You're right. While the truly excellent outliers I have known and led have all been local-ish, the median is about the same and has been, in my experience, for almost a decade. And the worst coders I have known were also local. Most of the Indian and Filipino coders I have known were straight up the middle, generally competent enough. Not stars, not flops.

Whether or not workers in a particular segment are unionized is entirely orthogonal to the quality of goods being produced and services being provided.

Enshittification is happening because of many factors, but perhaps the biggest single idea is "move fast and break things." When a company no longer values the customer experience, the customer experience is shitty. That effect has nothing to do with the organizational structure of the company.

Keep on reading the papers.

The key thing to make QC work is the ability to do logic on error corrected qbits with scalable error correction.

We are not remotely close and there's no sign of a plan to get there.

The quantum surface codes and quantum LDPC stuff that claimed to solve the problem clearly do not. You just have to read the papers and find the bit where it gives the error correction capability vs the unreliability of the underlying non error corrected qbits. Compute the binomial error distribution for factoring a 1024 and 2048 bit RSA. You will find just how fantastically far away we are from having a working quantum computer.

All the technical people I know use Signal.
Those of us conversant in cryptography have studied the protocol and found it to be good.
The ratchet, oblivious RAMs, good algorithm choices and much more.

It reads more like they did the logical thing.

ML-KEM is the new NIST standard for transferring a key (ML=Modular Lattice, KEM=Key Encapsulation Method). It's the default choice for a post quantum KEM.
With the ratchet, the logical thing to do is to tack on a third cog using ML-KEM. That's what they did.
Also you need to accommodate the huge numbers that ML-KEM uses. That's what they did.

It's a fine design, done well and deserving of praise - especially deploying a hybrid scheme against the best efforts of the NSA to stop that, but I don't think it counts as an amazing engineering achievement.

Calling is SPQR is pretty funny for someone who grew up in a formally Roman fortress town.

And you offloaded that price of growth to those other countries. The fact that you changed its geography doesn't make it go away. It's still your cost.

I don't think you could price it high enough, except by pricing it so high you would effectively cause our solutions to converge. Whether you ration gasoline or you price it beyond the affordablility of the masses, you're doing the same thing.

Perhaps we agree by effect, if not verbiage.

Actually, yes, Growth, at least, is bad for the environment. The environmental cost has always marched alongside economic growth. Pollution, for instance, isn't a side effect of growth. II's a facilitator. The path to environmental balance is massive recession. You don't have to go back to candles and horses, but you probably have to give up 500 watt video cards whose only contribution to society is pretty graphics.

Too little, too slow. Trying to promote things like insulation standards and massive public transportation upgrades won't move the needle quickly enough to deal with the crisis. We would have to start in the 1950s. And the affluent will be unmoved, since they can absorb the uptick in energy costs. We can't "suggest" our way out of this.

The scalpel is no longer enough. Time for the sledgehammer.

Increase the capacity of transit, but not the quality, and ration gasoline mercilessly. Ban trivial uses of AI - no more generating 500 versions of an album cover because it's free. Put a halt to new data centers, and put a bullet in nvidia. And so on. Starve the supply side as well as the demand. Pay the large societal cost of that. And it will hurt. A lot. This would work... but...

Understand that I think these things will not happen. I think we're screwed, and we'll pay the price through mitigation, not prevention.

I don't have a better answer. I just think what you are suggesting wouldn't accomplish enough to matter.

Proven by the fact that most people immediately put it into a case that is now thicker than the phone itself.

The progress needs to be made in apartment building parking slots. Yes there would need to be as many charge cords as there are tenants with electric cars / PHEV's, but they don't need to be "superchargers." California at least is making it happen.

It's really one-car households that need a hybrid the most. Out in the suburbs households have multiple cars which can be an EV for daily driving and a gas car for long trips. (Or I guess one day an EV for practically everything once the infrastructure is ubiquitous and the tech is good enough.)

Hanford announced last week that their spent fuel vitrification plant is officially in operation, converting nuclear waste into glass ingots that can be safely stored for millenia. If they keep going for about a century they might be able to vitrify the spent fuel we already have. But we still have no place to store the ingots.

All these small modular reactors have the same deficits. They require high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) produced only in Russia. They're a proliferation risk. They require a substantial footprint with passive and active defenses, 24/7 armed security, security clearances for all the highly paid professionals involved. They're slow to approve, finance, build. They're more costly even than classic nuclear reactors to build and operate, and those are the slowest building and most costly form of energy which means high energy costs when (if) they are finally built. Traditional nuclear reactor projects have a 95% failure rate from proposal to generation so 19 times of 20 they never deliver a single watt hour. Those times the money is just spent and lost. The one time in 20 that the generation comes online to produce the world's most costly power doesn't even include those costs.

At Hanford cold war nuclear waste continues to seep gradually toward the mighty Columbia river. Inch by inch.

Somewhere in America just now a homeowner just plugged his DIY solar panels into the inverter and battery he bought on Amazon for the first time. It will give power 24/7 for 30 years at no additional cost. It was quick and cheap. He didn't even need permission. It won't kill his family, nor yours, nor mine. There is no chance that his solar panels will result in radioactive salmon or other seafood.

"repairable"? Its a system on a chip. For the most part ... either it works or it doesn't. There's not much to repair. That said.. yeah, I've got an intellivision flashback that died pretty quickly - so i guess its a valid concern.

I'm disappointed in the game selection on the Spirit. It doesn't have the Dungeons and Dragons games (which also go by minotaur and crown of kings to avoid licensing the DnD name).

It does say it sports a usb port for "game expansion" - so maybe there's a way in there. (official or otherwise).

HDMI and wireless are nice though. I really can't be bothered to hook the original one up with its its whole ancient antenna hookup system. The flashback was nice while it lasted because it was at least RCA. I use jzintv now on a PC.

I currently have usb adapters for both the original system controllers and the littler ones that came with the intellivision flashback a few years ago - works very well.

But wireless would be nice, so I might still buy it for the controllers if someone figures out how to get them working with a PC.

Then you should love instant. It's the purest concentration of coffe out there, and you can put as little - or as much - in your cup as you like.

I admit it, I drink Tasters Choice. It's good, I'm telling you! At a restaurant of cafe I sometimes get coffee I like more, but just as often I like it less!

I suppose people are more likely to charge the easier and more affordable it is. Assuming that is the case, it would follow that the existing plugin-hybrid cars will be charged more often in the future than they are today, because charging infrastructure will improve during the lifetime of the car.