🌬️ The Hidden Cost of Wind Curtailment in the UK
An illuminating data-driven exploration of renewable inefficiency that underscores the need for smarter grid management and energy storage strategies.
The ‘Wasted Wind’ analysis reveals how turning off wind turbines has cost the UK over £1.1 billion in 2025. Drawing on Elexon Insights data, it details the cost of lost energy generation, compensation to operators, and replacement power from other sources, contextualized by real-world energy consumption equivalents.
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🤖 The Rise of Fake Engagement: When Bots Imitate Humans
A sharp exposé on how advanced automation is corrupting digital marketing metrics and costing businesses millions in wasted ad spend.
Research across hundreds of e-commerce sites shows that up to 73% of visits are fake, driven by sophisticated bots designed to replicate human browsing behavior. These bots inflate analytics, distort conversion data, and drain advertising budgets — while ad platforms profit from the deception.
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🎥 How Old Video Players Used ‘Green Screens’ to Play Smoothly
A nostalgic yet insightful dive into the engineering hacks that shaped early multimedia performance — elegant simplicity before modern compositing took over.
Microsoft’s blog revisits a clever optimization from early video playback systems: using green-screen overlays to render videos efficiently. Instead of drawing frames pixel by pixel, players marked green regions that the GPU replaced with live video, minimizing CPU load and improving responsiveness.
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🧩 The Trouble with C Varargs — and How to Fix Them
A thoughtful critique that blends historical insight with practical solutions, offering modern developers guidance for writing safer, more maintainable C code.
A deep dive into the flaws of C’s variable argument functions, examining their unsafe and inflexible design rooted in the language’s early history. The essay proposes safer approaches using macros, arrays, and explicit APIs, along with potential language-level reforms such as adding argument counting and type-safe interfaces.
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