Crypto is useless. Do I really need to remind anyone that crypto is useless?
There is no specific need for bitcoin in the world, it's a solution looking for a problem.
If I had a bitcoin, I couldn't do anything with it other than sit on it and pray that it's worth more some day, but still, in order to derive concrete utility from it I would have to first get rid of it and convert to real money instead.
It's a very formidable waste of resources, akin to growing tulips instead of something useful.
You can't eat tulips. Well even with tulips they might be edible but you could probably grow a lot of potatoes for all the work you dedicate into cultivating a rare tulip.

Some people who are about to be fired train their replacement. What do we do when AI is good enough that it doesn't require intensive training and an army of support people to calm users down when it fails?

Works well for the rest of the world. Like the metric system, and everything else that is not retarded.

In Portugal we have a $10 billion datacenter being built by Microsoft where a large thermal power plant used to be... it uses sea water for cooling just like the power plant used to. Beachgoers love the warm water. Sea water is not exactly scarce and there's no shortage of shoreline in Malaysia...

My new PC boosts instantly. What are they trying to improve? With oodles of RAM and absurdly fast SSDs there is nothing slow about a computer these days.

Irrationality. I remember it well. Quoting Wikipedia: "Irrational exuberance" is the phrase used by the then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, in a December 1996 speech given at the American Enterprise Institute during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

Yeah I miss the GNAA trolls... not.

The Las Vegas Fry's is still vacant, too. Best Buy has this market to itself.

Remember when 1.21 gigawatts was a lot of power? Now we're talking about 6!

What's the difference? We also posted web articles and had lengthy, sometimes heated discussions about it. People were a lot nastier back in the days, angry RTFM nerds were abindant. On IRC people would crash your computer for fun. We had cybersex and warez and all the good things that are technically inappropriate for a 15 year old.
Now we have censorship all over the place. Nobody stopped you from posting porn on USENET, we had specific newsgroups just for that. Try posting porn on social media nowadays. Nobody cared what you had on your F-Serve on IRC.

I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too.

I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.

Embrace the power of "and."

"Computer science went from a future-proof career to an industry in upheaval in a shockingly small amount of time."

This is basically 2001 prior to 9/11 again. Even the Slashdot comments could be substituted. I must be getting old.

Sucks to be graduating right now.