If the rest of our existence as a race, for the next however many years until we go extinct, is entirely based on what we know currently about physics, and there is nothing left to learn, no short cuts, no loop holes, no new approaches, then.... fucking hell, the future is going to be boring.

I refuse to believe that our future abilities have been set in stone by scientists who barely knew atoms existed when they came up with their rules about how the universe operates - I fully expect future generations to get around those rules, otherwise we had better get used to living in the 2020s for pretty much the rest of humanities existence.

I remain eternally hopefully that there are different ways of doing things that Einstein et al could never conceive.

Modern smart devices offer awesome quasi-magical advantages over my very first computer which was a mobile pocket handheld computers I brought when I was 16, sporting Basic and 1.2kb RAM.

However, the distraction and mental load that comes with these devices and services these days is larger than any single human can reasonably consume in their life. The idea of ditching the smart devices and going back to paper notebooks and dumbphones the size of which I can _actually_ handle has been quite enticing to me too for the last decade or so. And I might actually do it some day.

Then again there's Google Maps, Communications, Notes, an ultra high end Digital camera, automatic sync and Backup, times and alert, notes, checkliste, calendar, groupware and a full blown VM with programming environment (I do Web) right there in my pocket. Star Trek is bronze Age compared.

Maybe it's just best to use these devices but work on the discipline in using them. A thing I'm equipped for better than anyone as an 80ies computer kid. The best way is probably some combination of both.

Brexit happened on lies upon bloody lies by populist douchebags like Nigel Farage. The British people were once again screwed over epic style by the political class. Which made things even worse after Brexit, ironically.

We all knew Brexit would hurt, but holy cow, as much as we like to make fun of the Brits for doing Brexit, this is painful to watch. We feel you guys.

... a post-cyberpunk post-scarcity economy. If he only achieves half of what he's pushing for that wealth won't mean that much. It's precisely that he's acting that way that puts him in a position to be this wealthy. The final goal of capitalism is to make itself obsolete. We might actually be getting there just now. Musk being a trillionaire is just an intermediate step on that scale.

... Moscow was clogged with Pokemon Go players, just like any other big city on the planet back in the summer of 2016. It was insane. Gorky Park, Victory Park, Arbat clogged with young people running around with their phones, collecting their Pokemons. I was surprised seeing the same crazy stuff going on just like in my homestates capital of Duesseldorf.

That such data is enough to program homing drones with ultra high precision is of no surprise. The sheer amount of data is enough to get all the accuracy you need.

... Lobby crew!

FOSS finally getting general public mindshare. Finally!

... big thing. I don't think anybody has anything against any vehicle, tractor or other, or anything at all stuffed to the brim with useful electronics. (emphasis on useful) The problem is when that technology is proprietary, disfunctional on purpose and designed to be extortive. That farmers are sick and tired of that I can see clearly.

One big part of the problem also is that farmers are locked into their business harder than other people, more prone to corporate extractive and extortive business pratictices and they are likely not the type to have the free time to deal with these practices in other ways.

Setting up a non-profit and/or publicly shared business to offer hardware designs that counter these problems are a likely candidate for some use- and helpful businesses. I expect this to be the next big area where the FOSS concept catches on.

It's only that now, roughly 25 years late, even the dimest of dimwitts in the political sphere have noticed that proprietary software is shitty by design and expensive and thus plan to move to FOSS rather than continue spending trillions of Euros on software that experts have downloaded for free and in better quality from the intarwebs for decades now. One should never say never I guess.

It's only by coincidence that that software (mostly) happens to come out of the US. Which is totally beside the point of why FOSS is gaining traction anyway. FOSS from the US will certainly be part of that transition too.

If this AI craze plays out only half as intense as often predicted, the disruptions are going to be much bigger than just the current graduate job crisis.
Which, btw., is happening _all_ over the world right now(!). Yeah, let that sink in for a moment.

The Neo is the Apple laptop here.

Dells offering is branded XPS. It sounds like you conflated the two.

So the Neo definitely has access to Apple parts - and its been confirmed to use the same SoC that was previously just used by the iPhone line of products.

Going from bits/OP-code to OOP and Functional Programming easily happen on its own in a single individual lifetime and career if the hardware is there and available. Many people doing programming in the 80ies or eariler discovered some form of OOP on their own just by writing code. The first serious refactoring of the first seriour program usually leads to OOP all by itself. I clearly remember discovering fundamental principles like higher PLs, APIs, OOP, information hiding, state management, event / messaging systems and other fundamental principles on my very own before learning the academic terms of those things that others had discovered and named. I even came up with my version of Oauth/OIDC for only after something like two weeks to think: Wait a minute, I sure has hell can't be the only and/or first one to come up with the principle of the Ident/Auth/Auth triangle. And sure enough, Oauth and it's update OIDC is already standardized and documented. Test First or DBC are also things that come naturally once you've written a few non-trivial pieces of code that grow beyond the scope of what a single human brain can keep track of all at once at the same time.

Bottom line: No need for those traditions to survive, they come back naturally for any healthy brain capable of logic with a sufficient enough logic machine to tinker with at it's hands.

And let's be honest: For some of the historically grown mess in IT (just take a look at the keyboard in front of you) it would actually be a good thing for that to get lost and be reinvented.

... together for life to evolve and persist on earth. This is certainly a very large part of the answer to the Fermi paradox.

It's open source and there's no liability whatsoever, but that's nothing other than malware. Just not in a regular programming language, but with a specific instruction for a machine. With premeditated, intended malicious consequences.

In other words: It's malware, plain and simple. The flak the guy is getting is understandable.

IIRC this class of substances is won from venomous animals. If it's a toxin that enhances brain function that would be cool. Perhaps something with the effect of stimulants, but permanently.

However, I'm not taking these new drugs just yet.
I'd rather wait a little longer and see if the Ozempic crowd turns into a bunch of blind Zombies or a bunch of Superhumans.

Then I'll make my call.

... _very_ fundamental way.

[Disclaimer: Passionate multi-decade Senior Web Developer here]

And that is *drumroll*:

Always online, no standard default way for offline.

Seriously, this is the biggest downside (and perhaps eventually downfall) of the Web and ist it's protocols. It's the reason I initially thought "Who needs this crap?" back in the 90ies when the Web first appeared.

In this regard Fidenet and other BBS networks are technically superior(!!) to the modern Web.

Solid crypto-based Ident/Auth/Authed DNS and a set of document-centric offline capable Web protocols on top would be the right way to do this. Most security problems and this tracker garbage we have to deal with _every_ _single_ _day_ would vanish in an instant. As would quite a few other problems of the modern Web along with it.

The Web is awesome. It won for very good reasons. But it _that_ way the Web is epic shit by design. If the Web eventually fades away it will likely be because of that flaw.

Until then it's paying bills, so not many too hard feelings on my end. But the general IT expert in me sure wishes we had better protocols for solid offline capability.