I doubt they’d have to retire the phone - digital radio power levels are normally pretty easy to change in the radio firmware. Which also means it’s pretty easy to change, intentionally or unintentionally, in a later OS version.

Perhaps Apple chose to cheat to improve reception after mandatory testing was complete and the phone was available to buy, figuring they’d never get caught out. Perhaps Apple didn’t retest with later OS versions and it was unintentional. We will probably never know.

The last syllable is usually pretty subtle, like the br- in bread, but very quietly voiced. I’d say I hear it maybe 75% of the time I hear the word. Currently in Yorkshire, via SW England, London and NW England. The syllable is a lot less subtle in a West Yorks accent!

Did you learn French at GCSE level? Possibly there’s a relationship between that and pronouncing the re like that in French-derived words. Cadre is another example. If it is related to learning French, then it’s probably on the decline as French teaching is on the decline and foreign languages are no longer compulsory at GCSE.

In some of the accents around here, blood, wood and food do rhyme, more or less.

British English voices those letters in most accents. I think the two silent letters is just a North American thing.

Similar to herb.

If you’re on-call 24/7/365 without a break, and it’s not because you have equity in the company, then find a new job.

If you don’t, then your health (physical and mental) will eventually force you to leave anyway. I did it at a startup where I was employee #1 (no equity for me), just me and the founders, and I nearly had a nervous breakdown from it, and ended up quitting from stress. Afterwards I decided I would do no more than 1 week in 3, and life got better after that.

What? Tech companies the world over have people on 24/7 on-call rotas, and it’s usually voluntary.

Depending on the company, you might typically do 1 week in 4 on-call, get a nice little retainer bonus for having to have not much of a social life for 1 week in 4, and then get an additional payment for each call you take, plus time worked at x1.5 or x2 the usual rate, plus time off in lieu during the normal workday if the call out takes a long time. If you do on-call for tech and the conditions are worse than this, then your company’s on-call policies suck.

I used to do it regularly. Over the years, it paid for the deposit on my first house, plus some nice trips abroad. I enjoyed it - I get a buzz out of being in the middle of a crisis and fixing it. But eventually my family got bored of it, and I got more senior jobs where it wasn’t considered a good use of my energies.

Your internet connection, the websites and apps you use, your utilities - they don’t fix themselves when they break at 0300.

If TSMC’s approach to on-call is bad, then yeah, screw that. I don’t see anything in the article that says that one way or the other. But doing an on-call rota at all is a perfectly normal thing to do in tech.

Nice to see Google doing the responsible thing here, because Apple certainly didn’t when AirTags were launched.

I still think having cheap, socially acceptable, easily-accessible, highly effective tracking devices with months or more of battery life is something out of dystopian fiction though. It’s not good for society in the long run.

At least for me, there is a big difference between naming things at home and naming things for work.

Work “pet” machines get systematic names based on function, location, ownership and/or serial/asset numbers. There aren’t very many of them these days. If they are “cattle” then they get random names, and their build is ephemeral. If they go wrong or need an upgrade, they get rebuilt and their replacement build gets a new random name. Whether they are pets or cattle, the hostnames are secondary to tags and other metadata, and in most cases the tags are used to identify the machines in the first instance, because tags are far more flexible and descriptive than a hostname.

At home, where the number of machines is limited, I know all of them like the back of my hand, and it’s mostly just me touching them, whimsical names are where it’s at.

Ungulates. Because who doesn’t like a hoofed animal?

My client machines are even-toed ungulates (order Artiodactyla) and my servers/IoT machines are odd-toed (order Perissodactyla). I’m typing this on Gazelle. My router is called Quagga, both after the extinct zebra subspecies and the routing protocol software (I don’t use it any more but hey, it’s a router).

Biological taxonomy is a great source of a huge number of systematic (and colloquial) names.

Have you tried turning off Wi-Fi power management on the Deck? The Deck’s Wi-Fi is normally pretty good, but the Wi-Fi power management occasionally has issues with some combinations of router chipset and router settings, which can cause symptoms like what you’re experiencing.

Full instructions are here: https://seekingtech.com/how-to-disable-wi-fi-power-management-on-steam-deck/

Converted-to-Bluetooth Stadia controller.

It’s actually a really nice controller. The ergonomics are great for my big meaty hands, it’s got some weight to it and feels really solidly built. The heft means the vibration really has some kick to it. The battery life is really good too - it was specced for having Wi-Fi on all the time, so now it’s running only a little Bluetooth LE radio, the battery is massive. Even when it runs down, the charge rate is quick - full in about half an hour, and then good to go for weeks. Again, probably because it was specced for Wi-Fi, the radio circuitry is way above average and the range is stupid - I can control a Steam Deck from two rooms away, through two solid brick walls, something none of my other controllers can do.

The sticks are accurate and don’t drift, the buttons are pretty good, and the D-Pad is a bit stiff but perfectly serviceable. My one significant complaint is that the springback on the triggers is way too light, which makes it difficult to be subtle with the triggers, a little annoying for driving games.

Still, if you see one at a sensible price, they’re a steal.

Nvidia drivers have (slightly) more timely support for the latest cards, and more mature support for non-3D uses of the GPU, especially scientific computing. To a large extent they are the same code as the Windows drivers, and that has positives in terms of breadth and maturity of support.

For everything else, the AMD drivers are better. Because they are a separate codebase from the Windows drivers, and are part of the de-facto Linux GPU driver stack Mesa, they integrate much better into the overall Linux experience, especially around support for Wayland. Unless you have an absolutely bleeding-edge card, they “just work” more often than the Nvidia drivers. If you like doing serious tinkering on your Linux system, then the AMD drivers being fully integrated and having the source available is a major win. Also, it used to be that the Nvidia drivers did a much better job of squeezing performance out of the hardware, but today there’s very little in it, and the AMD drivers might even be a little more efficient.

I’ve got both AMD and Nvidia GPUs currently in different machines, and I much prefer the Linux experience with AMD. I don’t think I’ll be buying another Nvidia GPU unless the driver situation changes significantly.

FWIW I don’t stream so I can’t comment on the exact situation, but I have used the video encode hardware on AMD cards via VAAPI and it was competent and much faster than x264/x265 on the CPU. I think OBS has a plugin to use VAAPI (which is the “standard” Linux video decode/encode acceleration interface that everyone but Nvidia supports).