You are correct on all counts; but you're also missing something:

Open source projects as a whole face a chronic shortage of highly knowledgeable people to review and maintain them. Having "easy first issues" reserved specifically for new people to get involved in is a deliberate effort to maintain on "on-ramp" that brings people into the project without requiring them to be late-career experts. Historically, if people don't get involved early, they don't get involved at all. They'll have other hobbies and projects by the time they become experts. And then each and every OSS project gently declines to the point that it's being maintained by a solitary underpaid programmer in their basement who just quietly dies one day and the whole world realizes that nobody has access to the repo anymore, or noone knows exactly how everything works, etc.

These "Good first issues" are very literally a survival mechanism to ensure that the project retains a group of people involved in it, and thus will survive long-term. It's a long-term strategic decision.

Basically, allowing an AI to swoop in and wrap up all these minor fixes and optimizations is like shareholders firing all the staff in order to reduce costs and boost the next quarter's profit margins. It's great for their immediate share payout, but it dooms the company. Likewise, it's great for the current users and corporations that need the code today, but it's terrible for people who want the project to keep moving forward and handle the unknown problems of next year or the year after, etc.

From a human perspective, there's that other thing you mentioned: It's great that all the talented people will still have serious work... But how are they going to make that leap from "inexperienced" to "talented" if there's literally no tasks for them to do? Assuming they can afford to spend time just doing stuff on their own without worrying about living, I suppose they can ignore the world around them and just spend their time re-inventing the wheel. Program a calculator for themselves. Program a web browser. Program a replacement matlib. Ditch the OSS (since it'll have become a purely AI-and-experts-only place by then), and rebuild everything from scratch, because otherwise there's nowhere to get started.

And no, it's not anti-AI racism. I'm very sure that will be a thing once AI itself is actually a thing, but until it is actually conscious, it's just a tool. AI-racism makes as much sense right now as saying someone is racist against hammers because they prefer to use screws instead of nails.

I think that's really the point, isn't it? Micron *isn't* saying that. All Micron is doing is no longer making memory suitable for all the "we're just building a regular desktop machines" purchasers in order to focus on producing memory in custom formats suitable for the purchasers building dedicated AI workhorses. If the purchaser has the budget to really matter to Micron, then chances are they have the budget (and interest) in switching off "making do" with customer grade memory to use bespoke AI specialized products.

It's just like bitcoin mining. Sure, GPUs are decent for doing mining. But you know what is more cost-effective? specialized mining cards that share some similarities with GPUs but cut out a lot of the unnecessary parts. Small time or rushed setups use bulk regular GPUs. Big Pro mining companies generally now use specialized cards that are optimized specifically for mining and either can't do or at least aren't specialized at graphics at all.

It's really just a case of "We've got enough customers to use 100% of capacity for this higher-margin product, so we don't need to spend effort on this more diverse and thus higher cost mass-consumer product with a less dependable market."

There is an easy solution to this: Don't store any files of worth in the Documents folder. Put them all somewhere else that isn't under Microsoft's programmed control. Maybe the root level of a non-boot drive? Then the document folder does nothing other than collects auto-generated folders by various games and programs, holds settings, and stuff like that. Then it'll usually stay under the size limit, and Microsoft is only datamining the auto-generated data, not the stuff you are actually working on. And on the plus side, you do actually get the benefit of those settings and saved-game files backed up for you. Oh, and since all your data is on a different drive, you can nuke and pave and restore to your heart's content.

It's still not perfect, I admit, but at least it retains some semblance of control over your data...

I do, actually, on multiple grounds.

A. This is being reported by multiple news services. If it was just one talking about it without proof, then the others would have a golden opportunity to disprove it and show themselves as being better. They're not, which supports the idea that this is true.

B. BBC has shown itself over time to be reliable. Are they perfect? No. Do they have biases? Definitely. Does their writing have some degree of slant? Sure. Do they make up entire articles and news stories? No.

C. This is reporting on the conversation between a trio of dicatators who have given every indication of wanting to live and rule forever, who have zero ethical concerns about using any and every method of doing so, and have the power and resources to spend on it without precluding other avenues. I'd honestly be surprised if they weren't researching this. Along with every other life-extension technlogy that has come up in the past couple of decades.

D. Lastly, but not leastly, the BBC article specifically cites a Russian media reporting that Putin effectivley confirmed his remarks. Doubt BBC all you want, but I'm sure there's at least a few Russian speakers in the western hemisphere who have immediately sought out Tass to find the article in question. If this citation didn't exist, BBC would be called out specifically for that lie, rather than just vague accusations that this whole event didn't happen. And Russian media isn't going to report anything that reflects badly on Putin. Remember, living forever is a good thing for dictators. It emphasizes their power and importance, and they're savy enough to pickup on the potential morale boost for their country of being able to imply "See, our country is great enough to enable its leader to rule forever. Unlike those weak western states that can't even keep their leaders functional for a couple of decades."

Putin reportedly reprised his remarks later while speaking to Russian media.

Russian state news agency Tass quoted him as saying: "Modern recovery methods, medical methods, even surgical ones dealing with the replacement of organs, enable humanity to hope for active life to last longer than it does today.

"Average age is different in different countries but life expectancy will increase significantly".

At the end of the day, the "does it make sense that they are trying to do so and wouldn't be afraid to admit it" check: Definitely. I wouldn't even put it past them to have staged this specifically for the propaganda value of revealing that they do have plans to live forever. It's possible. I'm not sure if that did happen in this case, but it's possible. They're all canny enough people, Putin especially, to not say things in public (even if the mics are supposedly off) that they don't want reported. There's lots of witnesses around, and the whole event they were at is specifically about showing off how powerful one of them is. This is just one more facet of power.

Firstly, yes, I want to go to space. Definitely.

But I want to go to space to achieve something. Going just to spend a few minutes being a tourist has a very low value to me, and would have to be commensurately extremely low risk for me to do it.

If I had the opportunity to do something pioneering, or do some really valuable science... Yes, I definitely would like to say "Yes."

But there's no blanket statements. It depends on the spaceship, the company, the crew I'm going with, the mission.... I have to be OK with all of these. Some entities have a better track record than others, and the one thing that I'm not willing to compromise on is the ship itself being capable and proven of being able to safely get me there and back.

Gmail has one thing that outlook does not: Sorting.

Breaking out of the "Each email gets to go in One folder like a piece of physical mail" is just cumbersome and unhelpful. It seems like these days at least half of my emails need to go in more than one category. Being able to label each email with *all* the categories it needs to be in, and then having everything in that category visible when I click on that "folder" was an awesome innovation that I wish could be applied to basically everywhere else I have files.

I like outlook (the desktop program), it's stable and functional. But the email organization side of it is terrible.