That bad? Well, they seem to be a society even farther advanced in Enshittification than most of the West.

Indeed, it does. Although not all tech sucks. Often you find some graybeards behind tech that does not suck or at least sucks less though.

CGI and C++? I do you one better. Apparently, if I was interested (currently not) my ex-boss knows people that are really looking for engineers that can handle Fortran competently and the pay seems to be pretty good. Once you are actually an engineer and not a mere technician anymore, the language matters not a lot, what you do with it matters. And none of the youngsters have even heard of things like Fortran, which is actually a pretty decent language.

True that. Of course, there are a lot of "meat grinder" roles (love that term!) and not so many roles for senior experts. But here is the thing: There are _never_ enough experts (let alone senior ones) and, yes, there is indeed no shortage of mistakes.

I see the same thing. And I see that what MS has built is a crumbly house-of-cards (see recent attacks). Competitors are a bit better, but still, the cloud is a massive single-point-of-failure. Solid and resilient engineering looks different. Less tech diversity is also a big problem. It means more mono-cultures and these are easy to attack and very hard to replace. Again, solid and resilient engineering looks different.

I guess we will need to have a global IT problem that makes Covid like a small thing for people to wake up. It is getting easier and easier to cause that and, at some point, some deranged group (of which there are many) will manage to do it.

They still have people at hand who can make sense of that code.

I can't remember if it was in the book, the movie, or both, but there is a great scene in Andy Weir's "The Martian" where NASA tries to find people who know how the Mars Pathfinder comms work after Mark Watney retrieves it and powers it back up to phone home 38 years after it first touched down on the Red Planet.

While true, you also have a moral responsibility from your choice of who to work for. The typical expectation is that if you do not agree with what your employer does, you first try to change culture there (by legal means, obviously), but then you leave. This is not a one-person-one-vote system, personal merit does count.

While I follow your argument, I do not think that is how it works. The main limiter is not model size, but training data set availability. If you want a different model "bias", you have to find a training data set in the same size that has this different bias. And you cannot use automatically generated data to skew the model. It has to be human-generated input or model collapse may well happen.

It is also pretty stupid with regard to resilience to rely on central infrastructure. Especially MS infrastructure which is known to be massively insecure.

Both. They're both victims of the governments of those two nations/regions. Hamas's barbarism is entirely inexcusable, but at the same time, the leaders of Israel (and Netanyahu specifically) turned their country hard to the right in a manner that pretty much gave rise to Hamas's power. Foreign governments have also added fuel to the fire, which doesn't help.

The tragedy is that nobody actually wants peace enough to make it happen. All it would take is the U.N. declaring all of Israel to be a demilitarized zone, ordering the Israeli government and Hamas to both disarm, shooting anyone who refuses to comply, and then keeping those million or so troops in that region to help rebuild, slowly drawing down the number of troops over... say 200 years, so that by the time they are gone, no one alive still remembers the horrors of this day.

Hydrogen seems to be the logical choice. Many gas turbine peakes can run on a mix of natural gas and H2 or even pure H2 so you make some hydrogen during periods of excess and burn it in the turbines during periods of shortage.

Where can you get batteries for $100/kwh? Is that a grid-scale price? Retail prices are much higher than this (around $200/kwh minimum when I last looked) I am not against nuclear (and think it should be a larger part of the solution). Better direct load shifting would go much further. Batteries are indirect load shifting.

Username checks out.

The easiest one, by the way, would be to heat your hot water during those periods! It doesn't take much investment to get a better hot water setup that can be run extra hot during peak periods.

Are you aware that, in China, men significantly outnumber women which is by itself a social stability concern. If you are 35 year old Chinese male who just got fired, you are likely doomed to a life of loneliness. Sure a 35 year old unmarried Chinese female could also go on some sort of rampage. But given China's demographics, unemployed single males are going to be the source of social instability while females might be an edge case.