Is that Alan Davies?

Jevon’s paradox says this might not help. If shipping gets faster, cheaper, and cleaner, because ships get free power on top of their engines - are we likely to do less of it?

If we ditch latin for IPA, maybe.

Maybe.

The more likely outcome is that some words would adopt those revised pronunciations, but most wouldn’t, fracturing the rules by creating arbitrary exceptions. This has of course happened over and over and over. That is the shape of the hole we are in.

Florida here.

Fuck.

English is a creole gone feral.

Some poor sheep farmers who thought the Thames was a lovely bit of river spent one thousand years getting rolled by the Picts, the Romans, the Angles, the Normans, the Saxons, the Franks, the Danes… and half of those were just the French wearing different hats. Most of these conquerors, heirs, and particularly rowdy tourists left a significant linguistic impact this mongrel archipelago of mayonnaise-filled peasants.

I’m in south Florida. Doctors’ offices usually have multilingual signs. Haitian Creole always looks goofy, but you immediately realize - that’s what English would look like if we fixed the fucking spelling. They look at French’s oodles of rules that all matter, and English’s very simple rules we don’t follow, and said “Sa trè estipid, nou ka fè pi byen.”

Jesus Christ, the usability nightmare of this website is worse than the goofy animated GIF they think is an exaggeration.

www.wired.com##.sticky-box to get rid of the autoplaying video go fuck yourselves, www.wired.com##.journey-unit__container to get rid of the assorted gigantic flyover bullshit.

Any solid-state media you can access is almost certainly NAND. There’s a second kind of flash memory called NOR, but it’s gradually disappearing. I think it’s relegated to EEPROMs and similar embedded uses. The number of applications where its advantages matter are outweighed by the seventeen bajillion dollar market for higher-capacity NAND. All the research money and foundry tech are going toward the one that’ll let them sell 1 TB SSDs for $20.

Dynamic RAM is a bucket with a hole in it. Genuinely, that is the model that makes it so cheap.

Static RAM is the proper way to do memory: half a dozen transistors form each bistable flip-flop, so there’s two input wires and one output wire, and the output wire is either high or low depending on which input wire was used most recently. Static RAM will maintain its state using comically low power. Static RAM runs on the idea of electricity. It’s how cartridge games from the 90s had save files. There’s a button-cell battery that was enough to power some kilobits of memory for an entire decade. But because static RAM uses so many gates, it takes up a lot of silicon, and it is hideously expensive, to this day.

Dynamic RAM is a stupid engineering workaround that happens to be really, really effective. Each bit is a capacitor. That’s all. It will slowly drain, which is why your laptop has to hibernate to disk instead of lasting forever like Pokemon Red. When a capacitor has charge, applying more power is met with resistance, which lets the sole input wire detect the state of that bit. And so long as you check every couple milliseconds, and refill capacitors that are partially charged… the state of memory is maintained. On very old machines this might have been done by the machine. IIRC, on SNES, there’s a detectable stall in the middle of each scanline, where some ASIC reads and then writes a portion of system memory. On modern devices that’s all handled inside the memory die itself. The stall is still there, but if it affects your program, you are doing something silly.

The RAM in your machine has nigh-unlimited write cycles because it will naturally return to zero. It is impermanent on the scale of microseconds. By design, your data has no lasting impact. That is central to its mechanism.