Many PFAS/Forever Chemicals have a structure and effect similar to estrogen, which makes men less manly. It also appears that there are environmental effects lowering testosterone, some researchers Link this to PFAS as well. Low sperm count has also been linked to PFAS.

So, yeah, they literally make your more trans. If you're a man that is.

They are slowly gaining in Germany too and have been for the last two decades or so, also due to some EU funding while back. Some German towns even exploited this a little by stringing roundabouts together. They make you dizzy driving through them. That aside, roundabouts are a surefire way to slow down traffic to reasonable speeds, remove breaking and waiting at traffic lights and are low-maintenance intersections.

They'd be the default intersection if I were in charge.

Sadly, quite a few of my fellow German citizens whine like crybabies about them and would rather wait at traffic-lights. I don't quite get it, but this is Germany where people are similarly crazy about cars as some are about guns and gun regulations in the US. Go figure.

Narrative podcast is a media format, not an industry. Conflating those two like some silly dimwit is very likely to lose you big amounts of money. QED.

"Serial" was a podcast that helped kicked off the craze. It was new, had the true-crime pull that fascinates women and men alike, produced with a fairly low budget, available for free download asynchronously (unlike radio shows), covered a current controversy (which it helped hype up, partly out of self interest in the attention economy) and had enough cliff-hangers to string people along and have people around the world awaiting the next episode.

There is one "problem" with this sort of format though: It takes time to consume, very much like a streaming series. And there is only so much time that shows like this can eat up. I jumped on the "Serial" bandwagon right after a close friend of mine got all hyped up about it. I listened to a few episodes but quickly noticed the cliff-hanger shtick on keeping people on edge wether the convict was guilty or not. IMHO the trick was somewhat transparent and it became less compelling after I noticed it.

I'm pretty sure the format is still out there and used by podcasts, but it never was an industry, since every regular person with a cheap-ass laptop and a free installation of reaper or ardour has everything they need to get going and producing their own narrative podcast.

Thinking that this is an "industry" in itself was quite silly from the beginning. Sort of like calling "cooking spagetti" an industry.

Looking around tells me that computer skills are becoming less relevant and closer-to-basic survival skills are becoming more important. Most computer devices are way too complex for most people and true value-add to these devices and their app-space these days is a very rare thing I would argue. It's about a non-retarded digital culture 95%+ of the time and I doubt regular Gen-Z folks are more suitable for this than any other generation besides my type of Gen-X 80ies computer kid who grew up in lockstep with the development and general adoption of microcomputers. That's the reason anyone older or younger than us is often completely out of their depth when doing anything but the simplest tasks on a smartphone or computer.

AFAICT (and some other people too) there is solid indication that key aspects of a high-culture based on digital devices and their educated use is increasingly degrading and has been in the last decade or two. And once that happens you don't need or neither afford too many people sitting at a desk and operating a computer. Wether with AI or not.

... to screw this one up eventually.

What really surprises me about Nadellas M$ is that is actually pretty decent, by M$ standards that is. VS Code is a really neat contribution to the FOSS community and to open standards, as is TypeScript. Some neat surprises on that front in the last decade, I have to admit.

The silver lining is that this is Git. Building your own Github replacement borders on the trivial, as is changing your upstream SPoT repo.

What I absolutely love about Git is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting in the fact that migrating your upstream Git Repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.

... the forming of life and its subsequent evolution is. Yes, you need very specific circumstances for life to form in the first place and - apparently - a quite specific sequence of evolutionary happenstances for intelligent life like us to form, but other than that what happens along the way and where it leads is pretty random. Example: We have some solid evidence that todays birds are the successors to dinosaurs because they are vertebrae with a circular system that runs counter to that of all other vertebrae. Left- and right turning circular systems of blood can co-exist because they are "meta" enough to basic life, just as we can (sort of) get along with todays hornets that only come in pocket-size (unlike some of those cambrian monsters that apparently were around at some point), _but_ when it comes to cells and bacteria we're talking the very basic fundamentals of life-forms.

And unless someone discovers some organism that has internal cell-systems "spinning the other way" and has some solid research indicating and perhaps proving that both types of lifeforms can exist and evolve without significantly endangering the other it is totally prudent for molecular biologists to tread very carefully in this field. It's an epic threat, quite similar to AI or some accidental super-virus. We only have to get this wrong once and humanity, or in this case even life itself as we know it, is done for. And we wouldn't want that to happen, do we?

Cudos to the biologist talking precautions here.

... is little more than a formalized model and API description anyways, so I don't see this as too much of a big deal. Well established systems use CASE tools and code generation regularly. So much so that using AI may even be a superfluous intermediate step.

That AI is likely to take over the grunt work and bulk of coding shouldn't be news anymore to anyone paying attention.

... 10 SAP Premium subscriptions or so.

... and always have been completely bedazzled on why MS Word even has a business case. How this piece of software could gain the market let alone survive to this very day is a mystery to me.

Of course it stops being that one I encounter regular users, but objectively there is no real reason for MS Word to even exist beyond some fringe niche scenarios.

... now they are ultra-expensive pets. This is the prime driver behind birthrate decline. On top of that comes hormonal birth control that _significantly_ alters women's perception of men. Add to that social media that amps said perception of options, self-worth and alternate reality 10x and you've got the perfect storm of an aloof late-stage decadent society on the brink of dying out.

Curiously enough there are historic records of exactly this happening throughout human history, with astonishingly similar effects in society, like rising property prices, disenfranchising of mid and low-status mem, whore becoming a desired choice career for women and dissolution of sex/gender definitions. Rome, Maya culture, Weimar Republic and some vanished societies in far east Asia are examples from recorded history that show similar trajectories.

The "West" will collapse and some other society will take its place. If we don't all die out completely from some global Ecological Tilt brought about by climate change and pollution that is.

Always a safe bet, even when bought refurbished. I rely on ThinkPads to this very day.

... allowing sideloading and installing a completely open source boot process and OS. I don't know if that still is the case but a few years back Xperia phones where the last ones that allowed for this sort of thing. A good thing IMHO and worth supporting.

I'm pretty sure a pill isn't going to fix my lobsided skull or my staggered teeth and underdeveloped jaws. A problem evidently linked to wrong post-teething toddler nutrition rampant in modern societies around the world for roughly 200 years. There's even a book on the problem (Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic).

... going balistic in a society that is 110% dependant on digital systems and networks up and running 24/7.

Nice. I like it.

And somehow I get the inkling that Visa and Mastercard won't be able to ignore this or brush it away.

The things holding back Linux for the unwashed masses have diminished to minor annoyances in the last 15 years, especially when compared to the nonsense wintel still puts its users through. It finally has gotten through to ords that there are solid reasons why experts don't even consider Windows as an option when doing mission critical stuff these days. ChromeOS and Android are signs of the things to come and Windows isn't even on the radar with those usage patterns.

Looks like linux has finally gotten critical mass for regular end users. I certainly wouldn't mind. My last Windows was Win2k and that's been a while. I occasionally bump into poor bastards using whatever the newest Windows is and always experience a bizarre throwback into distant and long gone times messing with ultra proprietary systems and their bullshit. Very strange. Personally I fundamentally do not get why M$ even has a business case with their system. And I even am a well paying customer who is quite happy with his XBoxes.