The throttling is "per device", not "per type of device". If you connect 1 travel router and use it to share internet with >1 user, those users are sharing the capped capacity the plane gives to "one connected device".
I’ve lived in the UK for 35 years and lived in various properties built in every decade from 70s-10s. Some much older and less loved ones did have single pane windows but have never seen plumbing on the outside. Maybe on much older houses? Certainly not on anything remotely new. A lot of new builds here have solar, heat pumps and insulation has been excellent for at least 20 years.
You do relatively commonly see wastewater piping on the outside of a house in the UK, especially older stock (soil stack from the toilet, waste pipe from sink or bath running into it). This is fine in the UK climate where a normally empty pipe doesn't need insulation. I hear that it won't work in places that get extreme low winter temperatures, but the UK doesn't have winters that cold.
You don't see them on new builds, I think, probably because the pipe going from inside to outside would reduce insulation effectiveness.
Yeah it makes sense for buildings where plumbing was retrofitted.
Otherwise people try to retrofit narrow drain pipes in the walls which are prone to clogging or give you poor flushing performance. Or outside big enough pipes outside interior walls where you get to hear every flush/shower unless you build a box around that. Easier to just run it outside if you can configure your bathrooms that way.
A boiler should actually be lasting more like 20 years. I recently replaced my 20 year old one purely because if anything went wrong, it’d become an expensive/long job to fix as parts were hard to find, otherwise it was still running perfectly at its manufacture specified efficiency. Running them for 20 years isn’t uncommon.
I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to replace pipework to support heat pump rads.
Pretty sure the government ‘incentive’ was £3k at the time. Doesn’t come remotely close!
I managed £15k minus £7k of Scottish government incentives, and I managed to avoid replacing all my radiators by .. getting a "hybrid" system which also includes a boiler for HW :/
Far from ideal solution, but it is mostly green, somewhat offset by the solar panels, and actually more comfortable than the old system because of the more even heating. Set to 20C and forget about it for the season. I'm hoping that it will last until the actual gas phaseout when a solution compatible with 8mm piping will exist.
This is why they need to be mandated on new houses, because it's so much better than trying to retrofit it.
Modern condensing combis I think are designed to be more complex and not last as long. I'm not sure all the complexity and fancy modulation etc is really worth it myself. I'd rather have a boiler that lasts 20 years and that any half-competent gas engineer can fix with a spanner and some spare parts.
Ye olde non-condensing boiler is usually about 70% efficient (that is, 70% of the heat from burning the gas goes into your house vs out the exhaust), sometimes worse (60% wouldn't be that out there for old ones). A condensing boiler, _if set up correctly_, will do 90% (95% for the newest models, allegedly). Now, the catch is that it'll only hit 90% if the return water is within a fairly narrow temperature range, so some system balancing is required, and in practice a lot of them end up more like 80%. But given how expensive gas is these days (at least in Europe) that 10-20% saving will handily pay for the cost of the boiler.
If I’ve had a break, gone for a walk, left it overnight, worked on something else simple for a bit and tried the other usual ‘fixes’ and am still stuck then I find ‘just do it’ really helps me. I find if I just write some code even slightly related to the goal, even if it’s complete garbage that gets deleted later, then I get unstuck. Although unfortunately even getting to that point takes a couple of days sometimes. We can’t always perform immediately on demand.
I definitely resonate with this. Getting to the point where you can just write and try things can be a little tough sometimes, but some of my best work has been done the second time around (i.e. the first pass was just doing whatever hacky, exploratory code I needed to do in order to get the feel and shape of the thing, and then the second pass was doing it for real once I had figured it out)
Yeah literally every new tech like this has literally everyone investing in it and trying lots of silly ideas. The web, mobile apps, cryptocurrencies, doesn't mean they are fundamentally useless (though cryptocurrencies have yet to make anything successful beyond Bitcoin).
I bet if you go back to the printing press, telegraph, telephone, etc. you will find people saying "it's only a bubble!".
Huh? I’ve been programming for 20 years now and LLMs/GenAI have replaced search and StackOverflow for me - I’d say that means they are pretty good! They are not perfect, not even close, but they are excellent when used as an assistant and when you know the result you’re expecting and can spot its obvious errors.
