I'm sorry, simply calling this crack-pipe dream of a "project" "poor design" is an epic understatement. A few examples:

- Building the line would eat up 60% of the worlds entire steel production for decades on end.

- The "chandelier stadium" is so l00ny and physically impossible that it might as well be dreamt up and squiggled on a piece of paper with crayons by a 5-year old. Advisors told the deciders this and they still chose to ignore them.

- The basin planned for the cruise ship docks at the west end would clog up due to lack of flow.

- Basic stuff like sewage treatment isn't even considered, as is way to common with these people I have to say. As with this stupid ultra-high sky-scraper, sewage management is/was intended to be done with trucks. Every day 200 trucks line up to empty the sewage tanks of that skycraper, then drive to Bahrain and simply dump the sewage into the ocean where it then get's carried right back to the coast of Dubai to stink up the beaches and that palm-tree island thing.

I could go on and on.

The list of inane and flat-out retarded decisions surrounding this and other projects is endless. These are infantile pipe-dreams by badly educated Arabian dimwitts with too much money on their hands and too many yay-sayers around them who are too greedy to ask them to stop being silly. Everybody with two or more braincells to rub together knew that this wouldn't go that far if at all anywhere. Perhaps the deciders should take things down a few notches because right now they actually _do_ have enough amounts of money to really make a change for large portions of the population in those regions and get themselves independent from oil. Perhaps let some smart people present some realistic ideas?

... with ginormous sun-rich empty spaces of mainland that we could solarize at record speed - as China is doing right now with results as shown - in order to get this fossil-fuel eco-turnaround happening ASAP. Wouldn't that be nice, no?

I fully anticipate there will be branding changes, like adding a '+' for rewards and consumers will learn fairly quickly that merchants frequently don't want to deal with the more expensive 'plus' transactions.

Can't blame them, your rewards points/cash back is just being charged to the merchant.

Or you just carry a couple of cards, one with no rewards that people will actually take, and maybe one or two with rewards that some merchants will still take.

The biggest thing to get right is some simple 'branding' so consumers actually know at a glance what cards might work or might not.

It's just bonkers that the credit card companies have basically made the merchants pay for the credit card companies to motivate cardholders to use the cards that merchants don't want them using in the first place. Those 'cash back' and 'rewards' represent some of cost of goods that a consumer can't really get away from without these measures.

It's right there in the summary, that merchant's would start being able to decline the credit cards with 'points' and 'cash back'. I presume this would come with some rebranding to be phased in, like 'Visa+' and 'Visa Business', with a lot of merchants refusing 'Visa+' just like they reject other high-fee cards.

... are way more stupid and/or pointless and more expensive I'd say exploring space should be one of our global scientific priorities. Perhaps even more so than yet another collider for even smaller sub-atoms or yet another Tokamak that goes nowhere. I'd perhaps even make that a new sort of quasi-religion, since the benefits from work on this is likely only to pay out when todays generations are no more.

As for saving this planet and keeping it livable for humans: We can do both and then thousands of other things on top of that at the same time. And we should absolutely do all that while we still have an advanced scientific high culture.

Z-Wave v. Zigbee largely stemmed from some awkward licensing to implement Z-Wave.

I think the thing driving Matter-over-Thread seems to be a desire to have more commonality with IP stacks, notably Apple's Homekit not having the adoption Apple wanted and Apple deciding to maybe go with something that the device manufacturers will go for, but not wanting to have to have a totally different stack for dealing with Zigbee vs. wifi devices.

So here's Matter, based on IP, with endorsement of 'Thread' as one of the transports. Now talking to a Matter device over Wifi is pretty similar to talking to a Matter device over Thread, except Thread is not generally IP routing.

So Thread is an inherent mesh design, unlike Bluetooth or Wifi, and low power. Bluetooth kind of sucks for this application since it's peer to peer. Wifi somewhat better but it means you have to inject access points even if coverage could be had mesh-style, with a light switch serving as a perfectly viable relay while doing it's job otherwise. Also you have an actual shot of running a Thread radio on modest battery much longer than Wifi.

... just as I have never written for Google Search. I've always written for humans. If an AI and/or a crawler wants to read that, I'm totally fine with that. If it doesn't, then that's OK too. By and large I couldn't care less.

... to become a Bladerunner? I sooo what that cool coat, gun and one of those flying police cars. Awesome!

And can I have an Ana de Armas clone in flesh an blood? OMG that would be so awesome. ... She'd have to be engineered to find me irresistible of course, but that should be a problem, or?

Ooooh, I'm so excited!

... with a Linux setup on her brand new good Lenovo laptop with the lates W1ndows pre-installed. Backed up her Thunderbird Mail directory, wipe-installed Mint Linux and set it up in a few minutes. The difference in boot time and responsiveness is night and day.

I started at a new company a year back and hat one of their Win Laptops for a few weeks before my dev MB Air arrived. The system was so finicky to the point of being unusable. I was speechless. I fundamentally don't get why people even use W1ndows for regular stuff these days. If all you need is Mail, Web and some digital project and content management. there is absolutely no need for anything other than a lean modern Linux. The last version of W1n that I used for anything meaningful was Win2k and that was just about 25 years ago.

Totally bizarre.

... big techs obscene cash reserves and not so much third-party or VC investment money, so I'm not too concerned for the market, to be honest. The environment and the looming AI threat is a different issue, but's that's not so much about the market. If the bubble pops I hope for little impact for ordinary folks.

I think the woosh is directed the wrong way, the comment had an example of exactly and obviously useful data, so it has to be sarcastic.

"Matter-over-Thread" is actually a solid strategy compared to most 'cloud connected' wifi smart devices.

This is more akin to Zigbee/Z-Wave. It's a local, non-internet scheme for local communication and control. You can get a totally local air-gapped Matter over Thread setup running without internet. It's if you pick a cloud-connected thread border router when you get in trouble, but you can roll your own, e.g. with Home Assistant platform providing a way forward.

Art distorts reality in order to show us different perspectives and perhaps give a warning.

Could the world of Bladerunner 2049 be a thing? Absolutely. Is it likely to be exactly like that? Probably not. Same with Gattaca.

I love cyberpunk literature. I've been reading it since my teens. It prepared me for everything that's happening these days. And what I really like about that is that some things have been outpaced by reality. In many places we are already in post cyberpunk utopia before we even reached cyberpunk.

As Deni Villeneuve said to the Google engineers:"You guys are making it really difficult for us to write science fiction."

Which pretty much sums up the state of things with fiction vs. reality.

Steam was introduced by making it mandatory to be able to buy and play Half-Life 2. Big red flag right there and then, which is why I decided _not_ to use Steam right then and there at the beginning of it all.

Yes, HL2 was an excellent game and dominates the hall of fame of videogames for good reaons. Which is why Steam took off like a rocket. And yes, Steam offers great value and Gabe and his crew manage the service well. But if he changes his mind or valve gets sold to some greed leech investment gang things can go belly up pretty fast. I buy my pure-bits versions of videogames with GOG and archive the packages myself. If GOG would shut down tomorrow, I couldn't care less. Which is the way things should be. I'm too much of a (seasoned) computer and internet expert to be fooled otherwise.