However many of these ARM chips have their own sub-architecture in the Linux source tree, I'm not sure that it's possible today to build a single image with them all built in and choose the subarchitecture at runtime. Theoretically it could be done, of course, but who has the incentive to do that work?

(I seem to remember Linus complaining about this situation to the Arm maintainer, maybe 10-20 years ago)

[1] https://docs.u-boot.org/en/v2021.04/uefi/uefi.html

I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.

Here is one company's experience (UK focused): https://www.revk.uk/2026/03/late-payments.html

It depends a lot on your relationship with the customer as well, I guess. Some may get butthurt about it, for others, your relationship is with a person in a different dept to the people organising the payments, you can send interest notices to the finance dept without worrying the person who wants your services.

1 slip every job, annoying all of the customers whose jobs are queued up. You get a bad reputation.

2 Move onto the next job on time, and gradually complete the stalled job in the background by sending workers back to it when you have spare (which you should have, because in general you must overestimate or things will go badly wrong). That customer will now suffer because their job is going to take a multiple of the expected time, but all of the other customers are happy, so your reputation is good.

So you are correct that discreteness is a problem, because if you are nearing the end of the budget you may optimally prefer to get more dice rolls than take bigger bets. But the optimal solution is then often analytically intractable (or at least it was - I last read about this a while back), and the entropy approach is often reasonable anyway. (For cases where search effort is significant, a good search plan can be found by simulation).

[1] https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/search.pdf

For example, suppose you have some piece of hardware which you can interrogate, but not after it crashes. It crashes at a deterministic point. You can step it forward by any amount of steps, but only examine it's state if it did not crash. If it crashed, you have to go back to the start. (I call this situation "Finnegan Search", after the nursery rhyme which prominently features the line "poor old Finnegan had to begin again").

The deterministic algorithm has you do an examination after every step. The nondeterministic algorithm has you choose some number of steps, accepting the risk that you have to go back to the start. The optimal number of steps (and thus the choice of algorithm) depends on the ratio of the cost of examination to the cost of a step. It can be found analytically as the expected information gain per unit time.

(Either way the process is pretty annoying and considerable effort in hardware and software design has gone into providing ways to render it unnecessary, but it still crops up sometimes in embedded systems).

I'm going to have to check out how you got linear time with Shannon entropy, because I used Renyi entropy to do that, to make the algebra easier.

It's also possible to do it over the DAG, rather than a linear history - although that makes the code a lot more complicated. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a linear time cumulative sum algorithm over dags, so it's super linear in some cases.

It appears your could legally install one of these panels on the 15th of this month, but there presumably won't be any certified to comply with the regs on sale yet.

[1] https://electrical.theiet.org/amendment-4-updates-to-18th-ed...

(That seems to be an archive of the old revctrl.org pages from a while back; most likely Bram Cohen has a blog somewhere explaining it in his own words - probably about 2003, at a guess)

Now, most of our senior politicians go to the US after leaving office; so for consistency they adopt the belief that there is no downside to making the UK beholden to foreign companies, or becoming a nation where all the innovative professions end up building capital for foreign owners, instead of building strong UK companies. As a consequence of this, they almost compete to sell out the public. It's impossible for them to believe that what they were doing is a betrayal of their country, because that would go directly against their personal interest.

A door that opens outwards uses space that has to be clear anyway because that's where you walk. A door that opens upwards takes space that could have been used for another appliance or storage, or the upper half of a fridge twice the size.

The only way round that would be for it to be able to slide outwards, but that's also inconvenient.

Having said all that, they are a great idea if you have the space.