This is written from a French perspective as if southern countries joined later because they were not as developed. Quite the opposite. Spain, Italy and Portugal were in the first years of EPI, but they went there own ways because of the lack of progress that was being made by other members like France and Germany. Bizum in Spain is quite popular (I would say that more than Wero in France) and now is starting to manage payments in physical stores, after being a popular solution to transfer money between friends and in online payments (and in the physical black market).
As someone who lives in Spain, a country that also has a tradition of siestas (that's where that name comes from after all), I have a lot of doubts and I think people romanticize the idea too much. First of all I have no doubts about the health benefit of siestas, but in the current society they have some issues.
When I was younger I hated siestas because I had energy and everything was closed, you couldn't do anything in those hours. It felt like a waste. In fact I think that sports clubs, book clubs and similar things are not as important here as in other countries of Europe (at least from my perspective, no data) because people don't have time. After siesta, stores open and you have to do your chores, giving you no time to have a leisure activity (other than going to the bar and drink, that is).
And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it? A way is to start working early and having lunch very late, working like 7-15. Some government offices and factories work this way. Some people like this schedule but waking up so early, specially during winter I think defeats the point of siesta, as you're probably damaging your body in the morning. Other like me have a split schedule with lunch in the middle, more similar to Europe but the problem is that you leave later. Because at some jobs the mandatory stop is 2 hours.
Now, schools have also different schedules to fit better into their parents schedules and there's been an infinite discussion about which one is better for children. The reality is that is a mess. If we could work less than 8 hours, it would be much better but 8 hours plus siesta is difficult to put up with.
The last time I attended a mass (Spain) it was about some people in the village that were not helping the church enough (with an activity they had to do but also I think there was some money involved) but it was a bit cryptic, so only the ones that were directed the message to could fully understand it.
In Spain many parts of the Internet are shut down when there's a LaLiga match to "prevent piracy". They usually block Cloudflare as a whole but also Vercel, GitHub,... had issues. For example last Sunday I couldn't access some of the stories submitted here. I could also not access the documentation of hledger, a FOSS contability tool.
It is still GPL, it is still free software, the source code is there. Only the Windows and macOS binaries are behind a paywall, but you can build yourself the binaries, or use it on Linux. RedHat does this and is "an example of free software monetization", Strawberry does it "and it should no longer be called free software".
Yes, I often say that the gold from America was a poisonous gift. It made the country so rich that they stopped caring about other stuff, they could just buy them from elsewhere. So there was little incentive to manufacture first, and industrialize later. Which is ironic because some of first steam engines you can find in Europe were invented in Spain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jer%C3%B3nimo_de_Ayanz_y_Beaum...). It also enabled the funding of numerous stupid wars, with the human cost they bring. The name of this process is called the Dutch Disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
Loongson started with MIPS CPUs but current CPUs are not MIPS-compatible. LoongArch, while being very similar to MIPS, uses a different encoding. And some other details have changed. Better to say, MIPS-inspired.
Impressive post, so many details. I could only understand some parts of it, but I think this article will probably be a reference for future graphics API.
I think it's fair to say that for most gamers, Vulkan/DX12 hasn't really been a net positive, the PSO problem affected many popular games and while Vulkan has been trying to improve, WebGPU is tricky as it has is roots on the first versions of Vulkan.
Perhaps it was a bad idea to go all in to a low level API that exposes many details when the hardware underneath is evolving so fast. Maybe CUDA, as the post says in some places, with its more generic computing support is the right way after all.
At least where I work, writing new Java code is discouraged and you should instead use Kotlin for backend services. Spring Boot which is the framework we use, supports Kotlin just fine, at the same level as Java. And if you use Jetbrains tools, Kotlin tooling is also pretty good (outside Jetbrains I will admit it is worse than Java). Now, even in new Java projects you can still be using Kotlin because it is the default language for Gradle (previously it was Groovy).
So sorry for your loss. Some months ago I was very angry to found out that a person was dead for a bike injury that can be easily solved but he had to wait for almost 50 minutes for the ambulance. Not because he was far away, but because he was in between two regions and the 112 was discussing who should send the ambulance. In fact, they initially send one and later told the driver to go back while in the highway. He's dead just because he happened to have the accident near the border of two regions of the same country, each one with its own public health system.
After a quick research, there's no evidence of a bridge there and it seems difficult to do even for Romans. But there could have been some people with boats in Cale to help cross the river and still be considered part of the road.
As always with this kind of stuff, there are so many inaccuracies, at least in the parts I know of. Roads are mostly ok, although some of them are more like "suppositions" that real roads we have found. Let's take a look at the area around Valladolid: https://imgur.com/xMW6yiY
- Pintia is almost confirmed to be near the Duero/Douro river, much more to the south and to the east. It is one of the most explored pre-Roman settlements in the area and while there has not been a definitive proof, there are many hints that show that it's on the place I showed and not where it's shown on the map
- Amallobriga is also, for most historians, located in Tiedra, but it shows Tordesillas. As you can see on the map, the actual location of Tiedra is also a road intersection. The location in Tiedra is consistent with archeological evidence and with route books that show the distance from Amallobriga to other cities we know.
- Nobody really knows where Intercatia or Tela are. But note that a there's a big road intersection at the south. It is confirmed that there was a settlement but we do not know the name of it, several have been proposed. In any case, Intercatia is very difficult to be located as it is shown in the map with no roads going to it. Many archaeologists say it could be in the actual town of Paredes de Nava.
- I don't think there's any real evidence of a bridge that crosses the Douro/Duero river there. What we know is that there's a medieval bridge closer to Septimanca and that it could have had a Roman origin, but according to the map there's no road there.
They leave you with lots of options though, which could be a problem if you're starting into accounting