... Is why the big players do not offer outdoor/rugged versions of their phones. They'd make a fortune, like apple with the apple watch ultra. I'd have started this 10 years about at least.

Drip is the shit version of coffee. Good instant coffee doesn't filter out the crema like drip does. In fact, good modern instant coffee is often even better than pressured "hand made" espresso, because you have to be skilled at grinding and operating the steam coffee maker in order to get anything of value out of it which most people can't. Espresso is what the name says: a fast pressured version of drip, originally invented to make lots of coffee fast.
Same with espresso bots. Price/performance is pretty much the worst with those. I'll take a good single serving instant espresso over one of those any time. For fancy nothing beats a good French press.

If you _have_ to spend lots of money for good coffee, I recommend cometeer coffee. They pre-brew their coffee at an expertly tuned industrial scale and then seal almost dry pellets of that coffee in single serves. You just pour boiling water over it and get the best coffee ever with zero the ceremony. Not cheap, but still lengths cheaper and better than Nespresso or similar nonsense.

... putting the people who came up with such brilliant ideas like the Rings of Power in charge of a nuclear fission plant? Think that's a good idea?

How else will I be able to feel that deep sense of dread when I call any company's customer support and I'm greeted by an overly polite chatbot that's so syrupy it gives me type-2, that doesn't understand my problem and refuses to let me talk to a real person?

Censorship is a big no-no for tech companies. Particularly when it doesn't make then any money.

Wikipedia is an interesting concept and it works decently well as a place to go read a bunch of general information and find decent sources. But LLMs are feeding that information to people in a customized, granular format that meets their exact individual needs and desires. So yeah, probably not as interested in reading your giant wall of text when they want 6 specific lines out of it.

Remember when Encyclopædia Britannica was crying about you stealing their customers, Wikipedia? Yeah, this is what they experienced.

Don't say they can't be useful. I like this. I generally also like laws like the GDPR that enable EU regulators to fine megacorps for 50 bazillion Euros if they choose to get pissy with the rules and ignore them. Good stuff. Gotta hand it to the EU.

At least US carmakers are scared. German carmakers are still stuck in the steam age because "luxury". Although they are getting a clobbering as we speak. And of course they're demanding a bailout which the new "conservative" government is willing to provide because they've been in bed with carmakers since the dawn of time.

I've been hosting my open-source projects on Github for years.

Why you ask? After all, isn't every open-source and free software advocate's duty to stay clear away from Microsoft?

Here's my reason: I only use the git part of Github. I don't use any of Microsoft's proprietary crap on top of it.

Therefore, Microsoft has no vendor lock-in on me: my projects are one git-push away from being hosted elsewhere. I waste their resources by making them host my massive files for free and they have absolutely nothing to show for it - no revenue, no private data to monetize, nothing.

But the minute Microsoft starts getting annoying, my repos are gone. I'll move them to Codeberg and I will gladly pay for the hosting in the form of donations.

When you have 32 kilobytes of RAM and a 1 MHz processor, you need all the programming talent you can get to squeeze the most performances out of them.

When you have 32 gigabytes and dozens of cores, any incompetent code monkey can churn out the same application in Visual Basic or Python.

Resources don't make your computer faster. They empower incompetent and sloppy developers, who crucially are paid less than good ones, so their boss can make more money.

I remember in the last 90's / early 2000's discussing with a colleague how it was possible that X allocated 2 megabytes for an empty window, just for sitting there on the screen.

to serve up advertisement and privacy-invadind SaaS at lightning speed. I can't wait!

Just plain pathetic. I would want my performance EV just to "naturally" whine as they do. I find that sound waaaay more impressive and intimidating anyway. You're literally hearing the pure torque at work. Sound of like the ground version of the Tie Fighter scream from Star Wars.

and low bars for academic performances have been the norm for a long time.

Mixer up the i and w there, sorry.