... when the AI bubble bursts and 90% of the AI data centers go dark. The AI that remains will be the AI that is doing something useful enough to be worth the electricity it sucks down.

Hacker's keyboard is great when I'm using apps like ConnectBot. But, when I want to send an email or text, the swipe in Gboard works for me every ducking Rome.

What the world would really like is something that performs like nuclear fission (lots of 24/7 reliable baseload power, deployable anywhere) but without the big upfront expense or the catastrophic risks (pollution, storage, proliferation) to manage.

Is there such a thing? Could there be? Nuclear fusion might be one answer, and they've made good progress, but it's still a bit iffy and even in the best-case scenario it won't be applied at scale for some years yet. Geothermal is seeing some interesting developments that might allow it to be deployed more broadly, so that's what I'm currently geeked over. Short of that, there's always good old-fashioned renewables+lots of storage, which can be made to work, but requires a lot of infrastructure.

The moment self-driving cars are ready, Uber will get rid of all human drivers

And, why shouldn't they? Better for them, better for the passengers. Win-win.

I doubt you're completely correct, though. If there's a market for it, they'll just have a different tier of vehicle, driven by humans, for riders that want such a thing. "Uber-H", or something.

I wonder, are there any computers that both have a PS/2 port and also can run Windows 11?

Au contraire -- quite a few police have a well-known back door that you can exploit with nothing more than an envelope full of $100 bills.

Me too. I had a Pixel 5 for years. The battery swelled and damaged the screen. So, because there wasn't another phone (with a LineageOS port) available in the size I wanted, I bought another, refurb Pixel 5.

Two weeks ago, the battery started swelling again, so I just broke down and bought a Pixel 9. Awesome phone, aaaand I kinda hate it. Too big. Too heavy. Way too damned slippery (I hate putting cases on my phones).

What I really want is something the size of the old OnePlus X. That was a great phone (crappy camera notwithstanding). An updated model of the OPX, with a mediocre camera (to keep from having a bump) would be great, and I'd pay a premium price for it.

I suspect the idea they are hinting at is that ancient yeast might have been living on (then-livable) Mars and got meteorite-blasted over to Earth, and survived the trip. For a temporary trip like that, survival is sufficient.

The article claims to measure the severity of a memory leak defect based on the amount of memory it leaked -- but most memory leaks (that are severe enough to be noticed) are small leaks that occur at regular intervals, meaning that the program's memory footprint will continually grow larger over repeated operations.

Therefore, do you want a 1MB memory leak? Run the program for a while. Do you want a 1GB memory leak? Run the program for that much longer. Keep going, and you can eventually get to any number you want, to post in your Substack article; this makes the reported numbers arbitrary and therefore meaningless.

TL;DR: Memory leaks are a problem, and they can be avoided with care and proper coding techniques, but claiming that software quality is worse now because the leaks "are larger" is silly.

OTOH there are actual Apteras on the roadways... only about three of them, but they do exist, at least in prototype form.

In general, nothing. But rich people buy sports cars for the same reason less-rich people buy video games that let them pretend to race sports cars, i.e. so they can have fun "going fast". Driving a sports car without cool engine sounds (however you want to define them) would be like playing an auto-racing game on mute -- less fun than it might otherwise have been.

Fascism: You're with it.

It seems it can (although whether it's economical to do it at scale is another question).

AI has invented a new variant of Pokemon Go. Gather points by taking virtual photos of imaginary destinations!

If the automated coding tool is reliable, you wouldn't need to be skilled. OTOH if the coding tool keeps emitting code that contains bugs or misfeatures, then someone will need to analyze and debug the emitted code, which is a skill. In some cases, that might requires more skill than simply writing the software by hand.