> What we could have done is have brutally stringent anti-spam laws and a federal task force which actively enforced the laws

I guess you mean "brutally stringent US anti-spam laws" and "US federal task force". Which might have helped a little, locally in the US. But would have made no difference to the rest of the world. Most of the spam I receive here in Denmark is sent from somewhere else, and claims sender addresses from yet another place.

I am past 60 now, and still (!) reading a lot. When moving to a smaller apartment, I got rid of most of my books, only keeping those that I felt I would want to read again. These days I get almost all of my books from the local library. If I have read a book twice, and think I might read it twice again, I consider buying a copy. But OK, I live in Copenhagen, where we have a great public library system, and the university libraries are available

Fun fact: i grew up in Finland many years ago, and Abloy was the standard lock just about everywhere. We used to laugh at American films where apartment door locks could be opened with a plastic card or easily picked.

Most of the comments here seem to be about how high our 25% VAT is. But for that we get all kind of services. I can order almost any book at the library, and they get it for me, even from very far away. Free of charge. And free education and health care as well.

I suffered from sleep apnea for many years. Breathing problems often triggered nightmares, several times a night. A CPAP machine changed my life, I could finally get a whole nights sleep, and the nightmares stopped. I can still recognize an apnea nightmare, which I get if I don't use the machine. Sleep apnea is known to increase many medical problems and to shorten life. I guess other conditions could also provoke nightmares.

I have met a few people whom I would say were in the 10x category. What they had in common was a deep understanding of the technology and the domain they worked in, and a very humble attitude - certainly not bragging about being better than the rest. And a certain dislike of getting into management.

We already have a system - not perfect, but ok - for dealing with academic fraud. This kind of tricks should be considered on the same level as falsifying data, or bribing peer reviewers. Huge mark against the guy, making sure his career ends there.

Couple of years ago I bought a FairPhone 4. It has replaceable battery, and almost everything else. I am not sure about guarantees, but the company is still supporting previous versions. It can be opened without tools for battery and sim card access, and the rest just needs one screwdriver. Unless it gets stolen or seriously broken, I hope to keep it for 5 or 10 years more. Extra bonus is their policy of fairness, taking care where they source their materials and components from.

Also from the Finnish news: The police is investigating this as a crime, the ship is being held back both for the criminal investigation, and now also for a private suit from the cable owners. 9 members of the crew are forbidden to leave the country (a bit less severe than getting arrested). They have found traces of a dragging anchor that are over 100km long, and the anchor itself right where the ship was stopped. Even if they can not prove it intentional sabotage, the ship owner is still responsible for the damage it caused. The authorities are carefully not blaming Russia, at least until they have all their evidence laid out. It may be difficult to prove Russian influence. But there is not much question that it was this ship that broke the cables, and it sure doesn't look like an accident.

Once upon a time programmers struggled with writing machine code. Then some clever people came up with a system for specifying what you needed in almost plain English, and the computer would do the rest. It was called COBOL, and coding was never quite the same. But still, programmers were badly needed, and once everyone was on board with these newmodern "plain English" ways of coding, the requirements just escalated so we still had more than enough work to do. After COBOL, ALGOL, and FORTRAN, there came new and improved languages, and yes, the machine coding guys were a dying bunch. But there always was work for people who could make computers do the things that were needed. I guess it will be the same this time...

Could we please get a maximum noise limit on cars, motorbikes, and scooters. At least within city limits.

I have not seen a single case where daily micromanagement meetings contribute anything. Except frustration.

Now that I am (semi?)retired, I have decided not to accept any work that involves such.

When making an item for yourself, like the kayak paddle in the article, it makes good sense to use your own body measurements as a starting point.

I have heard of a modern harpsichord maker, who starts every instrument by defining the inch for that instrument. If I remember right, it was the width of the wide ("white") key. Everything else was derived from that with geometric methods, so the proportions of the instrument came out right.

I have read that in the middle ages, most European cities had engraved some (local) standard measurements in the walls of the city hall. That was good enough when there was not big need to standardize things. But today things are more international. A German M6 nut is going to fit on a Chinese M6 bolt, without any big discussion about the thread pitch etc.

Long time ago there was a movement to explain what the computer should do, in more or less plain English instead of mysterious codes. It was called COBOL. It, and other high-level languages of that time did indeed change coding a lot. But the need for programmers did not go away, at all.

The real art of programming includes being aware of different failure modes, error handling, and considering malicious user input, as well as a deep understanding of what the program is supposed to do, and finding an acceptable compromise between the clients vague specs and what is technically possible. Maybe an AI can some day handle all that, but not in the near future.

Bet most of you have never heard of it, but my first computer was a Telmac 1800, built from a Finnish kit. Loosely based on RCA's Cosmac. Running on a RCA 1802 processor, with 2kb of memory (and room for another 2kb, if someone can use so much), audio cassette tape for storage, a lousy keyboard, and using an old TV for display, all of 64 pixels wide. Me and my dad soldered it together somewhere around 1975. Later we got an extension board with 16kb memory, and a better display, 16x64 characters, and a Tiny Basic interpreter. Soon after that, I dived into machine code... At a time I had nightmares directly in hex.