For some context, it's a country with 40 million people.

But it’s hardly industrialized right?

So is that a fair comparison?

It actually sits right about in the middle of all countries for percentage of GDP from industrial sectors.

It's pretty heavily fossil-fuel powered right now, but like most of the rest of the world Morocco is planning to capture most of its growth in energy demand with renewables. Because, getting back to the original discussion, it'd be idiotic to choose fossil fuels over renewables in 2026.

100% agree with you. Especially with the amount of sun they get, would be a great candidate for Solar.

Renewables also seem to be the best pathway for many nations to attain some level of energy independence (which is NOT the same as oil independence though).

Are you, like, just not very into reading things or remembering things or is it just one of those things where you're stuck in the 1980s and haven't updated your books since then.

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

Yeah, clearly I haven't done any meaningful reading regarding Morocco. I will read up more to fix the gaps in my knowledge. :-)

The USSR made several key decisions which made Chernobyl a far more dangerous and deadly situation and it's important that the decision making process is studied and understood to stop it from being repeated. As far as I'm aware Fukushima was a series of unlikely events when brought together ended in a disaster. The decision making process was fairly open to the public and open to international scrutiny and criticism.

Seems like a poor use of space when you can just work at making things easier for people to travel without a car.

It's essentially for programming microcontrollers, ESP32's and the like. It's really handy. You have to confirm the connection every time.

I have an idea - what if a webpage could just run arbitrary code? With a confirmation every time. Then you wouldn't need a WebX for every X.

Dell, HP and Lenovo have had laptops with cellular modems for maybe 15 years at this point.

I can confirm this. I work at an e-waste recycling company, and the vast majority of my inventory is corporate IT decommissioned gear. About 1 out of 10 laptops I tear down has a cellular modem, going back to about Intel Core 5th gen.

I've had laptops with cellular modems built in going back to Pentium IIIs. The Compaq N600c had a "multiport" bay on the lid, one of the options was a GSM modem.

*A few select models got celluar modems.

I have owned several Dell, HP and Lenovo Laptops in the past 15 years and I have never had a cellular modem.

When Apple makes a change like that it impacts a lot of customers because they have way fewer skews.

I've never had a modern laptop with a cellular modem, but every one I've owned has supported them internally. Even when they aren't provisioned with them, they're usually still supported as aftermarket options.

Yeah, but any given technology hasn't been invented yet, until Apple releases it.

Weirdly, I remember in school when I was about 8, everyone in my class was given this making of documentary on VHS. Not sure why, I assume someone got a big box for free.

On the topic of backing up data from cloud platforms such as Onedrive, I suspect this is stop the client machine from actively downloading 'files on demand' which are just pointers in explorer until you go to open them.

If you've got huge amounts of files in Onedrive and the backup client starts downloading everyone of them (before it can reupload them again) you're going to run into problems.

But ideally, they'd give you a choice.

This is a pain, to be sure, but surely there is some sort of logic you could implement to detect whether a file is a Real File that actually exists on the device (if so, back it up) or a pointer to the cloud (ignore it by default, probably, but maybe provide a user setting to force it to back up even these)

It used to be the case that placeholder files were very obvious but now OneDrive and iCloud (possibly others) work more like an attached network storage with some local cache, and that was a good move for most programs because back then a file being evicted from storage looked like a file deletion.

Came here to say this. Files in OneDrive get removed from your local storage and are downloaded ON DEMAND. given that you can have 1TB+ onedrive folder, backblaze downloading all of that is gonna throttle your connection and fill up your disk real fast.

No reason for that to be true.

I'm often a pedestrian and I've been known to walk into the road where there are bikes and cars also.

Ironic, the day after the launch of Artemis II that people are using microcontrollers far more powerful than the original Apollo 11 navigation computer to control a single fan in their PCs now.

One could go farther and complain that it's a waste of a microcontroller at all to control a fan when an analog circuit for fan speed vs temperature would work fine.

True, a very simple analog circuit would be enough.

However the bane of analog circuits was that they age, so a control circuit that works perfectly today will drift and no longer work as intended after some years.

The second problem is that analog circuits need adjustments to set them at the exact desired parameters.

Adjustments can be done either by using an adjustable element in the circuit, e.g. an adjustable resistor or capacitor or inductor, or by measuring many resistors and/or capacitors and/or inductors and selecting the ones with the right values to be used by your device.

Redoing periodically the adjustments also solves the aging problem. However, both the initial adjustment and any periodic readjustments need a lot of work, so they are no longer acceptable in the industry.

When doing something for yourself, you may make an analog controller and the initial adjustment would not be a problem, but even in this case it would be annoying to keep track and remember something like having to readjust a fan controller every 6 months, to be sure that it still works as intended.

You're over thinking it. If the application is very simple and needs to do one thing, an analog system works fine. Once you start needing sequencing, multiple adjustments, and maybe a little smarts then a CPU can get involved.

I worked at a shop that had an old closed loop water-air chiller for a laser. The water temperature controller was a small PCB with an op-amp chip with some passives and the temperature was set by a potentiometer. That thing ran fine until the compressor died and it sent to scrap.

My analog fan control comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but turning a knob on a potentiometer to adjust fan speed has some personal appeal - no digging around for a sw utility, no poking interfaces to see if the motherboard mfr bios exposed the control, of if it exposed it but doesn't actually hook the right plug, no adjusting to see if the right temp input is reading correctly. Fewer layers of things to go wrong can be so nice.

Analog control circuitry is also really hard to patch in production, or to adjust to different behavior during design.

Oh, you need a quadratic fan curve instead of a linear one? Have fun starting from scratch!

You can definitely make a PID controller just with opamps and potentiometers.

I bet you can. But you can't turn a simple single linear amplifier into a PID controller with zero physical changes, can you?

My point was that, if you want additional behavior, you need to bake that in from the start. With an MCU you can trivially switch it in-the-field to literally anything you can imagine.

Nah, it's a much lower part count and much simpler to put a microcontroller in. If you're concerned about cost cheaper parts are available.

Yup. You could use a quad opamp to build a PWM controller with closed loop control but then you need all the passives to setup the oscillator and so on.

I went through this years ago making a fan driver for my vehicles HVAC blower. The analog setup was fun to make but you use more board space, higher BOM count, and really, higher BOM cost vs a micro-controller.

It's crazy how far technology has advanced. A μc with RAM and a bunch of input and output ports and some code is cheaper today than a pile of analog components.

I am not controlling a single fan though. It's wired to a fan hub, so the PWM signal is sent to all the fans in the system. I also wrote a companion windows application that reads CPU temps using PawnIO or HWiNFO which follow a curve that the user sets, and it sends the proper duty cycle to the arduino.

It's not just a dumb fan controller that I could've bought off aliexpress.

But that approach has demonstrably not worked in this instance because Iran has been planning for this exact scenario.