That's actually a pretty good time range - Sun-like stars in the Galactic Habitable Zone have been around for about 9 billion years, and if we assume Earth's 4.5 billion year history is typical, 5 billion years ago is about as far back as you'd expect to find little green men.

We are on the verge of being able to scan the atmosphere of exoplanets in bulk. It won't be that long (relatively speaking) before we'll know if there are any planets in our sky with chemistry that suggests a living biosphere. I hope to live long enough to see the results.

Expecting respect from the current US government.

Monopolies have always been legal. Abusing one is not. It's literally never been against the law to be a monopoly.

Just wait until Claude impregnates your dog while OpenAI and Grok film it for Meta to post online.

Yes, sadly, they do not cure mental illness.

T-Mobile is on one hell of a downward spiral. It's actually impressive.

It's easy to blame Intel but that was a joint venture with Micron and Intel. IMFlash out of Lehi Utah. Micron was every bit as responsible and if I remember right still holds most of the patents.

You could even make the case it was Micron that killed it because they dumped the entire thing on Intel and sold off the Lehi fab. Without Micron sharing manufacturing costs and with scaling difficulties lagging behind traditional NAND bit density improvements, Optane became financially unviable.

I'm all for keeping a nice environment, but whenever someone trots out the word 'sacred' I want them to fuck all the way off.

You know what should be sacred? Science and discovery. Even before it had a name and was formalized, science was advancing humanity's state. It's the reason we're not still wandering the savannahs and forests of the world in small groups, subject to every random whim of Nature.

It's a bad time to invest in anything knowledge-based in the US anyway.

I had some business reasons to have an account and participate in a few niche subs. The subs were niche enough to mostly be enthusiastic friendly people, but it didn't take long to notice the patterns of the same ideas making the rounds.

Then one of my posts was removed for reasons I don't understand (and didn't try). Whatever the mod was thinking, I just gave up, deleted my historical posts and removed my account. Not worth the effort.

Up to that point, old.reddit.com was working (with or without signing in, mobile or desktop) despite the threat to shut that down. I wouldn't use the new interface unless you paid me a decent wage to do so.

I've quit Reddit before - it's very toxic overall - but now it's not even worth it for business. I doubt they'll ever lure me back again.

Isn't limited to reddit. It's every social media site and almost every comment section online. I'm actually appreciative of the sites that don't have comment sections or require an extra click to view them these days.

Truth Social I'm sure. As hard as it is to believe, there are still people who think Trump is a genius, and still want to "own the Libs".

Call centers have been absolute shit for 30+ years.

Even if you live somewhere with good cops, they're still human beings and will often put themselves above duty.

Only the fear of consequences drilled into them during training followed by robust monitoring and security audits will keep it under control (note I didn't say 'prevent entirely').

The range and payload penalties will be enormous.

If you can build an enclosed habitat that can keep a population alive for 1000 years in deep space, you'd find it a lot easier to do the same on Earth. And if that's not an option, Mars, or the asteroid belt. Places where there are resources to exploit to resupply and repair, or even expand.

And that's before you think about how your destination is an entire alien biosphere - you might know the air, water temperature and gravity are all fine... but you won't have any idea if you can digest the locally available flora and fauna, if it'll be toxic, or if it'll be digesting you.

Interstellar colonization is for when your star is cold and all the rocks around it are used up.