Well, I'm not competent either, so I just understood it as "There's gonna be some major shake down, think subprime, so you better more it to something more stable"

Before any of us even imagined we'd have a computer or a course on it, we "programmed" in text books. The language was mostly GOTO, but might even have the occasional conditional as in, "If you like cheese turn to page 56 otherwise 103". Typical applications were insulting the teacher's appearance, as in "for a picture of the teacher, turn to page 45", where there was a picture of a gorilla.

This was of course, not permitted which made us low-key black hat "hackers". In private school the penalty for this was far too steep. I don't know if public school kids learned how to diagram sentences or not; but we did. I later realized we had been taught parse trees by another name.

Yes, BASIC was my first programming language on an actual computer.

No, that wasn't a scam.

I don't know shit about investing, and yet I have some money invested automatically in some stuff. 2 weeks ago the banker called me and told me shit is about to hit the fan and to pull out of my investments... True or not, if that's not worrisome...

I remember people saying the exact same thing about computers in general.

Exactly. It's like taking a look at ENIAC and thinking 'welp, this technology will never be commercially successful, and I can't really think of a use for it.'

On the other hand, PDAs went from 'useless toy' to 'corporate status symbol' to 'literally redefining how society works' in less than twenty five years.

People live their lives through their phone. There's a qualitative difference.

Like why your car requires a seatbelt and airbags, but your snowmobile doesn't.

With so many RGB lights, your computer was just asking for it.

And if you haven't experienced these temperatures you need to understand that those not accustomed to them can't do much of anything when it's that hot. I've experienced close to the higher of these two temperatures in Death Valley, and mild exertion was not sustainable. It was life threatening without an air conditioned car to get back to. The lower of these comps to being in my house when there was no air conditioning. What happens after a while is you're just consumed with keeping cool and can't focus on much else. A spray bottle and a fan helps a little, but if you're not wet and the air isn't dry, then there's a point where the fan stops acting to cool you and actually heats you up--it's a low-grade convection oven effect.

Motorcyclists are aware of this, they even have a chart out there somewhere that shows the break-even point where the wind stops cooling you and starts baking... but dang, all the links that I could find easily are badly enshittified. Just trust me, bikers will feel slightly *warmer* when riding at highway speeds in temperatures above 95F.

Some people can actually acclimate to these temperatures. They generally know who they are. The body is an amazing thing, but I'm sure even those people have their limits.

Most of coal (and gas and petroleum) come from the Carboniferous period between the time plants invented lignin and became trees and the time microorganisms found a way to digest and recycle it. It lasted from -350M to -300M years when dead trees just piled up on each others without rotting. So if you can find a way to burn 50 million years of accumulated carbon in a decade, go for it !

I guess things get too complex after a while and nobody wants to work on them anymore and somebody just goes 'We should write something more simple (and faster and with newer tech)' and it works fine at the beginning but then when you add all the missing things and workarounds and bells and wishes, then you end up with the original product in all its horror...

The same people paying for the gas/diesel transportation, storage, and distribution stations?

Do you think pioneers just find giant underground fuel tanks and wild-grown gas pumps naturally sprouting along highways?

Nope. Fleet operators can safely maintain a bank of charged batteries and swap them. Five minute operation or less with a properly designed truck. That's based on commonly used technology that exists, with peak storage batteries on the grid already. You can find plenty of qualified technicians to deal with all that. It fits in neatly with various industrial operations that might have other reasons to maintain a bank of batteries in order to smooth out their power consumption and get better electric rates.

H2 can sort of do all that--but needs high pressure tanks, and a way to convert to/from electricity but the real nail in the coffin is finding qualified technicians, and safely and quickly fueling the vehicles.

Hydrogen is a boondoggle pretty much every where. It made sense in some space craft, that's about it.

It's true. The last time I upgraded ram in a laptop was a Toshiba Satellite Pro back in like 1999.

Otherwise, we just, you know, spec the initial laptop purchase properly.

It's true. I bought a Series X to play Starfield (stupid me) and now, for me, it's a way to replay 360 games with no load times.