WeChat itself on Android bundles a Chromium-based engine to run these mini apps.

Most people in China are using Chromium frequently, even if they don't think of it as a browser.

Some cities have the trash trucks drive around playing music, ice cream truck style, and you are required to bring your trash out to the truck. Logistically that would probably work in Manhattan. Politically I don't think you would ever be able to get it done.

Seats are purchased by the airlines, they are made by separate manufacturers like Recaro or Zodiac and not by the airframe manufacturer (Airbus or Boeing). While the seats obviously need to be compatible with the airframe, there are a wide variety of options and it is common for airlines to refresh old airframes with new seats.

IFE systems are not manufactured by the airframe or the seat manufacturers, they are made by companies like Panasonic. They obviously need to be compatible with the seat, and my understanding is that it is uncommon for airlines to update the IFE system without also replacing seats.

So, while a newer aircraft type typically will have a more up to date IFE system, there are plenty of old aircraft that have new IFE and seats retrofitted.

You can imagine what your hosting provider or ISP will do with this.

Source: I ran a URL shortening service from 2004-2007 and this happened to me.

The total cost was maybe $30 of parts on AliExpress.

I use 433Mhz Acurite temperature sensors with a software defined radio (rtl433) running on my Home Assistant box to have remote temperature sensing. The 433MHz sensors are cheap, have good range, and have excellent battery life.

I was able to verify that it worked because an employee in a store literally could not transfer my SIM with it enabled. Their iPad app just gave an error of "customer has SIM lock enabled".

Interestingly the T-Mobile employee had never even heard of this feature, which suggests that basically no one uses it.

A typical US vented dryer has a 5500 watt element, although it doesn't use that amount of power continuously since it cycles on and off.

I have no idea how much power a typical dryer uses in Switzerland, but the heat pump ventless dryers you can get in the USA now typically use around 1000W when they are running. They typically take around 90-120 minutes to dry a load depending on how big it is and how much water there is to evaporate.

This white paper has a nice graph that shows power usage over time: https://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/pt_awards/SEDI_Fact_S...

You may notice that, while the heat pump dryers take longer to dry, they use so much less power that it more than offsets.

I also think it's an understatement to call Weixin as ubiquitous as Google in China. There are alternatives to basically every Google service. In China, many times there is no alternative to Weixin. 支付宝 (Alipay) is sometimes a substitute, but in many cases only Weixin is supported. Want to order food at a chain restaurant? Want to buy tickets for a museum? Want to choose the song at a Karaoke bar? Need to fill out a customs exit form? Weixin is often the only option.

In some ways, this is smart - it avoids the need for applications to handle anything other than 1x and 2x modes, and it avoids the complications of handling fractional pixel sizes (how does an application draw a 1 logical pixel wide line at a 1.5x scale).

In other ways it is monumentally stupid. The macOS technique wastes resources rendering at a higher resolution than you actually need. Worse, even though the downscaling is excellent in macOS, it still has ringing artifacts and it still is blurrier than native fractional scaling.

This is personally one of the things that I hate most about macOS. Many Mac laptops ship with internal displays that default to a resolution that is scaled in this way (though fortunately not the 14/16 inch Apple Silicon MacBook Pro). That's annoying, but it's not nearly as bad as the situation with external displays. I use a UHD (3840x2160) 32" display. On Windows it's perfect at 1.25x scale. On macOS, my laptop ends up rendering at 6144x3456 and then scaling the output down. This looks very noticably blurry, and it's a huge waste of resources.

Only Windows really gets this right among desktop/laptop operating systems.

GNOME uses the same behavior as macOS, except that the "render at higher resolution and scale down" options are hidden by default, and the scaling itself is a lot blurrier.

KDE does support native fractional scaling, but there are a ton of bugs related to rounding errors causing 1px gaps and random cases where applications end up being blurry, especially on Wayland. Worse, display scaling changes often don't apply until you log out or restart applications, which is particularly annoying if you have a different scale factor on an internal and external display.

Windows on the other hand handles this relatively well, although there are still some annoying bugs on Windows 10 related to the taskbar and notifications (mostly fixed in Windows 11). There are also still a lot of Windows applications that do not handle scaling at all, which end up in blur city.

My university (University of Colorado Boulder) bought one of a very few SiCortex systems ever sold. As an undergraduate I competed at SC07 and SC08 in the Cluster Challenge competition.

Our coach was a CU facility member, Doug, who also was responsible for the SiCortex box we bought. At SC08 he told us that another one of the teams was competing with a SiCortex box. We knew that they would win the LINPACK part of the challenge, but we didn't know that LINPACK was basically the only thing they managed to get working.

We had also heard rumors that SiCortex was in trouble financially at that time. When we were walking the show floor at SC08, we came across the huge SiCortex booth, which had 10 or so machines of different sizes (I believe the smallest was a 64-core workstation and the largest was a ~5000 whole rack system).

I remarked to Doug that SiCortex didn't look to be in such bad shape.

Doug turned to me and said, "25% of the machines SiCortex has ever made are in that booth".

The SiCortex idea was like VLIW. On paper the numbers look great. On highly optimized synthetic benchmarks it looks good. On real world code you find out how hard it is to get good performance.

In-order execution does not mean that there is no branch prediction, it just means that the number of instructions speculated is much smaller.

Personally I am glad that people can't just call me up. I would rather be asked over chat first.

I don't know what you are talking about with the A380. I have never heard about it being able to fly a TCAS RA maneuver (collision avoidance) on autopilot.

The A350 can handle TCAS RA maneuvers on autopilot. It can also fly windshear escape maneuvers on autopilot.

Bill Palmer (A350 check captain) talks about it: http://www.airplanegeeks.com/2018/02/14/490-airbus-a350/

You also can't make SuperSpeed cables that actually meet the spec once they get past a couple meters.

If I just want to charge my phone or laptop, a High Speed cable is actually better.

Fitt's Law says that the time required to interact with an element depends on both the distance to that element and the width/height of that element.

Putting an element on an edge (where the cursor cannot go beyond that edge) essentially makes it infinitely large in one dimension. Putting it in a corner makes it infinitely large in two dimensions.

Taskbar buttons in Windows (or menu items in macOS) do benefit from Fitt's Law, just not as much as items in the corners.