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Lighting was the killer app for electricity.

Outdoor lighting in particular, at first at least. A fun historical anecdote on this one most don't know is the saying that somebody "can’t hold a candle to [x]". It's a reference to the old profession of link-boys who were mostly poor kids who'd carry a torch at night for people to see their way about, in exchange for a penny or two.


AI in search I could go for:

"Find that meme I downloaded last year with the girl standing by the burning house"

Creating AI slop though? No thanks.


To drive "engagement". Hardly a surprise. Still a disappointment.


For context, Optus is one of the Australian telcos, and triple-zero is what you call instead of 911.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-19/optus-network-failure...


Totally agree.



Very sorry for the loss of your friend.


I worked as a cashier at a large UK supermarket when I was a student. In our training we were told that if there was an outage with the cash registers we should ask shoppers to estimate how much their groceries cost and accept what they told us. Payment could be by cash or cheque.

Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.


The main reason I use a phone case is to stop the phone slipping from my hand in the first place. My current and previous phones (Pixel 8 & 5) are alarmingly smooth on all sides.


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