Being able to take pictures at effectively zero marginal cost, and being able to see them instantly, both make it much easier to get into the hobby.

I would love to believe this but I don't see it yet. I see a lot of anger in some circles, but I also see the machine marching on as normal.

What is this LWN thing?

LWN.net aims to be the premier news and information source for the free software community. We provide comprehensive coverage of development, legal, commercial, and security issues.

https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn

Only about 10% is reabsorbed quickly [1], the rest stays for hundreds or thousands of years. That may not be "trapped" in a pedantic sense, but it's pretty close.

[1] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-long-carb...

Ocean Conservancy has annual reports that include statistics from trash cleanup projects. The 2026 report[1] has a "global top items collected" list that covers 1986 to 2026; straws (& stirrers) are 5th at about 16 million items collected. Drinks bottles are number 3 at nearly 27 million. Cigarette butts are top (65 million)

Looking back at the report from the year 2000[2] as a comparison (this one lists numbers just for the year 2000 cleanup projects), straws are number 10 out of 12, cigarettes are still top, various other plastic items (not all of which are classified) are above straws.

[1] https://oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026... [2] https://oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2000...

How can software engineers maintain a healthy "manual programming" skill set? What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?

I've never tried it and it might take some thought and effort to conduct an experiment to find out properly, but I would be interested in the answer.

If I'm understanding the book's structure correctly, the comparison at the end of Part 1 (chapter 18 "Can we live on renewables?") is based on estimating existing demand. Deployment of heat pumps in Britain even today is woefully low, and when the book was written it was no doubt even lower, so of course it wouldn't make sense to include heat pumps as a significant factor when comparing actual demand when the book was written with potential supply.

Chapter 27 "Five energy plans for Britain" discusses large scale ways to make the energy budget "work", and those hypothetical comparisons do include use of heat-pumps. Maybe those numbers are inaccurate and a better hypothetical could be produced today, but I would first put that down to the difficulty of forecasting the future.

It's been a long time since I read the book fully though. Did I miss something?

I imagine the economics (and perhaps technical improvements) of some things may have changed more than the book could forecast. But heat pumps were definitely understood by the author.

https://aifundingtracker.com/who-owns-alphabet/

So with regard to LLMs, for me the question is not purely "how often does it get it right?" the question is "how does it compare to the sources and self-diagnosis methods people use otherwise?"

Of course, I agree people should be careful with any form of self-diagnosis or LLM-diagnosis.

FYI, Imitone has a patent, I don't know what it covers or claims though.

(Jobs I'll give you.)

Since you mentioned you weren't sure: it's "cronyism", no 'h'.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cronyism

This is despite having an etymology that - at least according to etymonline - does come from greek "khronos"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/cronyism

From the release notes:

2002-06-17 (2.5.0), "Parse (but do not implement) foreign keys."

At one point there was also a tool which would generate trigger rules to enforce foreign key constraints. (2008 Oct 15 (3.6.4), Added the source code and documentation for the genfkey program for automatically generating triggers to enforce foreign key constraints)

And tbh I'm not sure it was ever a plausible contender for commercial success, more like Carmack wanted to play with rockets. But that might be unfair; I would happily accept a correction.

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