Electricity generated from peat peaked at 19.5% in 1990, apparently.
And that's far outstripped by the current figure for renewables (42% in 2025) - so renewables have enabled locally-sourced production to reach more than double the share that was ever managed in the peat-burning days.
(And the comparison is actually even better than it seems at first glance, given that the 2025 figures are all-island and the peat figures would be 3 or 4 points lower if you included NI. A good chunk of the 23.2% imports can probably also be classed as renewable, given that GB had a 47% renewable mix)
Solar panels contain negligible amounts of rare earths, compared to the amount used in wind / gas / steam turbines. They're also still used in oil & natural gas refining (though less than in the past).
Fossil fuel generators are most reliant on them, wind less so, solar barely at all.
Oh, I completely agree—but they're so frequently used as a gotcha for why the rise of solar is just trading one "foreign master" for another. "Oh no, solar panels rely on rare earth minerals, so that means you have to kowtow to China!!!"
And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
> Oh, I completely agree—but they're so frequently used as a gotcha for why the rise of solar is just trading one "foreign master" for another. "Oh no, solar panels rely on rare earth minerals, so that means you have to kowtow to China!!!"
> And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
It's the old saying about a man and fish and giving vs. teaching.
Solar panels bought now, at least the quality glass-glass kind, doesn't really go bad in a way that makes them depreciate at-all-quickly.
If in locations that are not themselves at a premium, so lower yield only matters if maintenance overhead per yield becomes so bad it's cheaper to replace& upgrade, they can be expected to stay there for 30~50 years depending on how fast they'll mechanically fall apart after their warranty expires (which is expected to be the duration until which most stay alive). I'd guess something like an agricultural east/west fence install would stay more towards 50y and get individual modules replaced when they break, as they're easy to get to unlike roof/wall installs and the like where they're hard to get to and given they are very low complexity in mounting system ("fence panel") there's little engineering complexity in retrofitting a plain new future panel of the same physical size and sufficiently similar voltage/current.
For instance, my postcode covers 15 houses and half of a large park. Those houses have been subdivided into 4-6 flats, and many have been redivided or renumbered multiple times. The park also contains various buildings and other places that might plausibly receive deliveries, some of which have multiple entries (an electricity substation appears 8 times, for some reason). So in total, it covers more than 200 addresses - mine is no.140-ish in a typical sorted list.
You'd be amazed by how many address checkers can't handle more than 64, 100, or 128 addresses in a postcode. Or how many scrollbars stop working, requiring you to use the arrow keys to navigate. Or how many other glitches I've seen.
The other common problems are usually down to temporary postcodes (which used to always end with an 'X' but can now be indistinguishable from 'real' codes) escaping into the wild, re-addressings and re-numberings not being picked up properly, the old problem of outdated PAFs being used, and - my personal favourite - BT/Openreach using their own separate postcode database, dating from the Post Office split in the early 1980s, which doesn't always agree with the PAF. Agh!
My "birthdate" is the same as yours. It was fine when I started using it in the late 90s, but has become increasingly awkward over the past few years - lots of sites seem to assume a maximum age of 120.
If I ever turn uBO off, the ads I get are mostly for funeral plans or incontinence products, with a smattering of "126 year old mom lost 30 lbs of belly fat - click to see how!" (yeah, decomposition's a bitch...)
> If I ever turn uBO off, the ads I get are mostly for funeral plans or incontinence products, with a smattering of "126 year old mom lost 30 lbs of belly fat - click to see how!" (yeah, decomposition's a bitch...)
And, for the record, it's way better to get ads for BS like that than stuff that may actually influence you.
Same, also on macOS. My "personal" firefox profile on my work Macbook Pro, which I use for occasional gmail, HN, wikipedia, and pretty much nothing else, has crashed twice in the last 6 weeks - both times when shutting down to update the OS.
Honestly, I've been blaming MacOS for it since other apps also crashed at the same time (the first time it was Microsoft Intune, the second time it was Slack - I doubt either uses Firefox internally). I don't recall seeing a Firefox crash on my personal laptop running Linux at any point in the past few years.
I don't think "crash" is the right word for the Firefox behaviour. Yes it does pop a window that calls itself a "crash reporter", but in my observation it's a shutdown timer timeout that expires after ~60secs.
My guess is that it's trying to obtain or release a filesystem lock, possibly one that it's lost track of in some trivial way.
I've never seen any damage or inconsistencies in the resulting environment. So I don't think it's a dramatic event, just a safety timer that isn't resolved correctly.
Yes, you're right - the tabs restored fine afterwards and the restart was only delayed for a minute or so, so it was barely even a minor inconvenience.
Contrast that with the dreadful corporate-supplied Edge AI browser I have to use for one client, which seems to randomly close windows without being asked, and never seems to be able to restore them.
Reassuring to hear I'm not the only one, and would consider this a normal use case for the browser, in fact one of the main reasons I use Firefox over chrome as it's simpler to manage than the latter.
I was hinting in my original comment if these cases are contributing to crash reports in any capacity there is a small chance they could be misattributed towards the claims in the post, especially if memory is not freed correctly on shutdown. Even more so if any memory allocation is shared between processes / helpers.
If I quit normally, don't wait for the "timeout" and force quit I still get the crash report UI immediately which suggests to me something funky going on.
10% is a crazy high percentage to claim for bitflips.
Yes, 30 pin SIMMs (the most common memory format from the mid-80s to the mid-90s) came in either '8 chip' or '9 chip' variants - the 9th chip being for the parity bit.
Most motherboards supported both, and the choice of which to use came down to the cost differential at the time of building a particular machine. The wild swings in DRAM prices meant that this could go from being negligible to significant within the course of a year or two!
When 72 pin SIMMs were introduced, they could in theory also come in a parity version but in reality that was fairly rare (full ECC was much better, and only a little more expensive). I don't think I ever saw an EDO 72 pin SIMM with parity, and it simply wasn't an option for DIMMs and later.
This website is a bit too hyperactive for my taste, and I can't imagine how they hope to make enough money from it to satisfy the VCs. But Bubbletea really is a great TUI and it's properly open source - so I'm happy to enjoy it while it lasts.
I'm with you on the Turbo Vision love, though. Honestly, it felt we were getting to such a good place in the early/mid 90s with beautiful, well-thought-out TUIs becoming the norm.
In retrospect, the universality of basic curses/ncurses on Unix/Linux (together with the death of DOS) was a real a step back - trapping us in a local pessimum for far too long. TUIs languished, and most of us moved to a mix of CLIs and GUIs.
(There's an MIT-licensed port of Turbo Vision available now at https://github.com/magiblot/tvision - pity that it's a couple of decades too late!)
So the entire business was happy to go offline for 2/3 weeks whenever their infra person fancied going off on their summer holiday?
By doing this, you're guaranteeing a bus factor of below 1. I can't think of any business that wouldn't see that as being a completely unacceptable risk.
I never understand the drive to stay away from cloud services for small scale operations. It’s not your money that’s being spent on the cloud, but it is your free time being asked to be on call when you encourage your company to self-host!
Bus factor 1 is rarely enough for "entire business". But if the GPUs are for training models, and their users are the data scientists that are also on holiday around the same times - that might indeed be good enough policy.
Ouch, that is indeed a risk one must be wary of. Can be a "works for the company but sucks for employees". Which can also drain the company of skilled people, a poor trade in most cases.
It's reasonably common to sort by a either a short form of the name or the ISO code or similar, with the full name being displayed by the list.
This sometimes causes problems for the UK, which can be sorted as U, G, B, or even E (presumably for "England", making it especially annoying for people in the other countries of the UK).
And that's far outstripped by the current figure for renewables (42% in 2025) - so renewables have enabled locally-sourced production to reach more than double the share that was ever managed in the peat-burning days.
(And the comparison is actually even better than it seems at first glance, given that the 2025 figures are all-island and the peat figures would be 3 or 4 points lower if you included NI. A good chunk of the 23.2% imports can probably also be classed as renewable, given that GB had a 47% renewable mix)
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