It takes a very special mental illness to call that "free". Especially coming from a country that literally kills people based on metadata.

Neither is it an "industry". It's a craft, and always has been. In fact, most IT project failures are due to the fact that the work is managed like a conveyor-belt factory instead of the workshop of a craftsman.

I always call the new plug the TSB-C. We had a Universal Serial Bus, but the new plug is at best a Temporary Serial Bus.

You might want to check flying-whales. I can't see a working prototype yet, but they have designed an airship just for that.

Social media are more alive than democracy. In fact, social media play an important role in the decline of democracy.

If the choice is between that and cleaning up AI hallucination garbage, you'd be surprised.

On the contrary. China invested a lot in electric vehicles, while western car makers continued lobbying the politicians that anti-pollution laws would "harm the industry".

But the situation is also different politically. The right-wing western politicians believe that government "is only in the way" of a functioning market, while China believes the government is part of the market. So China not only subsidized electric vehicles and their development (*), they also bought the vehicles that were produced for public transport and local taxi services.

So while western car makers are still whining that they are hurt and keep on pulling the trigger of their foot-gun, China actually supported their industry forward instead of backward.

(*) The subsidies were given with the conditions that the batteries were made in China, so even foreign companies like Tesla profited from it.

I did not know 2nd hand Boeing 747s were that cheap nowadays. Or was that law not meant to "correct" the Qatar "tip"?

I was more thinking about Hex. It is so analog that it is even an analogy to a computer.

You mean the ones that are still there? Everyone I know who was on GitHub is moving to Codeberg or is already there. GitHub is enshittifying so hard that everyone is jumping ship.

While the UK government might have no productivity boost, for Microsoft it has created:

• Vendor lock-in
• An endless stream of inside information about the UK government
• An excuse to wreck the environment

Did the UK really think there was anything in it for them?

Lots of missiles designed to take out RADAR installations have a "loiter mode" to wait for a RADAR pulse and decide for themselves when they have enough data to attack. The only difference here is that now it is a wolf pack of missiles instead of just individual ones. And the unnecessary AI hype off course.

And yet, people from the USA think that their latest invention is sliced bread.

The LLM probaly has no data on that. There is a great article about how LLMs are most trained in "right" actions, but not in correcting wrong ones.. So these LLMs do not develop craftsmanship. Remember, real craftsmanship is not about doing everything right, but about understanding and experience that allow you to fix mistakes.

Bluesky is as centrally managed as Twitter.