I'm guessing that China is trying to make the US overspend on defence R&D so as to cripple its budget elsewhere. Claim to have mach 12 missiles, even when you don't, and the US then has to spend many millions researching defences against mach 12 missiles. Rinse lather and repeat for many other areas, and the US spending massively dwarfs the cost of fabricated claims of progress.

The trouble with Windows' insistence on backing up is this: it has no way to tell which files in Documents, Music, Videos, etc, need to be backed up, and which don't. For example FL Studio puts a ton of files in Documents\Image-Line. Around three gigs. Most of those are provided in the installer, so it's crazy to use cloud space for those. Of all that, only Documents\Image-Line\FL Studio\Projects needs backing up, and possibly a few user-created presets lurking somewhere. And it is a similar story for much of my music software. Then there are many gigs of music files that I have backed up on NAS anyway, so no need to back them up to the cloud (and if I did, I'd blow my 100G cap).

But Microsoft in their infinite wisdom think it's sensible to just try and back up all that to the cloud, possibly using a free account with only 5G total, for 100's of gigs of data.

The Starship fun reminds me of that scene in Robocop 2 where they unveiled two failed attempts at a Robocop 2.

Learn to not make mistakes the same way musicians do. Practise as slowly as you have to to not make mistakes. Then slowly speed up, while remaining intolerant of mistakes. Also as an exercise, one I heard about from my Mum when she was taught professionally, was playing music with a clear pulse, and typing in time with the music: either one correct key per beat, or zero. But not more, and no mistakes. But treat typing as a discipline akin to playing the piano or some other musical instrument.

For those learning touch typing, especially self taught, take the attitude that there is far more than just typing without looking, and using particular fingers to press particular keys.

The overall aim is to type: quickly, accurately, with minimal effort, and with good ergonomics.
As for what you type, for many tasks, it is useful to have your eyesight free to look at other things.
(It is similar with, say, the piano where if you want to read chords, lyrics, or sheet music while playing,
then you need to be able to play without looking at your hands.)
Having your eyesight free for other things is one of the reasons to touch type, consider reading
something out of a textbook, and how much harder it is to type what you see if you have to keep
looking back and forth between your hands, the source text and/or the screen.

Then, thinking old school, professional typists had to be able to type accurately. One single character
wrong, and they can probably get away with tipex and retyping it, but that takes a comparative age
compared to not making the mistake in the first place and going a little slower. (I write this as someone
who was self-taught, and wish I'd drilled accuracy into my technique way earlier.) Especially if
coding, not making typos is important. So learning not to make them is important. And as a suggestion,
consider how a pianist learns to press the right keys in the right order without making a mistake.
Treat accuracy in typing as just as important as accuracy when playing a musical instrument.
The trick is to go as slowly as you have to, to ensure correctness, and then only speed up when
you can do things correctly. If you go faster than that, you rush, you make errors, and then you learn
to make more errors, and to be tolerant of errors. Tolerance of errors is how errors creep in.

But going back to what I said: efficiency, accuracy, speed, effortlessness, and ergonomics.
Those are your real priorities, and they are often well-served by learning touch typing properly.

Oddly enough I still use notepad.exe a lot even though I've got notepad++ installed.

Hopefully what an update can do is restricted. It's never happened with apt, touch wood, but imagine if someone put rm -rf /* in an installer script in some third party repo.

The trouble is that AI plagiarising is kind of like money laundering. You can't take the output of an AI and work out what went in, in general, an more than you can take the output of a hash function and determine the input that produced it. Reaching the bar necessary to win a lawsuit is probably impractical, and the AI companies and their expensive teams of lawyers know this.

Killing the AI industry in its current form _worldwide_ would be a good thing. A big reset and rethink, kind of like reining in the nuclear arms race. Killing the AI industry in the UK only, while it remaining a free-for-all elsewhere is economic harakiri. If the UK bans it, but some other country doesn't, then companies will simply go set up shop in that other country, do all the creative output mining where it's legal, and then sell whatever they can to whomever they can. They make money, the UK doesn't. Basically creatives are being thrown under a bus, there's little a minnow like the UK can do about it acting on its own.

I use one for both, but crucially I only cut one type of meat, and I cut all the vegetables beforehand. Veg to meat is not a problem; meat to veg is, and raw meat to other raw meat is.

Once civilisation started, we started helping each other survive on an industrial scale. People who would normally fail to reproduce now manage to. So survival of the fittest lost its cutting edge. So we've hardly evolved since pre-civilisation. Hence our biological instincts are oriented towards living in small isolated tribes. And as a culture we're collapsing back to that pre-civilisation psychology. In previous generations, hardship motivated us to work together, and religion played a role to. We've got rid of both of those and not replaced them with a functional equivalent.

If the Orange Dictator says "don't manufacture in India", you'd better "don't manufacture in India", else said Orange Dictator will get angry and use whatever means he has at his disposal, legal or otherwise, to make life difficult for you. How there isn't uproar, I don't know.

But then the 'old company' with those liabilities just gets wound up.

So say these satellites last 20 years. So in 20 years they'll have to stick another 2000 of them up there. And again 20 years after that. And then each competitor will have to do the same. In 40 years you'll have 10,000s of them. What could possibly go wrong?

Since you can get a taxi, you don't need to walk. So why bother walking?
Since you can buy ready meals in the supermarket, you don't need a cooker, only a microwave, and don't need to learn to cook. So why bother learning cooking?
And why bother lifting weights in the gym if you can make a machine to do the work for you?

The biggest benefit of learning to code is how it trains your brain.