The circuit power doesn’t matter for the example. I was just picking easy numbers. You can have the same problem as long as the rating of the extension cord is less than the circuit breaker. (And as you pointed that out this is a very common case due to the frequently low rating of extension cords.)

Yeah, there are two components here

1. Adding extra length.
2. Adding more outlets.

2 is the main problem, but you need a little of 1 to have it fail in an unsafe way (ie. not just tripping the circuit breaker).

If you just add a lot of extra outlets and plug lots of stuff in then you will simply trip the circuit breaker. (Assuming that everything is properly set up according to code.) In order to create a problem you need some extra wiring that is rated for less load than the wall wiring. (Now in practice every splitter has some amount of wiring, so these can be the same device, but most power bars are rated to be “fully used” or have a fuse internally). So the problem looks something like this:

1. Have a 20A wall circuit.
2. Plug a 10A extension cord into it.
3. Plug a power bar or other splitter into the extension cord.
4. Put enough devices into the splitter to generate 15A of current.

Now you are overloading the extension cord and risking fire.

Yes, you will have double heat output due to twice the resistance which causes twice the voltage drop and more or less the same current. But this heat output is spread across twice as much wire, so unless the extension cables are coiled together on the ground each will heat up the same amount as a single one would.

To clarify a bit, the benefit of the UK system isn’t the end device having a fuse, but the cable itself having a fuse.

In the US the setup would be something like

1. Wall has 20A wiring.
2. Electrical panel has 20A fuse to avoid the wire in the wall from overheating.
3. Extension cord is designed for 10A
4. You plug in 2 10A devices to the extension cord.
5. The wall wiring is fine, it can take 20A.
6. The circuit breaker doesn’t trip as it is also 20A.
7. The extension cord overheats and starts a fire.

In the UK the 10A extension cord will have its own 10A fuse in the plug. So when you turn on the two 10A devices the fuse in the extension cord will blow and prevent the extension cord from overheating.

But unless coiled up on the ground the longer cable also has more area to dissipate heat, so the longer cable doesn’t change anything here. The heat output will be consistent for any section of the cable no matter how much more cable there is on easier side of it.

The only think that the different resistance would affect is the voltage drop to the end device. But voltage drop varies wildly so you are unlikely to have a meaningful difference caused by a few extension cords (unless maybe you are already a bad case like an apartment building to start).

The others have made great points about how any amount adds up. Especially with compounding.

But the most important reason me just be making it a habit. If you are saving $50/month you have a place to put your savings and an investment strategy for that money. The next time you get a pay raise or get rid of some recurring spend it will be natural to start saving $60/month, then $100 and more and more. It is much easier to improve an existing habit than starting a new one. So as soon as you have the chance start that got habit.

As with most of these things it is pricing based on value.

• Contractor is often fixing or building and cares a lot about the price.
• Most other purchases are during renovations so a luxury expense and relatively speaking the faucet will be a small part of that, so it is easy to milk these people for money.

require a separate device that looks like a calculator to use online banking

To be fair this actually provides a very high level of security? At least in my experience with AIB (in Ireland) you needed to enter the amount of the transactions and some other core details (maybe part of the recipient’s account number? can’t quite recall). Then you entered your PIN. This signed the transaction which provides very strong verification that you (via the PIN) authorize the specific transaction via a trusted device that is very unlikely to be compromised (unless you give someone physical access to it).

It is obviously quite inconvenient. But provides a huge level of security. Unlike this Safety Net crap which is currently quite easy to bypass.

which is supposed to enforce to run apps in secured phones

The point of the Google Play Integrity API is to ensure that the user is not in control of their phone, but that one of a small number of megacorps are in control.

Can the user pull their data out of apps? Not acceptable. Can the user access the app file itself? Not acceptable. Can the user modify apps? Not acceptable.

Basically it ensures that the user has no control over their own computing.

I wouldn’t call a nail hard to use because I don’t have a hammer. Yes, you need the right hardware, but there is no difference in the difficulty. But I understand what you are trying to say, just wanted to clarify that it wasn’t hard, just not widespread yet.

which is hard to decode using hardware acceleration

This is a little misleading. There is nothing fundamental about AV1 that makes it hard to decode, support is just not widespread yet (mostly because it is a relatively new codec).

Just to be clear it is probably a good thing that YouTube re-encodes all videos. Videos are a highly complex format and decoders are prone to security vulnerabilities. By transcoding everything (in a controlled sandbox) YouTube takes most of this risk on and makes it highly unlikely that the resulting video that they serve to the general public is able to exploit any bugs in decoders.

Plus YouTube serves videos in a variety of formats and resolutions (and now different bitrates within a resolution). So even if they did try to preserve the original encoding where possible you wouldn’t get it most of the time because there is a better match for your device.

From my experience it doesn’t matter if there is an “Enhanced Bitrate” option or not. My assumption is that around the time that they added this option they dropped the regular 1080p bitrate for all videos. However they likely didn’t eagerly re-encode old videos. So old videos still look OK for “1080p” but newer videos look trash whether or not the “1080p Enhanced Bitrate” option is available.

It may be worth right-clicking the video and choosing “Stats for Nerds” this will show you the video codec being used. For me 1080p is typically VP9 while 4k is usually AV1. Since AV1 is a newer codec it is quite likely that you don’t have hardware decoding support.

I’m pretty sure that YouTube has been compressing videos harder in general. This loosely correlates with their release of the “1080p Enhanced Bitrate” option. But even 4k videos seem to have gotten worse to my eyes.

Watching a higher resolution is definitely a valid strategy. Optimal video compression is very complicated and while compressing at the native resolution is more efficient you can only go so far with less bits. Since the higher resolution versions have higher bitrates they just fundamentally have more data available and will give an overall better picture. If you are worried about possible fuzziness you can try using 4k rather than 1440p as it is a clean doubling of 1080p so you won’t lose any crisp edges.

Most particularly they generally pretend that nothing on the web is encrypted whereas in practice HTTPS is nearly universal at this point.

The use case will change everything. OP is likely using much more memory than you are (especially disk cache usage) so the kernel decided to swap out some data. Maybe you aren’t using as much so it has no need.

To put it another way you want to be using all of your RAM and swap. It becomes a problem if you are frequently reading from Swap. (Writing isn’t usually as much of an issue as they may be proactive writes in case more memory needs to be filled up).

Basically a perfect OS would use RAM + Swap such that the least disk reads need to be issued. This can mean swapping out some idle anonymous memory so that the space can be used as disk cache for some hotter data.

In this screenshot the OS decided that it was better to swap out 3GiB of something to use that space for the disk cache (“Cached” ). It is likely right about this decision (but is not always).

3 GiB does seem a bit high. But if you have lots of processes running that are using memory but are mostly idle it could definitely happen. For example in my case I often have lots of Language Servers running in my IDE, but many of them are for projects that I am not actively looking at so they are just waiting for something to happen. These often take lots of memory and it may make sense to swap these out until they are used again.

1. Launching Steam games outside of Steam can be very difficult. Some games outright won’t allow it.
2. Steam provides native libraries such as the overlay, networking and matchmaking tools, achievements… You need to have Windows versions of these which wouldn’t be distributed by default in the Linux version of Steam.
3. In the past Steam just didn’t run under Linux, so you had no other option.

There is an option in settings to allow trying all games. By default it only allows it for tested and verified games. But it is a simple checkbox then you can download and run any Windows game.