy so that trains don't need to wait 45 minutes to continue and so that they can keep running on stormy days.
• Standardise boiler units across all trains. Perhaps small modular ones (2x2x2m?) that the engines take multiples of (depending on their size).
• Not sure what the cranes would look like. If you're clever then you might find a way of laying things out so simple human-powered (long-armed wooden) cranes could do all of the work.

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Metal corrosion and pollution

• Pure NaOH will be very nasty to metals like copper. No copper and bronze steam locos, even in the boiler, unless you want a pile of verdigris within a trip or two :(
• Some stainless steels fare better
• You don't want any products of a hydroxide-metal reaction (gooey mushy rusty gungy stuff) leaking, these will be a reasonably persistent pollution. Copper oxides, hydroxides, carbonates and the like are insecticides and fungicides often used on citrus trees so perhaps it's not too bad, plus it would be economically infeasible to let your boilers dissolve away to nothing all of the time, so maybe this won't be an issue in practice. Alas I'm not sure if the chromium from stainless steel might get pulled out, that's a whole other can of worms.

We already have memory wafers glued to our CPU wafers in the form of L3 cache. It's lower latency, higher throughput, up to a few hundred MiB in bigger models and can potentially be used without external RAM sticks (but I've not heard of using that feature outside of BIOS firmware early boot -- that's probably the only change we'll see). Sometimes it's DRAM, sometimes it's SRAM, its size varies quite a bit.

Very pretty stuff. I particularly recommend Ken Shirriff's Reverse-engineering the mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer:

He goes into detail about how non-linear equations are implemented using shaped cam gears (and how such functions can be difference-encoded against linear forms). It's insane.

And because it’s analog, there is no quantisation, rounding errors, floating point errors.

Eh, I'd say that runout and stiction are their own demons with potentially more bias than those error types :) Not to mention temperature sensitivity -- hot days will give different answers to the equations!

Do you have more info?

The minimum specs I've seen for NAND flash chips are 10 year retention time at room temperature.

Being powered on isn't enough to change this, the firmware would have to be actively reading, erasing and writing blocks of data to refresh them. I'm sure there are some that will do this, but it would increases some other data loss risks, wear rates and power draw; so I suspect (?) it's not universal.

"X, the formerly successful site known as twitter, reveals its new logo drawn by Elon Musk himself"

These days Win10 & Win11 only let you temporarily hide things you don't want. The next major update resets the settings, especially if it's for a feature that could potentially earn MS money, like ads in the start menu, cortana in the tray, microsoft account nags and onedrive nags.

Finally did this a week or so back, I had one of the original accounts (username login, not email). Made me feel like shit and manipulated, all to make Microsoft happier.

These two paragraphs in a row are weirdly similar:

His key fund has spent nearly all of the more than $150 million it raised, and is sitting on less than $4 million, according to the latest numbers available. He’s already dug into his fund for 2024 ads, and borrowed money to post bail in Georgia. And some of his allies are begging for donations, saying he won’t pony up.

After raising more than $150 million, his key fund is sitting on less than $4 million, according to the latest numbers available. He’s already dug into his 2024 super PAC, and borrowed money to post bail in Georgia. Some of his allies are begging for donations, saying he won’t pony up.

Am I seeing both the article and a preview version of the article? Or maybe the author was under time/etc pressure and left a duplicate drafted paragraph in? It doesn't seem ML generated as far as I can tell.

The next two paragraphs end with similar sentences too.