It combines 2 things, very good portraits of the people designing computers, and very good "bird's eye views" of how computers work. Particularly the later is great as the author managed to distill the core of each concept into something even a lay-person can swallow and understand. It's didactical simplification to the point and not beyond it. So what he says is stays correct, only ignoring things that are not important.

Considering text generators mostly work for things you'd have "copied of StackOverflow" before, I fear that this might lead to more and more boilerplate code. We already saw this with advanced development systems in languages like Java, where you often have more boilerplate than actual code.

I mean we keep seeing more and more effort being put into the same trivial code we've written for many decades now. Generative AI will likely only make that problem worse. Probably good programmers, now called 10x engineers, who just write short and efficient code, will be called 100x or 1000x engineers, since all the rest might have gotten even less efficient.

I mean, it's been clear for many years now that app stores do not care about malware. You can find many kinds of software that, even by the definitions of the 1990s, would be classified as malware. App stores contain anything from adware via DRM, and third party tracking to software dedicated to stealing your attention.

The move to China already happened back when Apple was still called Apple Computers.

I mean for the Windows world the bigger "shock" probably is the declining quality of Windows. Apple hasn't exactly been in the "premium" segment for decades, for example in the 1990s when the "Desktop Publishing" revolution arrived the main claim was that a Macintosh was much cheaper than "something proper".

Now that Laptop from Apple isn't even particularly cheap. It's stripped and locked down almost to the point of a Chromebook. It still cost more than a regular refurbished laptop with better specs.

Of course, but that's true for any kind of mass storage, also SSDs. Also hard disks become progressively more expensive per Terabyte as they get to the extreme sizes, you kinda need multiple drives to get any meaningful amount of storage. 44 Terabyte is not _that_ much these days, particularly when doing archival work.

Lithium Ion batteries are already converging on the prices of lead-acid, soon they will be cheaper.
Even though there may not yet be a recycling system in place for lead-acid batteries... since there aren't to many of them, once there are more of them, they will get recycled or repaired. If costs are no issue, you can probably fix simple lead-acid batteries. Particularly if the work-force is cheap, things can become feasible that would be uneconomical here.

I mean it's very simple to fall into the "colonialism"-trap and think that the people in the 3rd world are all somehow "idiots", unable to deal with the challenges they face, but they are smarter, they will find try to find ways around their problems.

Yes, they may be completely safe now and they are probably somewhat cleaner than fossil fuel... ... but the time we only had those 2 options is long gone. We now have renewables and storage. Consumer prices (at least in Europe) for a 430-450 watts peak panel are down to about 60 Euros.
Storage prices are sinking to a level where storing a kWh or energy is much below 10 cents.
We are, at least for residential users in Germany, at the point where it's cheaper to harvest and store solar energy then to buy it from the grid.

Battery grid storage is by now a fairly common product. You can buy integrated containers you only need to connect to the grid and your control system. If you want have a larger system you just order 1000 instead of 100 containers (and make sure the power lines are sufficient).

It's easier than, for example, making a giant ball of yarn, as such things don't scale well, every new layer of yarn is harder to put on than the previous. With grid storage you just need to buy more boxes.

Streaming services are one of the pinnacles of enshittification. You pay for stuff you don't own. Everything can be taken away from you at any time. Ads can be added at any time, etc.

Having physical media means that you can get a simple DRM-free file from it, you can watch whenever and wherever you want.

Well you do need language support, as in many languages you have no protection between components. So while you might not be able to directly open a file, you can get the rest of the program to open a file for you.

Also things like, for example a text-editor, would be rather pointless if they couldn't open and modify your files. If they can do that, they can also encrypt them easily.

Yes, but first of all, how are you going to do that on a module basis for programming languages? Second has there ever been an instance of this actually preventing malware?

I mean look at mobile devices. Those are the most disease riddled devices a normal person has. Even apps you use to access services you pay for are full of third party tracking malware.

It's a concept that sounds nice in theory, and does have _some_ security benefit, but it's by far not sufficient to reign in malware.

Sandboxing is no solution since software actually needs to do stuff.

You cannot contain malware that way, and mobile platforms are a great example where this fails. Any app can just bully its user into giving it the permissions it wants to have.

... why should I assume they'll actually put any work into work?

On the other side, if the potential employer uses AI to screen the applications, why should I want to work there?

The main problem is that "Registries" make the problem of dependencies seem easy. Dependencies are a problem, you trust in code you didn't write. That's why in older environments those dependencies either are managed by your distribution (which will do some minor amount of checking) or installing them is some effort. (though not that much)
This effectively deters you from using dependencies unless it _really_ makes sense. You install a dependency because you want to speak a complex protocol or you need some highly optimized algorithm. You don't use a dependency for "leftpad".

Having "self service" registries is not a solution for this. It only lowers the burden to depend on code.