My understanding is that an EU member state has to physically be in Europe unless they are an “extension” of a state already in the EU. I get that it’s supposed to be an “associate” state but I’m fascinated by what kind of legal hoops they’re going to jump through to make this happen.
They did make an exception for Cypress, so I suppose there’s some kind of precedent.
Not the same, but the Canary Islands are part of Spain, and are clearly in the African continent, geographically speaking.
In any case, I believe the EU can accommodate Canada or other like-wise counties. One of the goals for the EU is to unify smaller sovereign regions to have a greater power and be able to sit on the table having leverage with the bigger states layers. Growing by anexing Canada would increase that power.
All of the things like free trade and free movement could presumably be negotiated separately, they’re just creating an omnibus deal and slapping a fancy label on it.
Vimmy Ridge memorial is also forever given for the use of Canada by France after WW1, it is administered by Parks Canada. So we technically control land in Europe.
I have found these same principles to be true in my own projects. More modern, “cleaner” implementations usually end up with a larger code base but a noticeable reduction in performance. Bloat ruins everything.
This eventual sluggishness is due to inevitable OS rot. I bought a brand new MBP in 2017 and it was snappy as hell. Booted up instantly, breezed through complex tasks, and ran GarageBand and Logic Pro X very smoothly. Every OS update seemed to take it down a notch and eventually Logic Pro X - my main production tool - was unusable. I happed to be talking about this to a professional music producer friend of mine and he said that everyone in his industry NEVER updates their OS. Basically they install everything, disconnect from the internet, and don’t touch the OS ever again because it can break delicate plugin ecosystems and drivers. That’s essentially what I ended up doing. I installed a different DAW (UA Luna) and have not updated the OS for about 5 years now and it’s still chugging along. I don’t use that system for any other purpose however I do keep it connected to the internet for ease of access to icloud. One day the hardware will die, but my next audio production system will likely be a Mac Studio that I set up and don’t touch for 10 years.
I remember long ago, when I first met a computer person in college and he told me about PCs vs UNIX, I asked him, "why don't they make it run on a PC?"
My favorite quote from Mark Twain is “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Indeed, brevity and clarity actually take time and analysis. I find this to be very true when writing requirements or documentation. Some of the worst requirements I’ve read have been extremely wordy and unnecessarily over-technical or jargon-heavy when it could have been explained in plain language. As usual, it very much depends on the target audience.
Yes, but it can be worth it as I've generally found that the most effective professional writing has your high-level request appear within the very first sentence.
This is because it as quickly as possible puts the reader into the context of what you need from them making your rationalization of the request reinforce it, whereas if you try to rationalize before getting to your request a busy reader (think customer support, exec, manager) will be thinking "Okay, okay, okay, what are they getting to? Okay, okay, oh there we go finally I know, now let's consider their rationalization, maybe I should scroll up and re-read".
I started doing this after having done email customer service many years ago, when you're expected to spend as little time as possible per support case, you will speed read their writing until you find the part which says what their issue is, for some emails this was paragraphs. A particularly memorable WoW case for me was something like this, but more verbose:
"I finished the raid last night where we managed to down , after we celebrated, I logged off. Then I woke up and went to school as usual, after getting home I tried logging on it showed a message saying I was banned, I was heart-broken as I've put so much time into the game and it means so much to me, so to find out why I logged into my Gmail and an email from you said I was banned due to ."
As a support person, all of that was completely irrelevant except for the part saying "I was banned due to " (which was commonly due account being compromised by a gold seller looting it and then auto-banned due to stuff they were doing on it).
Something else which reinforced my view of "get to the point quickly" was an HN comment saying how they were once sent on a course on "how as an engineer to communicate effectively with execs" which apparently essentially stated "write your email as you normally would, then at the end take the last paragraph and put it at the top of the email". The rationale being that execs are typically only interested in reading a full email if it's actually relevant to them.
This sounds a lot like the BLUF technique [0]. This is one of my favorite techniques in professional settings.
I don't interpret this as contradictory to the OP's point and quote: in order to determine the most important first line, one must slow down to identify exactly what that is.
It works in all cases except the important ones, where you expect that your request will be denied upfront and you have to present all the compelling arguments for your request along with the risks of not honoring your request, before you go to formulating what you need as the lesser evil of all the unpleasant alternatives.
I find that this quote is not just applicable to writing of natural language like letters. It also applies to code, and is becoming more and more evident to me due to the use of AI.
I believe the idea presented transcends writing actually. For example you could also apply it to painting or sculpting. I think this points to the character of creative thinking where one "chips" away at a subject until it is considered as finished.
Similarly I often read ticket or PR descriptions written by Claude that are so jargon-heavy that I just can't understand on first try. On one side it's a reality check because I always considered English to be close to a mother tongue for me, on the other side I never had to deal with words like "idempotent"... (Seriously, when did this become one of the go-to words to use?)
Idempotency is a crucial trait in the world of web APIs (and any other system where commands that modify state might need to be retried due to communication failures). It's not a new word or concept, but it's certainly a niche one.
Yes. It’s even worse than jargon tho I think it just invents its own metaphors. At first I thought this was clever and useful, helping me to internalize the code (“the normal path vs the escape hatch”) but I’m increasingly finding the metaphors to be so thick and esoteric that it’s actually a hurdle to understanding the actual code.
I have been using profiles for years in Chrome/Vivaldi for similar reasons. I do a lot of web app development and this is extremely useful for testing. In fact I have 10 different profiles on one of my setups so that I can easily simulate multiple users accessing the same app and each profile can remember its own passwords, settings, cookies, and session data, etc. Firefox’s MAC seems like it’s not quite as isolated as a separate profile but I can see how it would be useful for end-users who want to have different “identities” in the same profile.
Not sure why optical is a problem in 2026! I have a 2014 Samsung plasma dumb-TV and pipe the optical straight to my old (2002-ish) Yamaha receiver with absolutely zero issues (no sync drifting) and it sounds like a dream compared to the soundbar on my other TV.
Would be nice to see actual pics instead of silly silhouettes. I am in the market for exactly this kind of truck (especially a manual) but this doesn’t inspire me to want to buy it.
The company was started no earlier than December, according to the articles linked in another comment. Very real possibility that no pics or semi-finalized CAD design even exist yet at this point.
Slate also had 3 years of skunkworks behind the scenes by Re:Build Manufacturing as "Project Re:Car" with millions being thrown behind it by Bezos and friends.
The fact these guys are still trying to find manufacturing partners and suppliers is killing me when Slate's got Tier-1s (Vitro) already lined up cranking out windshields in Mexico for them (among the rest of the f*cking owl that is the truck coming together here in the US ;) )
The original reo went bankrupt in 1967 and after series of mergers ended up as part of the truck company diamond reo. Diamond reo then had difficulties and stopped production in 1995. This reo is wholly unrelated, except the guy who started it bought the trademark.
"In 1986, Packard Bell was the name of a defunct manufacturer of TVs and radios. Founded in 1926 or 1933 depending on how you count it, it survived until 1968 when it sold out to Teledyne.
In the 1980s the brand still had some name recognition on its own. But look at the other names it resembled: Pacific Bell, the telephone company. Hewlett Packard, the computer company. Packard, the defunct maker of luxury cars.
It sounded like an old-line company making quality products, which was what Beny Alagem counted on. He even put the slogan “America grew up listening to us. It still does,” on its early marketing literature.
People always confused them for something they weren’t, and for a time, it helped. “I don’t know about other brands,” one customer said to me when I was selling computers in 1994, pointing at Compaq and Dell. “But Packard Bell, that’s an old company.” Even my coworkers routinely thought Packard Bell was related to HP or to Packard, the car maker."
These new guys don't. The descendant of the original REO is Nucor Steel. REO owned a steel roofing company, and through a strange chain of events, that unit became the biggest steel company in the US.[1]
They did make an exception for Cypress, so I suppose there’s some kind of precedent.