I think this has been a phenomenon since VC became a thing, there's always been trends and fads - CEOs have had to chase them even when it doesn't make sense for the product.

I think this is the most wide-scale one I can personally recall (although I presume dotcom boom was similar), but I remember through the 2010s every database startup having to chase the same ball-game. Everyone was doing NoSQL, then everyone was doing analytics etc. Of course now all those companies have AI-native, vector-embedding, RAG, MPCs slapped all over their products.

It's somewhat ironic that they're only just getting around to it actually. The predecessor to `uv`, `rye`, had integration for `ruff` fairly early on - but Astral have really dragged their heels on putting it into `uv` (presumably because `ruff` had already won) and even now aren't adding support until after `ty` is integrated.

I'm thinking of switching to Zen which is a Firefox based clone of Arc

There's not a safety risk from doing this because the control systems are doing this to specifically stay within the stable power output.

There are some significant negative consequences from the power dropping excessively and unexpectedly. One of them is an excessive build-up of Xenon in the reactor which is a feedback loop that continues to reduce fission (known as Xenon poisoning) and is one of the underlying causes of the Chernobyl incident. Now, as far as I'm aware there are no Nuclear reactors running today that are _unsafe_ if they encounter Xenon poisoning - but it's not something you want to stumble into.

If there were a genuine safety concern related to a control rod drop then the reactor would scram and the _all_ the rods would drop and the reactor would need to be restarted.

It's a downgrade, but barely noticeable for me and totally inconsequential for the amount of work required to fix it and the corresponding $$$ saving.

I think this is the main one. The benchmarks from this are heavily cherry-picked, and they also widely publicised their performance for 4.5 while downplaying the fact the benchmarks were "accidentally" in their training set

However, that's not the same as the technology choices not mattering at all. As others have mentioned the product is buggy, and it appears Anthropic are struggling to continue to release new features within the existing architecture.

That's also not to say that Anthropic made bad choices - there's always going to be a tension between building quickly to capture the market now vs moving slower and building something more maintainable in the long-term.

The reason we've stopped having leap seconds is because the drift between TAI and UT1 slowed down and has actually been very slowly drifting in the other direction.

I don't think we know this do we? we haven't been measuring accurately enough for long enough to be confident that it does in fact cancel out. In fact for the period of time where we've been applying leap seconds they were happening with significant frequency and always in the same direction. It's only been very recently that there's been the realistic suggestion it might drift in the other direction.

If anything people have been suggesting that if we do get rid of leap seconds that we can just wait until the offset is enormous instead (say an hour) because it would take a very long time to happen. But even still, that does actually affect everyday people (because people would surely notice when solar noon is an hour later/earlier). Although pragmatically the obvious solution there is to change timezone instead.

There's a lot of packages in the Python ecosystem that use time based versioning rather than semver (literally `year.minor`) and closed ranges cause untold problems.

One of my favourite things to see were the random encounters that our data annotators would flag up.

Unusual agricultural vehicles, large to-scale images on the sides of vehicles, cars facing backwards being carried by a vehicle transporter.

It's a wildly long tail of things that automated vehicles need to handle.

I think at this point Apple will just release new versions of laptops whenever new CPU revisions and yields allow. M5 Pro wasn't ready for October so delayed until now.