I distinctly remember my dad too choosing for the TI-99/4A over the competition because of the 16-bit CPU. Little did he, let alone the little boy that I was at the time, know of the limitations of its weird design.

A[n] sizes are useful when enlarging or shrinking documents. Enlarge or shrink by muliples of sqrt(2) and there's always a fitting paper size available. Or you can put two A5s together on an A4, or two A4s on an A3.

I'm guessing the same kind of people who don't understand the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents (http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-...).

I feel this is somewhat similar to something Linus Torvalds once said about the faster merges git brought to his workflow:

"That's the kind of performance that actually changes how you work. It's no longer doing the same thing faster, it's allowing you to work in a completely different manner. That is why performance matters and why you really should not look at anything but git. Hg (Mercurial) is pretty good, but git is better."

(in a talk he did at Google, of which I the I found the transcripts here: https://gist.github.com/dukeofgaming/2150263)

Sometimes making something much faster turns it from something you try to avoid, maybe even unconsciously, to something you gladly make part of your workflow.

Since I started using uv I regularly create new venvs just for e.g. installing a package I'm not familiar with to try some things out and see if it fits my needs. With pip I would sometimes do that too, but not nearly as often because it would take too much time. Instead I would sometimes install the package in an existing venv, potentially polluting that project's dependencies. Or I use uvx to run tools that I would not consider using otherwise because of too much friction.

I was skeptical at first too. It's not until you start using uv and experience its speed and other useful features that you fully get why so many people switch from pip or poetry or whatever to uv.

Lots of politicians haven been pro-spying for quite a long time. Lots of people are quite indifferent about it.

The massive shift of communications to digital channels has put mountains of data right there for the grabs, which is extremely attractive for people who want access to all that data.

Let's Encrypt certificates last even only 90 days when unplugged.

Are company names even unique within the UK? Sure, there can be only one bank named Barclays because of trademark laws, but can't there be a company in a different sector with the same name? Like Apple the computer business vs Apple the record company?

Or don't you have small local businesses (restaurants, pubs, stores) with duplicate names as long as they're in different locations? I know here in Flanders we have, for example, tens if not more places called "Café Onder den toren" (roughly translated as "Pub beneath the tower"). Do all local businesses in the UK have different names?

Politicians like campaign on reducing immigration because it's an easy thing to campaign on. They don't like to actually do anything about it because (1) it's hard, especially when you want to comply with laws and treaties and (2) effectively reducing immigration could hamper the ability to campaign on reducing immigration.

Is it always true that a smaller motor with the same power has less heat dissipation? It doesn't seem all that obvious to me.

All else held equal, I think so, yeah. If you have the same temperature differential, the same manner of heat dissipation, and a smaller surface area then that should mean smaller heat dissipation, yeah?

Obviously if you go from eg. a large air-cooled motor to a smaller water-cooled motor, then the smaller motor could potentially dissipate more heat, but that's a different scenario.

We only know that the large and the small motor deliver the same power. I don't see how we can conclude from that the temperature differential is also equal. In fact I would expect a smaller motor to have a larger temperature differential, because the heat is produced concentrated in a smaller volume.

Yep, you're getting it. Same power, same efficiency, same power dissipation, smaller motor, smaller dissipative area, higher temperature.

The other assumption I probably should have stated is that the two motors are made of similar materials with similar temperature limits. We know the ambient temperature and we know the maximum temperature of the materials used. So for a component made of those materials, existing in that ambient temperature, with an additional heat load proportional to the waste heat in the motor...

The ability to shed heat (assuming similar forced fan cooling, as we were) determines the amount of power we can deliver to the device without increasing its temperature.

So, ok, under a whole bunch of stated and unstated unproven assumptions, a smaller motor of the same power delivery as a larger motor is more efficient. There's no relation to reality here. I don't even know why I thought the idea in your comment that started this thread was worth pursuing.

Probably combined with a bunch of unrelated laws, in an unrelated legislative committee, all to try to keep it out of public attention.