No, it's a British term The Register uses a lot. From Wikipedia:

Boffin is a British slang term for a scientist, engineer, or other person engaged in technical or scientific research and development. A "boffin" was viewed by some in the regular military or government services as odd, quirky or peculiar, though quite bright and essential to helping in the war effort through having and developing the key ideas leading to transformative military capabilities.

Earlier this year the Supreme Court just happened to rule that USPS can't be sued for not delivering mail.

A divided Supreme Court sided with the federal government on Tuesday in U.S. Postal Service v. Konan, a dispute over mishandled mail. Writing for a 5-4 majority, Justice Clarence Thomas explained that a law protecting the U.S. Postal Service from lawsuits over lost or miscarried mail bars lawsuits over mail that was intentionally misdelivered.

On Tuesday, the court sided with the government, holding that an intentional failure to deliver the mail falls within the FTCA’s postal exception. The ordinary meanings of both “miscarriage” and “loss” point the court to this conclusion, wrote Thomas in the majority opinion. “Because a ‘miscarriage’ includes any failure of mail to arrive properly, a person experiences a miscarriage of mail when his mail is delivered to his neighbor, held at the post office, or returned to the sender—regardless of why it happened,” he wrote. Similarly, “[w]hen Congress enacted the FTCA, the ‘loss’ of mail ordinarily meant a deprivation of mail, regardless of how the deprivation was brought about.”

"Boffin" made me think the slashdot post is about a post at The Register, and sure enough, it is.

Apple could use higher quality drives, or have to pay a premium for being weird and buying controller-less drives, but yes, a big part of the difference is probably just higher profit margins.

Apple raised prices on a bunch of stuff today, and the iPad Pro upgrade is now £900.

His primary was yesterday too, and he was unopposed. If he's getting primaried it won't be until at least 2028.

More RAM manufacturing plants are being built because of the demand, but it'll be years before any of them produce anything.

I was saying it should be used. The person I was replying to seemed to be suggesting it and I was pointing out problems.

edit: wasn't. I wasn't saying it should be used.

I don't think they can use the 25th amendment unless Vance is on board. And going into midterms with Acting President Vance might not be any more appealing to the Republicans than sticking with Trump.

The £800 to upgrade the iPad Pro isn't just paying for storage. The 1TB and 2TB iPad Pro have an extra CPU core and 4GB more RAM vs the lower storage tiers.

Part of the Halifax area hasn't had fluoridated water for years because of poor planning:

In a post on its website in January[2025], Halifax Water said the fluoride tank at Lake Major was at the end of its useful life and was becoming a safety risk in 2020, which is why the decision was made to take it offline.

Staff began plans to replace it in 2021-22 and a capital project was initiated, but record-setting rainfall events over the summer of 2023 "caused significant changes in lake water quality." Those changes meant more chemicals were being used in the water treatment process to meet compliance obligations.

The plant provides drinking water to customers in Dartmouth, Cole Harbour, Eastern Passage, North Preston, Westphal and Burnside.

Shouldn't Halifax Water have known ahead of time that the tank was approaching end of life and prepared for it? They didn't even tell us fluoridation had stopped until years later, and it's going to be a few more years before it's back.

It's gone beyond the EU. Last week Apple announced third party app stores will be coming to Brazil and

Apple has already allowed alternative app stores and/or third-party payment systems on iOS in the EU, Japan, and South Korea, and it will likely be forced to do so in the UK and Australia too, due to similar regulations in those countries.

Literally on the Steam Machine page:

• CPU: Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
• GPU: Semi-custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs

You could just build it yourself, there's not much to it.

Dockerfile:

ARG VERSION=2

FROM caddy:${VERSION}-builder AS builder

RUN xcaddy build \
    --with github.com/caddy-dns/cloudflare

FROM caddy:${VERSION}

COPY --from=builder /usr/bin/caddy /usr/bin/caddy

My Dockerfile is under dockerfile-dns and then in docker-compose.yaml instead of pointing to an image I have:

services:
  caddy:
    build: ./dockerfile-dns

I'm not 100% sure of the right way to update it, but I think I usually use something like docker compose build --pull --no-cache.

410 CAD to go from 512GB to 2TB, and sadly that's pretty much just what a 2TB drive costs these days.

I don't know if the OS exactly requires an online login, but it basically boots into the Steam client, and that won't do you much good without a Steam account.

I can't help you with automation. I update my containers manually, whenever I think to do it. Nothing is accessible outside my network so I'm not worried about staying on top of security updates.

The Steam Machine uses semi-custom processors. Changing them would have required getting AMD to design new chips, not swapping out off-the-shelf parts. AMD doesn't yet have an RDNA4 replacement for the GPU, so they would probably only go up to RDNA3.5, and that might not have been enough of a boost to even be worth the trouble.

Microsoft actually doesn't seem to have enough data center capacity: Microsoft forced to turn to AWS to boost GitHub cloud capacity following AI demand surge

If he's worried about people wanting to kill him, maybe he shouldn't have fucked over so many people with DOGE. That probably made the list of people who want him dead a lot longer.

That seems to be the default for Unreal Engine 5.