The World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems
A case study in elite misinformation. Want to support this Substack and make me extra happy on this World Happiness Day? Become a paying subscriber and receive 25% off your annual subscription! Helsinki in winter. A picture of joy. (Photo by Alessandro Rampazzo/Anadolu via Getty Images) Today is World Happiness Day. So, like every year […]
Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
2025-12-15 Share At the beginning of the year, I tested the Snapdragon X Elite unreleased dev-kit, and I couldn’t really compare x86 versus native gaming performance for the same game. I only managed to get World of Warcraft Classic x86 to run, and when compared to the native version, the FPS drop was 40-60% in […]
Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Motivation and Framing I love space. I live and breathe it. I’m lucky enough to brush the heavens with my own metal and code, and I want nothing more than a booming orbital space economy that creates the flywheel that makes space just another location we all work and visit. I love AI and I […]
Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
Ford is once again shifting its electric vehicle manufacturing plans, a response to a year that’s been tough for the powertrain technology that’s still making waves overseas but has seen domestic government support cut and customer enthusiasm weaken. Instead of planning to make enough electric vehicles to account for 40 percent of global sales by […]
Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
For years I treated HDMI-CEC like a house spirit: sometimes helpful, mostly temperamental, never fully understood. My living-room stack is straightforward: Samsung TV on ARC (NOT eARC – story for another day), Denon AVR-X1700H hidden in a closet, Apple TV plus a bunch of consoles connected to the receiver, and a Raspberry Pi 4 already […]
From devastation to wonder as Kangaroo Island bushfires lead to cave discoveries
It was an adventure into the unknown. From the surface all that could be seen was a small opening. Researchers had no idea how deep the hole went, or what was at the bottom. The ABC has been given exclusive access to newly-discovered caves on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island. The coastline of Kangaroo Island.(ABC News: […]
A kernel bug froze my machine: Debugging an async-profiler deadlock
QuestDB is the open-source time-series database for demanding workloads—from trading floors to mission control. It delivers ultra-low latency, high ingestion throughput, and a multi-tier storage engine. Native support for Parquet and SQL keeps your data portable, AI-ready—no vendor lock-in. I’ve been a Linux user since the late 90s, starting with Slackware on an underpowered AMD […]
1/4 of US-Trained Scientists Eventually Leave. Is the US Giving Away Its Edge?
Abstract:Using newly-assembled data from 1980 through 2024, we show that 25% of scientifically-active, US-trained STEM PhD graduates leave the US within 15 years of graduating. Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades. Contrary to common perceptions, US technology benefits from […]
The appropriate amount of effort is zero
Most people put too much effort into everything they do. Here’s a good example from Kristijan around tension in his hands when touching and holding things: Something clicked about inhibition and non-doing (in Alexander Technique), and the strongest effect has been a relaxation of my hands. Like I was touching and holding things with 40% […]
Upcoming Changes to Let’s Encrypt Certificates
Let’s Encrypt is introducing several updates to the certificates we issue, including new root certificates, the deprecation of TLS client authentication, and shortening certificate lifetimes. To help roll out changes gradually, we’re making use of ACME profiles to allow users to have control over when some of these changes take place. For most users, no […]