"So what first attracted you to the multi-billionaire Bill Gates?"

Yeah, my grandad ran his car off of kerosene for about twenty years, no problem at all. The important thing is to live somewhere really cold where you legitimately burn a lot of fuel oil for heating, otherwise the taxman will become suspicious of all your purchases.

The usual problem with running your car off of cooking oil is not that it doesn't work - works just fine. The problem is that your car smells like a chip shop wherever you go, and you will get very stressed waiting at traffic lights in case someone notices. Maybe smoke a lot of weed in your car to cover up the aroma?

Illegal in the UK if you've not paid tax on it for road use. It would appear that you can make your own and then pay the tax on it - you can get a receipt for it if you 'accidentally' fill your car up with red diesel - but that's going to invite a lot of scrutiny, which is what you don't want when you're tax dodging.

Don't like the overpriced Steam Machine? Just build your own and put SteamOS in it

Seems a bit unreasonable to call it 'overpriced'; it's hard to get equally-specced parts any cheaper at the moment, and it's all wrapped up in a neat, small, integrated package.

Being able to run SteamOS elsewhere might help convert more people to Linux, but the obstacle identified here is NVidia driver support, as usual. Steam has been very easy to install on every Linux distro I've ever used if you're still wanting to use it as a general purpose machine, but having it all wrapped up would be nice too.

Not arguing that you can get slightly better performance for a slightly lower price, but that's a substantially larger machine. The Steam Machine is little bigger than its controller in any dimension and easy to hide on a shelf; that Q300L is definitely a small desktop. It has niceties like HDMI CEC, so that it can wake your TV when you start it up from its controller. And it's whisper-quiet.

$70 extra for a really living-room ready games machine does not seem at all unreasonable to me, plus it turns up ready-assembled. If I had to replace my gaming desktop, it doesn't seem unreasonable. Replacing my gaming desktop would cost about twice what I originally paid for the damned thing as well, but that's a different matter.

Engineering degree are very heavy on theory and light on practice; my degree is chemical engineering, and while I had four years of concepts and equations stuffed in my head by the time I graduated, they hadn't taught us which way round valves open and close. That does make new graduates look kind of bad on site! But the intention is that you'll be designing or managing chemical plants, not operating them.

I can completely see that an electrical engineering course wouldn't include how plugs are wired; that's a job for an electrician.

Oh, absolutely. We were a bit obsessive about operability and maintainability - ensure that all valves can be operated without bending down, make sure that there's space and lifting gear available wherever it's needed for maintenance and removal. I could have told you the properties of ten different kinds of valves and when you'd use each one, I just couldn't have recognised them on site.

One of the stumbling blocks we had is that the operators would look at our layout drawings, and be unable to visualise how that would look once we'd built it. We'd started to do 3D models; wander through the treatment plant like it was Quake. The helmets always made me want to vom. But that helped in sorting out additional issues while they were still "the stroke of a pen" to fix.

I suspect that the laboratory design issues are caused by the people spending the money either not appreciating that it's even an issue, or not caring that they would cause issues. Bit like a kitchen, I'd guess - certain things want to be kept together because you move between them? But if the installation team can't even take half an hour to check with you that [fancy gadget A] is suitable in the easiest spot to power and plumb it, then that's a problem right there.

Certainly hit a few fuel tanks yesterday. Слава Україні!

Brainless, foul-smelling and hateful creatures, who can't be trusted not to shit wherever they stand. And the noise that they make is really offensive as well. The donkeys next to them are quite cute, though.

I didn't ask for this.

The original looks fine; it's gone from 'okay for 2000', through to 'dated' and back to 'retro charm' again. Plus you can turn up the resolution and fps to silly levels, which wasn't the originally intended effect but is pretty nice.

All early 3D games look so bad that the slight year-on-year improvements are nearly irrelevant now. A hideous AI texture 'upgrade' doesn't bring it to to modern standards, and distracts from the truly amazing game behind it all.

IVEBEENUSINGTHISKEYBORDFORWHOLEMONTHNDMMOREEFFICIENTTHNIVEEVERBEENBEFORE

Which makes perfect sense - none of the previous producers have. Mostly, they've just used their stock characters and locations, and made a game that they thought would be fun out of them. There's a couple of games that qualify as 'direct sequels' (Ocarina -> Majora's, Wind Waker -> Hourglass) but even then, it doesn't benefit you much to have played the preceding one. Would be weird to try and twist the games into a chronology that strikes me mostly as 'fanon' anyway.

Nothing to me says 'sexy' quite like your grandad and your great-grandad being the same guy, or your (great * 5)-grandmother / grandfather being one man and woman, when most people have that responsibility spread between 64 people.

Close family. Must have made Christmas easy - having the in-laws round isn't so bad when they're your own blood relatives too.

Just saying; cancelling Spotify and changing to Qobuz takes five minutes. Sound quality is amazingly better, the curated recommendations are done by human beings that love music, and 'just works' with everything that Spotify does. (For us, anyway.) It's French, rather than Norwegian-American like Tidal is, if you're trying to stop spending money on everything US at the moment, too.

Well now. A few things, here:

• there are not 9 × 9 × 9 × 9 × .... possible ways to play. After the first move, 8 squares remain, and so on, so there's at most 9 × 8 × 7 × ... = 9! = 362880 ways that the game can be played, ignoring the fact that most of those can be eliminated as reflections and rotations, or as win positions before you fill the whole board.

• we don't care how we got there. Each square can either be blank, a cross, or a nought, so 3^9 combos = 19683, and most of those are illegal, as only the boards where there's (one or zero) more crosses than noughts are good. And you don't need to store 'the computer's move', just jump directly to letting the player go again. Let's guess we need at most a quarter of that.

• we could have created a single web page with 5k anchor elements on it back in the HTML 1.0 days, ignoring the fact that it would have taken a while to download on our 28.8K modems. That wouldn't have been 170 Mb of unnecessary tagging, even with the 'lay it out with tables' style we had at the time.

Google do seem to have a predilection for reinventing the past, poorly. I hear that their bonuses are based on inventing 'new' things, though, so it's in their interest to pass it off?

Obligatory www.web3isgoinggreat.com - catalogues all of the grifts, hacks and thefts, with a running $$$ total.

Writing in ASM is not too bad provided that there's no operating system getting in the way. If you're on some old 8-bit microcomputer where you're free to read directly from the input buffers and write directly to the screen framebuffer, or if you're doing embedded where it's all memory-mapped IO anyway, then great. Very easy, makes a lot of sense. For games, that era basically ended with DOS, and VGA-compatible cards that you could just write bits to and have them appear on screen.

Now, you have to display things on the screen by telling the graphics driver to do it, and so a lot of your assembly is just going to be arranging all of your data according to your platform's C calling convention and then making syscalls, plus other tedious-but-essential requirements like making sure the stack is aligned whenever you make a jump. You might as well write macros to do that since you'll be doing it a lot, and if you've written macros to do it then you might as well be using C instead, since most of C's keywords and syntax map very closely to the ASM that would be generated by macros.

A shame - you do learn a lot by having to tell the computer exactly what you want it to do - but I couldn't recommend it for any non-trivial task any more. Maybe a wee bit of assembly here-and-there when you've some very specific data alignment or timing-sensitive requirement.

A controversial take. Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use, and a lot of that is down to Copilot, for me. Only way to get rid of it is to wait for Github to go down again, which is the only thing it does reliably at the moment.

It's one of those materials that has an almost complete list of superb properties, with one overwhelming downside. It's cheap, abundantly available, completely fireproof and can be woven into fireproof cloth, adds enormous structural strength to concrete in small quantities, very resistant to a wide range of chemical attacks. It's just that the dust causes horrific cancers. See also CFCs, leaded petrol, etc, which have the same 'very cheap, superb in their intended use, but the negative outweighs all positives'.

One of the 'niche industrial applications' was the production of pump gaskets in high-temperature scenarios, especially when pumping corrosive liquids. We've a range of superalloys that are 'suitable' for these applications - something like inconel is an absolute bastard to form into shapes, but once you've done so it lasts a long time. But you still need something with similar properties when screwing the bits together. For a long time, there was no suitable synthetic replacement for asbestos in that kind of usage.

If you know that the asbestos is there, have suitable PPE and procedures, then IMHO it's far from the worst industrial material to work with. It's pretty inert, doesn't catch fire or explode, and isn't one of the many exciting chemicals where a single droplet on your skin would be sufficient to kill you. What is inappropriate is using it as a general-purpose building material, which is how it was used for so long, and where it was able to cause so much suffering for so many people.