the exterior of the ISS is constantly exposed to small mounts of atomic oxygen, which is an incredibly strong oxidizer. probably in addition to ozone there is a huge variety of organic and inorganic oxides that get tracked in through the airlock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_International_Space_...

Fun trivia (well, perhaps not fun) in the second paragraph: "the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), which was retrieved in 1990 after spending 68 months in LEO"

Long exposure, 68 months, right. But it was only supposed to be in orbit for 11! Challenger being destroyed on reentry made a mess of things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Duration_Exposure_Facilit...

>It was placed in low Earth orbit by Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984. [...] At LDEF's launch, retrieval was scheduled for March 19, 1985, eleven months after deployment.[4] Schedules slipped, postponing the retrieval mission first to 1986, then indefinitely due to the Challenger disaster. After 5.7 years its orbit had decayed to about 175 nautical miles (324 km) and it was likely to burn up on reentry in a little over a month.[6][9]: 15

Challenger was destroyed on launch, not reentry.

Yeah it was Columbia that was destroyed on reentry (17 years later).

Which incidentally is the shuttle that brought back LDEF.

interestingly my ISP, at&t, quietly turned off ipv6. not sure exactly when it happened, i should get around to complaining about it but i hate making phone calls

my parents also lost data that was supposed to be backed up on backblaze because they didn't use that computer for a month and when they turned it back on the hard drive was dead. apparently backblaze silently deletes backups more than 30 days old even if they are the newest backup and then happily keeps billing you for not storing your data.

you can very easily prevent scalping by checking IDs at the door. they don't want to prevent scalping because it makes them more money

i was too clever by half and tried to make a NAND gate by combining an AND gate with an inverter. after about 15 minutes i realized that i had it backwards, an AND gate is actually a NAND gate combined with an inverter

note that the quoted 170Wh/kg is about the same as currently available LiFePO4 cells and half that of the best available NMC cells

what about mac os?

macOS doesn't require developers to rebuild apps with each major OS release, as long as they link with system libraries and don't try to (for example) directly make syscalls.

Apple may require rebuilds at some point for their Mac Store (or whatever they call it), but it's not required from a technical perspective.

The one exception here is CPU architecture changes, and even then, Apple has provided seamless emulation/translation layers that they keep around for quite a few years before dropping support.

that's backwards compatibility. forward compatibility is being able to run new apps on an old operating system. the latest version of the SDK builds apps which only run on big sur or newer.

The latest Xcode supports targeting back to macOS 11. This covers >99% of macs which is acceptable for most developers.

https://developer.apple.com/support/xcode/

that leaves out every mac made before 2014

At less than 1% why does it matter?

a few years ago the vending machines in my office building started accepting credit and debit cards for an extra fee of $0.35 per transaction. just recently they stopped accepting bills and coins leaving cards as the only option, but are still charging the extra fee.

one difference is that a phase change stores energy at constant temperature, which may be desirable given that heat pump efficiency is inversely proportional to temperature output temperature

battery life span is defined as when the reach 80% of their original capacity. it's possible that the decline will accelerate after that point but they aren't suddenly useless

Presumably an exponential decay, as for most tool lifetimes.