Has overtaken Saudi Arabia as nation with largest proven oil reserves.

Although it is 'heavy' oil, the 'brown coal' of liquid fossil reserves (i.e. low quality).

The fact that such a fuss is being made about low-grade oil is a concern in itself.

Most of the USA's refineries specialize in low grade oil. The best grade oil is often shipped out of the USA for refining. Shipping costs are so low on a grand scale that it's more profitable to ship the USA's high quality oil overseas than building new refineries in the USA just for that: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/05/13/the-u-s-exports...

> The fact that such a fuss is being made about low-grade oil is a concern in itself.

Keep in mind there's a lot of 'idle' refining capacity at the southeastern coast of the US which was built for heavy oil.

At least HDMI is a 'low frequency' connector, often only ever plugged in once, as opposed to USB (or refueling a car)

I believe this is what "Cargo-Cult Programming" is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

Using 'copy' as a clipboard script tells me OP never lived through the DOS era I guess... Used to drive me mad switching between 'cp' in UNIX and 'copy' in DOS. (Same with the whole slash vs backslash mess.)

I believe this is why all modern digital watches use a 32768.0Hz crystal resonator, it's a power-of-2 frequency above the 20Khz top end of the range of human audio perception, to avoid the whole 'tinnitus on your wrist' thing.

Also a tuning fork cut for a lower power-of-two would be a bit bulky for a compact wrist watch.

The old 1980s computers also had no equivalent of flash storage though, the RAM had to store the program being run as well as act as scratch-space.

I believe youtube still uses 40 mel-scale vectors as feature data, whisper uses 80 (which provides finer spectral detail but is computationally more intensive to process naturally, but modern hardware allows for that)

that's not true, consumerism is only growing, people are not giving up anything in that regard.

The planet is getting trashed and 'the children' are doomed.

Individually We try and help, driving less, recycling and so on, but it kinda gets diluted by a billion Chinese moving into the middle-class and burning coal like there's no tomorrow.

Reminds me of the Pentium FDIV bug from 1994.... a half-billion-dollar 'ouch' for Intel were many hard lessons were learned.

Surely math libraries and optimizations have been a solved problem for the last 20+ years.

I would disagree. The dark ages were hundreds of years ago, the electric grid is much less than a century old. Plenty of countries have unreliable supply and rolling blackouts and have adapted to it or have just never became accustomed to the luxury of 24/7 electricity on demand. Being without juice is not the end of the world.

Those places generally have the luxury of 24/7 electricity, normally via diesel gensets, for key parts of their infrastructure, such as fuel transfer, hospital, food supply.

The places that don't have the fallback ready access to fallback diesel genset, like rural South Sudan or Burundi, are pretty close to an end of the world scenario.

Don't romanticise disaster. If a developed country indefinitely lost power, a huge swathe of the population would die, starting with the infants, elderly, and chronically ill. Then hunger and disease would come for the rest. Nonsense ideas that we'd MacGyver or bushcraft our way out of trouble are infantile.