Back in the day, if you didn't want to waste space with or learn assembler you'd write in Opcode, like a real man. I did too. Not this newfangled Assembler stuff the kids use these days. :-)

... my dead tree copy to read? OCR is trivial for today's AIs and it's my copy of the book.

These are all issues directly related to regulation and unnecessary red tape created out of NIMBYism and irrational fear around radiation. India, Canada, and China aren't stupid. They're building and/or modernizing nuclear power plants like crazy because they're so effective at reliable baseline power, which renewables simply are not. In the US, we force years - sometimes decades - of reviews and permits and defending court cases and other bullshit unrelated to the construction and operation of clean, safe nuclear power.

The other issue going to cost is that the US - again, stupidly - bars reuse of high energy spent fuel. If you simply separate the low energy (relatively safe, but useless for generating power) waste from the high energy fuel remaining and feed the high energy stuff back in, you can extract nearly all the energy, save a ton of fuel costs, mine less fuel, and have vastly less volume of waste and vastly less energetic waste.

Let's assume some sort of absolute mandate were passed to build 5 CANDU-6 (known, proven, safe, reliable design) reactors. No reviews, no permits, no red tape, no lawsuits. Just build the damn things now. You can get one operational in ~3.5 years, all of them in about 4ish years. South Korea and China have built PWRs in 5. Assuming we also lifted the ban on fuel reprocessing, CANDU-6 plants will produce power at a cost of 5-6 cents per kWh, yielding a retail price of 13-17 cents per kWh. US average is about 16.2 cents, California has rates pushing 50 cents. But we're too stupid to get out of our own way and just do it, so we'll keep strangling the poor and middle class economically.

She's a nerd/romantic and late-bloomer just like I am and her mother is. I think she did make-up once or twice, one of those being a professional makeup Training I got for her birthday so she learns it properly if she ever needs it. She couldn't care less. Chucks are her go-to shoe, Yoga, Permaculture, Meditation and living in grass huts her daily shtick. She might perhaps be closet lesbian, but that's none of my business. She's grown up and does her thing.

However, if she should ever choose to be a slut, she'd actually know how to protect herself online as best she can. Or at least better than many others.

... online 101: Through-away and spoof accounts for anything but the most critical things: professional official named online publication, professional PR or legally binding business transaction.

All else: Spoof accounts, Pseudonyms, single-identity mail addresses and online accounts, etc.

This is the very first thing my daughter learned from her IT daddy when she got her first netbook at the age of 16 on which I already had set up one realname and one spoof account. She listened and to this day is careful what she does online and with what identity. That's daddys smart girl right there. She's had no problems with online bullying ever. Naturally.

Both pretty much guaranteed at this point. I hope modern civilization can survive anyway and not go off the rails and fall into some bizarre post-apocalyptic dark age (again).

... cash for some generic snacks served by unmotivated min-wage staff for a cookie-cutter superhero movie or bazillionth woke-trash or faceless peer-group adjusted adoption somewhere at the ass end of town only reachable by car are dead.

I'm pretty sure some artsy well managed movie theatre with live at-the-seat service, a good local bistro/restaurant and reasonable pricing could still very much attract a solid audience. The arthouse theaters here in Duesseldorf, Germany are doing pretty well AFAICT. They're small, smack center at major nightlife activity hubs and show a neat right up to very good selection of non-mainstream trash-free quality movies. They pretty much offer the exact same experience I enjoyed back in the 90ies perhaps with a slightly more sophisticated vibe.

You can get the best Japanese food in Europe less than 100m away from one of them, with roughly 30+ Japanese, Korean and other localities in close proximity including one of the states best comic book and grafic novel stores and one of the towns best cafes near by and the city center a leisurely 10 minute walk away. I'm pretty sure that cinema isn't going broke anytime soon. And they only got roughly 50+ seats per theatre on average.

The only time - briefly - when Microsoft was ever the good guys is when they coded early basics for early machines. Then Bill Gates shat the bed and it's been a terrible company ever since: they've been consistently technically incompetent, incredibly aggressive,hostile, monopolizing and always ready to do whatever it takes to earn money and principles be damned.

People usually get better with age. Not Microsoft. Fuck Microsoft. I hate them every bit as much now that they reinvented themselves as an invasive Big Data company as when they were an aggressive OS and software vendor.

As for Bill Gates, the sonofabitch has been working hard for years since he retired from being an evil CEO to clean up his image. But reality is, his foundation is just a tax avoidance vehicle and he's just as evil as he's ever been, But somehow people think he and Balmer are nice retired billionaires now. No they're not. Fuck Bill Gates too.

Nothing and nobody good ever came out of Microsoft.

Obviously.

Example: 3D was a dream-job 25 years ago. It was very niche and very demanding in skill and experience and the tools costed a fortune, but if you set your mind to it you could make an OK living, if only doing specialized client work like visualization or architecture.

Today we've reached a point where specialized Smartphone Apps can take a video rotation of an object and spit out an optimized textured 3D model in a few seconds. Blender is for free and there are services that can spit out 3D models of anything for free in a few moments. Even rendering services are dead. The last Oskar for that Blender animation flick was final-rendered on a standard deskop PC.

Another example: Drone Pilot. A few years back you could make a living with high-quality aerial videos or drone surveying. Special software and some knowlege and experience was required, but you could make money with this highly specialized occupation. Today you toss a drone-bot that costs a few hundred euros into the air and watch the aerial maps, pans, fly-throughs and whatnot just pour into your tablet in real time.

Same with media production such as DTP/Print or Video. AI will have 90%+ of that covered in 2 years or so but even today many processes have been shrunk and automated 90% of the way. It's turned into more of a cultural technique rather than specific jobs.

The bots are taking our jobs. I do webdev, moved (back) to frontend a few years back and now I basically just consult, talk to people and clean up shitty or half-finished code. And it isn't really a classic full time job anymore, it's just my experience and my self-marketing that helps me transition. I still have my IDE subscription, but I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes totally superfluos in a few years time. ... I am using ChatGPT4o as a tutor and personal expert/code assistant though. Really helpful. And a sign of things to come.

The bots are here and they're taking over. It's that simple.

... and let's grab some deck chairs, this is going to be a blast to watch.

Just to get you people on the same page: My daughter did her first primary German medical exam (Physikum) in regular study time, a feat that requires 12 hours of learning for two years flat. Pretty much a hardcore Havard level grind. I couldn't do it and neither could my cousin, and he's a German engineer. Not exactly an academic wuss either. The CoViD lockdowns started just as she was doing her final exam week. She went into a burn-out after that and eventually dropped out. I sure can't blame her, medical academia is an effing shit-show compared to any other German academic track. 30 minutes noon-break with a 20 minute walk to the cantina. Pure and utter bullshit.

So a metric ton rock dropped from my heart when she opened up to me that she would like to go traveling again and explore the world.

I trust that she can handle herself reasonably well. I did teach her a few things and she listened to most of that. She comes to me for advice and support and I'm really glad that I can give it to her and that her adulting and her quarter-life crisis has us grow even closer in a way.

Western millenials in general have the problem that they grew up in abundance like we and our parents did, but they have been heavily influenced by almost total dissolution of traditional family structures and the structures that give value and meaning. Add disfunctional toxic feminism into the mix and you've got yourself some serious mental-health issues and identity crisis with the ladies and girls. But I guess that's the downside you have to manage with todays abundant opportunities.

My daughter manages those issues pretty well and I'd rather she live in the jungle and be happy than somewhere in a city nearby and be depressed. Right now she's had enough of the hippie bohemian lifestyle and being exploited for cheap labor and is applying for jobs in the European tourist industry to combine her desire to travel with some opportunity to earn a little money. Like every grown-up she's fighting her own battles but I'm sure she'll handle it. And I'm there to help her as best I can.

This is easy, no devices needed: Just limit the top speed of legal vehicles in general. Can go faster than 150kph (or Bananas per one round of Baseball or whatever you guys use to measure velocity)? Not allowed on public roads. Problem solved. Let the drivers hard-throttle their cars if that's required to make them street-legal.

Right now it's just an elite of coders and IT nerds that are getting rationalized away. We are a small sliver of the general workforce, even in India. The real party begins when autonomous driving and general-purpose robots take over production, logistics and the trades. That's going to be epic compared to what's happening just now. I'm not quite sure how rough and extreme the transition is going to be.

... China has (way) more of just about everything.

Pretty much this. My daughter is "stuck" in a new-agey eco project in the jungles of central America and is struggling in a quarter-life crisis in trying to find out where to go from here. And given the overall current state of things I really can't blame her. And I actually _do_ think that joining some eco-permaculture-community project really isn't the worst of ideas for someone of her generation in that situation. If the going get's really tough at least she will know how to grow food. Couldn't say that about many people these days.