Apple added animated wallpapers a while back. I turned it off immediately. While Iâ(TM)m not one of those people who do everything full screen (why do people do that with a terminal on a large screen?!), my desktop is rarely visible, except for little bits of it around windows. Thatâ(TM)s enough though that if thereâ(TM)s any movement, itâ(TM)s distracting. I constantly felt like something was happening in one of my windows in my peripheral vision, making me look.

What is it with Microsoft and wanting moving crap on the screen. Itâ(TM)s always been a pain remote accessing Windows servers, sometimes over slow connections, whose default web page is animated and kills the performance and interactivity. Why?!

Nah, it's simpler than that. This is just good old fashioned gaming the stock market.
- Announce a big project or big investment that makes people think your company is doing great things
- Stock price goes up
- Profit!
- A year later, people have forgotten that you never actually built the big project you announced
- Lather, Rinse, Repeat

That's about the only thing that such a centrally-managed setup gives, it forces a shift in the bureaucracy to make the oligarchy's mandate happen. The problem is that this may not account for things like environmental degradation, harm to the general population and other issues surrounding personal rights, etc.

Something of a compromise approach can be reached in democratic countries, but it requires all of the stakeholders from the federal officials down to the local building code inspectors during the construction process to be onboard.

What China does for 'the people' may well not be good for individual Chinese persons. Similarly to what the Soviet Union did for 'the people' was often quite harmful to individual persons.

The same goes for the size. It's pretty clear that scientists were ballparking its size in metric units, and converting the fractional units with that much precision was stupid. Calling it "about a hundred feet or thirty meters" would have been a lot better.

And this sort of thing happened long before AI was in the picture. People don't understand significant digits, and it's worse when it comes to estimates.

As for distance away, it would have been better to include something like its closest approach puts it around 3/4 of the distance to the Moon.

Have you seen these things?
https://hilo.com/

Been thinking about getting one myself. It looks way more useful than Appleâ(TM)s approach of just sending a notification because it gives you a log with real numbers. The only downside for me is I hate wearing things on my wrist, although it is narrower than an Apple Watch.

For a very long time, one of the biggest problems we have had is FOMO -- Fear Of Missing Out.

If something becomes popular for more than 7 minutes, everyone immediately rushes to jump on board. $Billions are spent and wasted, a few people might get rich from it, and then it all collapses. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

I am shocked, shocked to hear, that Crowdstrike has sloppy software management practices in place!

You oversimplify. I despise Rust, but it does address real problems. (I'm not sure how well, because I won't use it.) I'm thinking of thinks like deadlock, livelock, etc. As someone above pointed out, there are lots of applications that don't need to deal with that, and subsets can work for them. (The above poster worked in a domain where all memory could be pre-allocated.)

Rust felt like programming with one hand tied behind my back. So I dropped it. Only one reference to a given item it just too restrictive. Perhaps it is really Turing complete, but so is a Turing machine. But multi-threaded programs really do need a better approach. (My real beef with C++ (and C) though is their handling of unicode. So I'm currently experimenting with D [ https://dlang.org/ ], which seems pretty good for the current application (though honestly since it's I/O bound Python would be quite acceptable). )

So you are saying that Trump should have just threatened ABC behind the scenes and then everything would be ok?
My problem is not with the how this is executed but with the fact that the government is unduly influencing the media.

Another Canadian dunce who's drank the warm cup of PP ...

Europe not buying LNG from Russia distorts the market. US producers can get a better price selling to Europe, so prices go up in the US too. If you donâ(TM)t like this, youâ(TM)re better off crushing Putin so Europe starts buying Russian LNG again. You canâ(TM)t just sit back and ignore it if you donâ(TM)t like it.

So there are two schools of thought on a premium product. One takes the mid-market product and cobbles-on a bunch of bells and whistles. The other designs the basic product itself to be of better quality even without bells and whistles.

I much prefer the latter. We bought a SubZero because the 40 year old SubZero that was installed when the house was built finally had enough rust developing in the housing itself that it was time to replace it when it had a cooling loop issue. If the new SubZero manages to go even twenty years I'll be quite happy with it. It's just a fridge. The only 'port' is an 8P8C tech/management port for troubleshooting, it doesn't do Ethernet, it doesn't do Wifi, it doesn't connect to anything in order to work, it just functions and lets a service tech get extended diagnostics while on site.

The trouble with the mid-market product that is turned into a premium product by cobbling on a bunch of crap is that it's ultimately still just a mid-market product underneath it all. When the stuff that was designed to the price-point for that middle-market position wears out due to those design decisions, it doesn't matter if all of the ancillary bolt-on crap is still working or not. It may well be due for the scrap heap because it's not worth the costs to repair it at that point.

So my advice would be to skip on the fridge with the screen and Internet connection. There's no point in buying durable goods loaded with commodity hardware and software.

So... Brazil ?

I guess that'd be more 1984 than Brave New World though.

That has not been my experience, at all. I'm entirely against the concept of what they're doing (giving me a reason not to visit the websites that ultimately pay for the production and publication of information) but the AI summaries and links to related articles tend to be spot on what I'm looking for. Perhaps you can give me a (non-contrived) search to try that demonstrates your claim?

It's mostly WINE though isn't it? Well, Proton but still. That has the 64bit-32bit thunking layer required. Native Linux builds would need to be 64 bit true, but that's where I was going with the "10-20%" bit.

I run 32bit Windows games on ARM via Rosetta/MacPortingToolkit. So long as the game itself is tricked into believing it's in a 32bit universe, it's happy.