I once warned a manager at a smallish company that their fantasy of doing manufacturing would never happen partly because of a lack of QC and the lack of anybody with authority to shut a project down if it was not meeting spec. "We need that guy!" the manager said, and I came back, "If you had that guy you'd fire him the first time he told you something you didn't want to hear." Musk is in a pickle right now and I'm sure he really doesn't want to hear that the tank failed an X-ray inspection and the whole craft needs to be taken apart to make sure it's OK, thereby missing the launch window. And I'm sure the QC guy knows that. So as I warned that guy who once asked for my advice, this is what he got.

She hunted and pecked through the beginnings of a reasonably successful career as a magazine copywriter back in the day. I tried to tell her it would be worth her while to spend a few hours with Mavis Beacon, but she insisted she had her way of doing things and that was that. Two index fingers, staring at the keyboard instead of the screen. Meanwhile, I was younger than her but did learn touch typing on a manual in high school. Anyway a year or so after I gave up trying to convince her to spend some time learning to type properly, I walked in on her as she was working and she was holding her hands in the home position, index fingers hovering above F and J, eyes on the screen, and doing a good 80 wpm as she pounded out copy. When I pointed this out she looked at her hands and said, "I don't know about any of that, I just adjusted what I was doing to get a little faster." Well, that's why they teach it that way, but some people gotta ice skate uphill, y'know.

Jobs and Wozniak got rich off Apple, Gates and Balmer off Microsoft. Sinclair was already rich. Tandy, Commodore, Atari, and IBM had hugely popular machines but no "rock stars" single-handedly responsible for their development, and bad business decisions ultimately killed them. Similarly Coleco, which had a great chance to undercut the PC with the Adam and its cheap letter quality printer, but they were too ambitious and by the time they worked out their manufacturing problems the PC had taken root. But the PC killed the rest of the industry by killing itself, making the first clones possible which could run object code generated for other manufacturers' machines, which was Microsoft's second stage to orbit after providing Level II Basic for the TRS-80. It wasn't MIcrosoft's intent, but imagine what today's computer ecosystem would look like if all software was still architecture-specific and there were a dozen or more popular models to choose from.
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Apple and the rest had room to grow because the big names like DEC, Data General, and even IBM were focused on business and saw them as toys. They bought and ate anything that looked like it might compete with them, such as the CP/M office systems which might be a credible threat to minicomputers like the DEC PDP series. That was another gap IBM threaded by being IBM.

Waste Management used to have pretty good customer service, if they missed a pickup you just called, they'd send a truck out. Bin broken, call and they'd come fix it. Easy peasey. Now, all you can get is a call center in India that insists you got service even when you did not. They have missed three pickups in a row now. When my wife finally got a human being after 3+ hours on hold with multiple calls, the rep was completely unsurprised that it ended with a cancellation request and offered no pushback. There are three other companies doing trash pickup in our subdivision, one of them will now get our business, and apparently we're not alone.

Hal's insanity trigger was actually revealed in the book version of 2001 itself.

Builders will have to learn what they can do with it, and what they can get away with, by experience. 3D printing allows walls to flow and make shapes that are all but impossible, or at least very expensive, with conventional techniques. Curves also make them stronger. But it's not clear just how well 3D printed walls will hold up to age and catastrophe. Eventually techniques will evolve to soften the layered look or at least vary it some. There is still no real consensus on what to do about roofs, and end of life demo promises to be a whole new thing. But there's certainly room to explore a technology that just needs to be hosed out after a flood, can't burn, and might be earthquake proof.

Can we please ditch this feel-good Cold War lie? Stars are powered by the proton cycle, a reaction that isn't attainable by any means other than gravitational confinement by the mass of a star, and which doesn't even produce that much energy. Stars just get very hot because they're very big, square cubed law and all that, and they've been burning for millions or billions of years. What fusion reactors are trying to achieve depends on deuterium and tritium as fuel, isotopes of hydrogen that are not found all that much in the Universe. Deuterium can be isolated and purified with a modest industrial effort but tritium has to be made in another nuclear reactor and has a relatively short half-life once made, and is wicked expensive. Fusion reactors are also likely to be extremely dirty, irradiating the whole facility with neutron flux that is not just lethal in operation, but makes otherwise stable materials radioactive through neutron capture. (The first clue that Pons and Fleischmann had not actually achieved cold fusion is that their apparattus wasn't shielded, and even at the relatively modest cell phone charger level power output they were claiming it should have killed them.) Nobody knows what that kind of neutron flux will do to a real life machine over a realistic operating life with all the working parts of a reactor, how the resulting waste will need to be handled, or even what it does to simpler things like construction structural elements over the long term. And of course there is the laughable way it's always been just around the corner for over sixty years.

You know what the argument used to be? Garbage collection. There were what we would today call scripting languages which made it all but impossible to have memory bugs, as well as other common bugs such as data type mixups. Yes those languages were slower, but when compilers were made for them they weren't all that slow, and still the entire industry insisted on continuing to program using a language whose every feature was pared down to make it fit in the memory of a PDP-8, in a day when corporate customers still regularly paid for their mainframe usage by the instruction cycle. When microcomputers became practical, most of them much more powerful than the mainframes of the sixties much less a mini like the PDP-8, mountains of code were written in languages like COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, and even BASIC, all of which made memory errors impossible. (Go ahead and call FORTRAN a toy language. I dare you. Let me stand back a bit first so I don't get flash burns.) Then instead of fixing the problem we layer frameworks and other band-aids on top of it which don't fix the problem, and make C and its derivatives just as slow as those other languages that started out safe, and the reason nobody notices is that computers themselves are a million times faster than a PDP-8 now and unless you are doing some kind of global level enterprise shit you'd never notice the difference in performance between a program written in C and one written in Turbo Pascal.

It's not real until the two computers blackmail you with your own nuclear weapons to keep the line open, though.

As for email, that wasn't a thing even in most offices until well into the late 1990's. The single biggest driver of microcomputers into business was Lotus, the granddaddy and predecessor of Excel, which had executives going into computer shops asking for "the one that can run Lotus." Word processing was neck and neck depending on whether your use case justified investing in a letter quality printer. Many entities outright refused to accept dot matrix printing, and while impact printers were there first they were very expensive and due to their mechanical complexity never really got cheap. Laser printers didn't start to plug that gap until the 90's. And in typical fashion, Microsoft weren't there with Office until they realized there was already a proven market.

The problem is that they have to explain to the court why they took DNA from the suspect in the first place. If the only answer is the DNA search, then they had no reason to collect the sample, the sample is inadmissible, and anything derived from the sample such as the link to the knife sheath is inadmissible. If they did get a court order, they again needed probable cause to ask for the search, and if the only reason for asking for the search was that he came up in the search -- warrant invalid, evidence inadmissible. Ta-ta. Why do we do it this seemingly insane way where we let obvious criminals go because of mistakes or overreach by the cops? Because that is literally the only form of sanction in place to discourage cops from being stupid or crooked. Rules that can't be enforced might as well not exist. It would make a lot more sense to fine the department or cop or functionariy who illegally ordered the search, and even better to put the individuals who directly decided to ignore the law in jail like the criminals they are, but you won't get sensible sanctions like that passed in today's world.

On a 24-hour clock there is only one 12, at noon, and midnight is 00:00. Morning is AM and evening is PM. So does 12 noon end the morning or begin the evening? Well all the hours on that 24-hour clock from 13:00 to 23:59 are obviously PM, and if the clock is balanced there should be 12 PM hours, so 12 noon and its hour from 12:00 to 12:59 add in to make a clean 12-hour sequence that is exactly half a day. Similarly, even though we call it 12 instead of 00, the 12 hours from midnight 00:00 through 11:59 AM are the morning half-day, which would be a clean sequence except for calling 00=12. It's kind of a hack, but so are most ways of accounting time.

Ibuprofen like all drugs taxes the liver and kidneys, but not really that badly. Acetaminophen is the liver toxic one, and can kill you with a does that would be absolutely harmless if it were ibuprofen. If your blood is already thin an excess of aspirin can cause you to bleed out through a minor wound like a hemophiliac. All drugs are toxins and all toxins are drugs, but they aren't all the same toxins.

...at about that age. At least I assume that's what was so special about your formula evaluator. Unfortunately I was working to fix a clone of Tiny Basic, and a few years later, so I didn't get to hear the CEO of Tandy ask how rich I wanted to be because of it. But we were probably doing it for the same reason: Most implementations of BASIC were slow and shitty, because those early computers were slow and shitty. So it was always a balance figuring out which functions you wanted to spend extra memory on to make them faster or more efficient, always at the expense of less memory for application programming. It felt quite powerful to be able to make those decisions and actually implement them and see the results. For some strange reason it didn't leave me with a lingering compulsion to take over the whole goddamn world, though.

For all I know the GS algo (I don't think it's "AI" in the bubble sense though, as it predates the LLM hype) may do a very good job of figuring out what I want, but it's hard to tell because its prime directive is now to shovel ads and the maximum possible number results in my face instead of what I asked for. Thus a search with multiple words comes back with the entire first page of supposedly real results having one of the words I took the time to type in crossed out, because huh if you look for what I actually asked for there are only seven legit results to return and we can't have that.