I would recommend moving to a country that is less susceptible to this threat.

I left the UK for this reason and live very comfortably on around £15k. I rent a city centre flat with 600 megabit fibre and really good amenities. I have time and space to build what I want.

"Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth." - Archimedes.

Unfortunately in the UK it's really hard to survive, let alone actually have time to do anything meaningful. I don't know if it's engineered by big tech/property/finance or some other demon. Maybe the monster in qntm's "There is no Anitmemetics Division" is allegorical.

Where did you move to?

That said, the real point is paying off your mortgage (or getting fixed low interest). With no mortgage I could almost live on that little in Sweden.

Malaysia. It's not going to be cheap for long here though, they're really positioning themselves as a tech hub and I think they'll do well.

Utilities are particularly cheap here, I pay around £10 per month for water and electricity. Many working people live on around RM3000 or about £550 a month here.

They get control and market differentiation. There will probably be a CloudFlare Astro CMS offering.

I personally would like a highly managed Astro solution. Astro is simple but highly extendable.

I can only hope they wean themselves off NPM somehow.

It's a great tool, but the dynamic loading of extensions in DuckDB makes working with code signing very difficult. Second, the spatial extension uses LGPL components which adds another headache for commercial apps.

As such, it's not readily usable as a library, or set of libraries. I really prefer Apache's approach to analytics where it's possible to pick and choose the parts you need, and integrate them with standard package maangers.

Need GB/S arrays over HTTP? Use Arrow Flight. Want to share self-describing structured arrays with files? Use Arrow IPC. Need to read Parquet? Add that package trait.

Another potential issue with DuckDB is the typing at the SQL interface.

Arrow allows direct access to primitive arrays, but DuckDB uses a slightly different type system at the SQL interface. Even small differences in type systems can lead to combinatoric type explosion. This is more a critiscm of SQL interfaces than DuckDB however.

Additionally Arrow has native libraries in most mainstream languages.

This is becoming a more serious problem now Siri is going to be Google powered.

Supposedly there is no data shared with Google when using Gemini-powered Siri:

Google’s model will reportedly run on Apple’s own servers, which in practice means that no user data will be shared with Google. Instead, they won’t leave Apple’s Private Cloud Compute structure.[1]

1: https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/05/google-gemini-1-billion-deal-...

Supposedly and reportedly that is true. For now.

We still have Google models running on hardware people pay thousands of dollars for, under the impression it wasn't a Google device.

Imagine the gigantic temptation of gigantic wads of cash Google would pay Apple to allow Gemini to index and produce analytics about your data on your machine.

Now Google have a foot in the door.

Store the Sentinel 2 imagery for a year - about 500TB.

Now I just have to find a way to avoid the $50k egress cost from AWS.

Thinkpads get eight or nine for repairabliity from ifixit while Macbooks get a four or five, basically because of storage replacability [1]. The pentalobe screw issue is moot for anyone with a spare $5.

Apple could easily fix this. Macs are generally good value except for the absolute rip-off that is storage. $400 to go from 1TB to 2TB is a ridiculous markup.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...

This is where EU should step in and force the right to replace the storage (hell even RAM) onto laptop manufacturers. And if Apple doesn't comply, then good riddance.

I think Apple would comply if the EU did this, after all they did so with USB-C.

RAM can't really be upgraded though given Apple only ship SoC laptops.

I was ignorant about their integrated RAM. Nevertheless, the point stands.

Yes. I don't think that one-size-fits-all is the future of coding agents. Different companies have different requirements. I would like to build specialised test harnesses that internal coding agents could use to iterate rapidly.

Also, inevitably these AI companies will start selling out data and become part of the surveillance state, if they're not already.

Have you seen the list of substances found in these things?

https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439...

You get downvoted because you're implying substances like methamphetamine are common in vapes (as per your linked article), which it obviously is not, and already highly illegal.

The truth is you can mix your own vape juice from just PG, VG and nicotine. Which are completely harmless to eat (except nicotine) and used in food products. A more rational discussion would be about if inhaling PG and VG is harmful to the lungs, or the additional unregulated stuff you find in flavoring of vape juice.

> Which are completely harmless to eat (except nicotine) and used in food products

Or we think so unless proven otherwise.

Yep. I definitely don't want to eat antifreeze based ice cream, or smoke antifreeze either.

Unfortunately the legal vape market acts as a cover for the illegal vape market. Vapes containing cannabinoids and other drugs are sold in shops.

I fully support banning these things. It's impossible to regulate effectively without.

I would dearly love to know why I get downvoted for providing concrete evidence of serious problems with controlled drugs in vapes.

They're not. The list of drugs found in them is terrifying:

https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439...

Cyberpunk is real.