Imagine it's ten years from now, and for $199 anyone can buy an in-home UPS from Home Depot with enough capacity to keep their lights on and their ice cream frozen for 48 hours. Once most houses have one of those, most power outages become more of a minor nuisance than a significant problem.

Part of it may be a dysfunctional corporate culture, but a lot of it is a consequence of Microsoft's business decision to maintain backwards compatibility at all costs. When you're committed to retaining every design mistake, forever, the complexity of the codebase just keeps rising, which means that less and less of it can fit into anyone's mind at one time, which means more mistakes are made going forward, and the technical debt just keeps compounding.

Will it have a Genuine People Personality? Perhaps a cheerful and sunny disposition?

Perhaps the real problem is that there is simply no reliable way to tell a real human's post from a generative AI's post anymore, since by the AIs are trained on the posts of real humans and are asymptotically becoming indistinguishable from them. You certainly can't simply go by post-quality, since the some of the smarter bots are better posters than some of the, err, less-well-informed humans.

Because of that, it's hard to feel good about putting any real effort into a social media conversation, because in the back of your mind you're always wondering: am I engaged in any kind of constructive activity here, or am I just unknowingly humping a rubber doll that Zuckerberg (or somebody) has provided for my amusement?

A Dyson sphere would have significant environmental effects too, and it's equally likely to be built.

If a company came out with a service that would burn your data into a crystal that you could wear as jewelry, and the crystal was reasonably durable (ideally diamond, or something similar), that would be a useful (or at least novel) way to store valuable data long-term. Assuming there was also a convenient way to read it back when required, of course.

This, however, isn't that. The whole point of git is that it distributes copies of your repository onto every client that clones it, so that the likelihood of everyone accidentally losing all copies at once is minimal.

Isn't that nice that the slop house knows everything about you.

It's not as though that was not known already.

I wonder when his birthday is - he is 19 now, but how old was he 14 months ago?
(Looking at the second link - the pdf - he was born on December 3 2006 so he was 18 in May 2025)

...and wouldn't it be nice to get something in return for our tax dollars? Other than billion-dollar ballrooms and pointless wars, I mean?

Do they need cover to reject anything? In my projects, I reserve the right to reject anything, for any reason, solely on the grounds that they are my projects, and if someone doesn't like it, they can fork off (their own repository).

Without a hostage there is no ransom!

As long as China does not introduce retaliatory sanctions for something Chaotically Stupid.

Being rich doesn't make you stupid, but being really rich starts to isolate you in a bubble of luxury and sycophants, and eventually you start to forget what the rest of the world is like, and start making decisions based on the unstated assumption that other people don't matter.

I can't remember having read about it either, but I'm pretty sure that Caldera was later taken over by SCO and anyone who can't remember SCO's attempt to sink Linux is either very young or has been living underneath a rock for several years. SCO had their own Linux distribution at the time, and that distribution was a rebranded Caldera.

I suspect Kim Jong Un got better grades in college than our dear leader

Of course he did, but maybe not for the reasons you're implying.
Kim Jong Un's daddy (Kim Jong Il) was the Supreme Leader before him.
Kim Jong Un's granddaddy (Kim Il Sung) was the Supreme Leader before him.