Meanwhile, Brexit remains the Will Of The People, with both major parties absolutely ruling out any reversal as not to betray the robust, unvarnished opinions of true Brits like Barry the football-loving squaddie from Southampton whose Twitter account is now either a big-haired homeschooling mom from Missouri or the social media officer of Palestinians For Trump.

Unless you were a corrupt politician whose aim was self-enrichment by looting the country, in which case you may be reassured that you are on the right track

Official vegan Satanist mascot

It was only called austerity in contrast to the previous vaguely social-democratic settlement. After a decade or two, it’s just the way things are. The Tories themselves announced the end of austerity a few years ago, without changing a single policy.

As Jamie Zawinski put it, it’s like a non-profit animal shelter setting up a sideline selling kitten meat to satisfy demands for hockey-stick growth. If somebody castigates them for it, they can point out that the demand for kitten deli slices didn’t going to go away, and if they didn’t sell them, someone else would step in and do it less humanely.

Have the Lib Dems abandoned their pro-EU stance?

John Gruber (yes, the Apple loyalist) pointed out that the Japanese law specifically exempts game consoles, and suggested the US retaliating by passing a law requiring third-party app stores on the PlayStation and Switch. Which probably won’t happen, but would be entertaining if it did.

They could call it the Dendy 360 or something

Given that they have a native, non-Electron iOS version, it’s a shame that they haven’t built a desktop macOS version using mostly the same code. (To make it look like a proper Mac app, they’d need different UI code, though even without that, they could build a version that looks like the iPad version with no changes, and it would look no worse than the Electron web-app UI and run an order of magnitude more efficiently.)

But can you use nuclear weapons against an electric sharknado?

Maybe when they have some time, Ukraine can sell Finland’s farmers some tractor modifications to use inertial navigation or other jamming-resilient techniques they will have honed to perfection.

The Jesus and Mary Chain did it better the first time around

Nonetheless, they’ll probably get away with it, because other than among a handful of autistic furries, there’s no demand for non-algorithmic, non-enshittified social networks.

The celebrities and brand-builders who use Instagram to grow their brand aren’t switching to Pixelfed or Misskey because, without algorithms boosting them, there’s no clout to be had. Artists, indie bands, vintage clothing sellers and other self-marketers are staying put for similar reasons. (Basically, if your goal is “self-promote at scale and hope to make ends meet” rather than “find a handful of weird friends with the same kind of damage as you”, the fediverse is worse than useless: it’s lost time and effort with nothing to show for it.) Your normie friends, who want to keep up with their favourite pop stars and tattoo artists and have a busy schedule without an extra 15 minutes a day for a social network few people use, aren’t going to add Pixelfed to their dopamine loops.

No. The 6502 itself is probably the simplest CPU to be used at scale in home computers: it has only 3 registers, a handful of instructions (you don’t even get multiplication) and is made of around 3,500 transistors (less than half the number in the Z80). All the things that gave the C64, Apple II, BBC Micro, NES and such their recognisable qualities were provided by support chips used alongside the 6502.

6502s were used in a lot of simple electronics after general-purpose computing moved on. They used them in battery-powered pocket chess computers in the late 80s, for example, and I wouldn’t be surprised if cycle computers or microwave ovens contained them as well.

They might not need to open-source it: hackers have found ways of jailbreaking the installed Linux and are stepping up efforts for making it reusable. It’s a rather feeble SoC, so there won’t be a huge number of applications for it, but there will be some.

Does Google still have a search algorithm? I thought they now just feed everything into a huge LLM and let it regurgitate statistically plausible answers.

If you want more like this, there’s Bunnix, the UNIX clone someone recently built in a month. You can follow its progress here.

They’ll probably launder them into real estate; possibly a penthouse in Dubai or a townhouse down the road from Buckingham Palace or something.

So, not only is it a slur, it’s not even one of the ones which are free speech.

They should at least release data sheets and any bootloader signing keys, allowing people to reuse the devices for other purposes. If you could replace the firmware, I’m sure you could use it for controlling your home automation setup or displaying the weather/news/train times/other info (or possibly other tasks depending on what’s in the SoC). Now, alas, it’s just e-waste.