It was that way here until the oil crisis, which shrank cars for a while. Now they are inflated again, but as things are getting crappier here, smaller vehicles are returning. If you have lots of space and fuel is cheap, larger vehicles are lovely. If neither thing is true, they are just more trouble and expense than they are worth.

Vehicles being higher up has little influence on how far their headlights cast, especially given safe following distances they are the least relevant thing. They are just commonly poorly aimed. I thought Europe had inspections for that kind of thing, though? In the US we theoretically do, but I see misaimed headlights constantly.

Just kidding, please don't kill me!

Technology is the answer, though. I don't plan to learn another script, though I might learn another language. But why should anyone have to? Computers are actually good at recognizing text and doing translations now. That's two legit uses for "AI" that have actually come true. For example I've successfully OCR'd Chinese documentation and translated it and had it not come out in broken English. This really makes one wonder why anyone is still doing bad documentation and ads, but I do still see them regularly. So weird.

Somebody predicting an AI product category is FUBAR instead of wonderful magic productivity?

It was good up to the point they forgot how to pool-chalk their unicorns.

While it might be true they fired a bunch of help-desk people and replaced them with AI, that's not the same as being any good.

It's possibly a case of being technically right but practically wrong.

For example, you could replace staff with monkeys who you pay peanuts and claim you saved lots of money. Yes you did, but customers are now talking to monkeys. It's banana logic.

unwanted feature...that permit microsoft to steal photos of your children for "training purposes".

Isn't that how EpsteinGPT was invented?

Ah yes, don't participate in modern society. I see you are very smart.

It's not a surprise if human knowledge which is kept secret doesn't show up in LLMs. And today, not putting any knowledge on the internet is effectively that. The reason all our nerd shit shows up in LLM data is that we made it freely available to all on the open internet.

And that's why end-to-end encryption is the only sort which can be trusted by the ends. None of this "SSL added and removed here" stuff. But of course governments strongly discourage its use, and especially any way to make it easier to use, because they want to eavesdrop.

The Trump administration is not much into science and exploration, they want "glory missions" with US astronauts dancing YMCA on other planets.

Thus, they are cutting unmanned probes, especially anything to do with climate research. Those climate scientists are all "bribed woke riggers".

Open source is self-reliance. If other nations do something goofy, you just fork and wave goodbye to them.

Greenpeace never said "don't mine", only "don't mine dumbly". Maybe China does it dumbly because dictators don't care much if they sicken their population, and boot out Greenpeace.

Why not use Libre Office formats if they want to avoid MS?

Modern software is built on towers of abstractions, each one making development "easier" while adding overhead: Today's real chain: React > Electron > Chromium > Docker > Kubernetes > VM > managed DB > API gateways.

It doesn't make it easier, it's to force DOM to act like a real GUI at gunpoint. DOM is the wrong tool for the GUI job, time for a new state-friendly GUI markup standard.

Apps that devs used to make in 3 weeks in VB, Delphi, Paradox, or Oracle Forms now take 7 months and be 5x the code. Development has become an e-bureaucracy. Many of these older apps still work, still doing their job; they are only being replaced because devs who know the tooling are retiring, NOT because they are "bad". Esthetically ugly, perhaps, but for internal apps that's not important except for the gullible.

And I'm not saying go back to desktop installs, there are ways to have network-friendly apps now.

The industry is simply focked up by bad standards.

And I'm not saying the listed tools are great, they were first generation of GUI IDE's, but we can build on what worked but toss the shit that gets in the way, as is often found in DOM.

* Okay, keep the DOM, but not for GUI/CRUD usage.