"The future" being 59,000 years ago! Neanderthals drilled cavities to treat a toothache

Curiously enough, spoken Farsi sounds like Russian to me (I cannot understand it, but it must have the same sounds, phonemes, or pauses, not sure), and I am fluent in Russian.

German and Russian?! Maybe to a person not at all familiar with either Germanic or Slavic languages, but they are not as closely related at the other 2 pairs.

I saw a little change from the beginning of the game/competition (or whatever they called it in the book) forward.

Oh, I clearly remember he gets worse. Starts out with noble intents to be the least like the upper class (gold?) and not harm anyone, by the end of the book, MC is happily slaying security guards and "lesser" personnel.

Cautiously optimistic about this one. $500 for a niche Linux phone that works as a phone is fair.

And color LED notifications! Why did we ever get rid of those?

Yes. Visit reddit's /r/dumbphones for repeated absurd requests on a phone that can support all of the apps necessary, but automagically prevents one from installing social media apps or browsing the web.

That's a long 24 hours... You know, the 24 hours he promised to end war in Ukraine in once elected.

But then

According to Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov

Sounds like a domestic CYA, "Trump told us"

A long time ago, I used Midori (the pre-2019 version), I remember it was the only browser that ran streaming video without issues. The browser itself is a bit flaky though.

/uj

The "money spent on survival" is the standard deduction and deductions in general. Deductions are viewed as if you never made that money in the first place. Whether standard deduction should be larger is another question.

...made by developers with a special student/hobby account, only for a limited number of devices.

Half-assed "solution".

forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider

Whose CEO publicly stated that "Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses". Oh, the irony.

No vibe coding needed. Many years ago, my friend, a new yet overly-confident web developer, pulled the entire list of usernames and passwords from the back-end when the login page opened. It was to "check if password is correct faster".

(And yes, he stored passwords in plaintext)

Using tap water for cooling is such an idiotic engineering decision it feels like it was suggested by an LLM chatbot.

Power plants use water too, but they draw it from the nearby river or lake, recycle it through cooling towers, and/or dump it back out into the river or lake. Or course that has its own effects, but at least it's not depriving a nearby town of drinking water by existing.

Some years ago, mentioning Linux for daily non-gaming use:

Guy: "Installing Linux is complicated though"

Me: "It wasn't bad 10 years ago, and now it's as hard as clicking Next a few times, even faster than Windows"

Guy: "Well duh, you have ten years of experience installing it!"

Difficult to argue with this non-logic.

Edit: Author says GenAI was not used for code, see below.

Original comment, observing signs of GenAI project:

What's up with these brand-new "Discord alternatives" being cranked out en masse? Would be easier to contribute to XMPP or Matrix IMO.

Initial commit 14,203 files changed +2872320

AI? Or "i worked on this for 10 years and uploaded just now"? /s

Overabundance of emojis in description. Probably AI.

Would be cool to see if anyone manages to get it running.

Were you able to run it yourself? What.

Has been since 2018, and acquisition news caused quite an upset at the time.

Large companies can do / have done that (dumping) to drive out smaller competition.

Small companies usually cannot afford this.

Unless you can pitch this as a disruptive idea to gullible investors (looking at all tech startups that burn trillions without making profits)

Three Body Problem is what I call "big ideas" sci-fi. Large-scale problems, global crisis, often detailed world-building, sometimes decent plot, but boring characters, who often act simply as reader's eyes / observers.

Many of Alastair Reynolds' novels are like that, so was Red Mars, and even Blindsight and Rosewater.

Not everyone's cup of tea, and I completely understand why.

AI is a tech debt generator.

Any programmer who worked with legacy code knows a situation where something was written by a former employee or a contractor without much comments or documentation, making it difficult to modify (because of complexity or readability) or replace (because of non-existing business documentation and/or peculiar bugs and features)

AI accelerates these situations, but the person does not even exist. Which, IMO is the main thing that needs to be called out.

Smartphones and tablets manufactured circa 2015 were powerful enough to run many apps and software, and not yet locked down as much as they are now. So there were a lot of custom ROMs and kernels being made for Android and jailbreaking tools for iDevices, allowing you to customize much much more than the manufacturer intended.

And it's just fun to make something that most people consider "obsolete" perform well, or well enough to be usable.

Not sure what role gender plays into that though.