It's quite easy to activate XP now all these years later. So if you have some old, isolated machine that requires XP, you can install it still.

Locally, yes, but the moisture that is accumulating previously evaporated and went somewhere else. What will the impact be there? Very hard to say.

If you travel back a couple of centuries, your 6 jigowatts will only be worth about 8 million horses.

Cow tittie milk should be labeled "cow tittie milk" to remind people where the product comes from. It's natural for mammals to drink the tittie milk of their own species when they're young, but drinking tittie milk (a) when you're grown up and (b) from another species seems downright perverse. Likewise, people could use a good reminder how the meat they eat is produced.

hell, even when a human enters the data, from the business, into 'google', that data can be wrong...as I discovered just 3 days ago when a restaurant with "recently updated hours" said they should be open until 10pm...and were closed when I arrived at 8:45.

so yeah, if i'm investing in a trip to another freakin' country, damn right i'm gonna have every scheduled event or location double-checked by contacting a human at in the know some point in the process.

That is essentially what happened. They didn't fire 35%, those 35% just transferred their reports to others and became ICs (Individual Contributors).

The 35% figure at Google is misleading. The vast majority of those people weren't pure managers they were software engineers who managed small teams as part of their duties while also doing productive technical work. A policy requiring a minimum of 5 direct reports for each manager was put in place, forcing all of those people to decide to either increase their management and cease doing significant technical work or cease being managers and focus entirely on technical work. Many chose the latter option, often quite happily (there is no additional pay or other concrete benefit to being a manager vs being an IC (individual contributor)). This partitioning of people who were in mixed roles into roles that were either managerial or technical provided most of the reduction in line and middle management.

Yes, I expect Alphabet would decline. I worked there for 15 years and understand the culture and motivations pretty well. Culturally, doing something like that would cut against the grain, hard. Pragmatically, they wouldn't like to oppose the administration but they'd get a lot more PR mileage out of leaking the request and publicly declaring their opposition than it would cost them.

Sure bit if you do need to run Windows 11 the old i5 might not have the TPM 2, and probably is bigger and consumes more power.

There are those that think we're masochists for running Linux. I disagree with them of course. But whatever.

They are small, cheap, pretty fast, and run Linux well. And Windows 11 decently if you have to. Most of them come with Windows 11 Pro (licensed in the firmware). $200 USD for 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD. Perfect for those that are forced to upgrade their old desktop PCs.

The I stands for Intranet. Don't buy crap that relies on the cloud.

I got a third-party cable for my phone that my phone recognizes as being able to charge it faster than the cable that came with the phone could. They should probably warn you that they don't have a cable or charger, in case you're getting a phone because you lost everything and don't have that stuff, but the first-party stuff isn't better these days.

There are some devices that phone home and/or are cloud enabled, but do not require the cloud to function. Though in a lot of cases that does mean you have to set up an alternative app to control it, for instance something like Home Assistant or Apple HomeKit; it's pretty rare for the vendor's app to work locally without access to the cloud (Philips Hue used to, for instance, though I'm not sure if it still does).

AFAIK the Ecobee WiFi thermostat works with HomeKit or whatever Google's equivalent is. Should be able to isolate it on a VLAN, and as long as your phone can see it, you can control it locally.

The trouble now is that, more than ever, Autism is a wide umbrella heading. If two people, Alice and Bob, have Autism, then they don't necessarily have the same thing, and the degree of similarity between Alice's Autism and Bob's Autism may be great or little.

There are many common features of Autisms* such as non-verbal, stimming, and so on. Then there are less obvious features, such as those described in books like Pretending To Be Normal.

*(and I think it best to pluralise: Alice has an Autism, and Bob has an Autism, but Alice's Autism may not be the same as Bob's Autism).

Part of the problem is the way the medical people like to apply diagnostic labels, as they do with physical medicine, and then try to reason based on those diagnostic labels. For example one may want to try a randomised controlled trial of treatments for Autism (without even considering the possibility that such a trial may not be comparing like with like).

Mind and brain are complex, and complexity is a bitch.