Yes, and that's the problem for Disney -- theme parks can only physically accept so many people per year, and they can't (easily) build more of them. So theme parks can't be more than a small amount of their total income; to really make the big money, the Mouse has to ship products that can and will be purchased by everyone. In practice, that means movies; ideally good movies, but at a minimum, popular movies.

No doubt Microsoft's agenda today is different from what it was 30 years ago, but it's still Microsoft's agenda. Microsoft can be relied upon to do what is good for Microsoft, and any dependency you form on their products can and will be used as leverage to extract money from you.

I'm very surprised it's legal here. I thought the electric companies were legally required to serve their customers reliably, and not solely when they found it desirable to do so -- that's the agreement they made in exchange for being a natural monopoly (natural because you can't economically run more than one set of electric lines to every household). Apparently I was wrong about that?

As astronaut Frank Borman put it, "a superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations which would require the use of his superior piloting skill".

The programmer's version of that would be "a superior programmer uses his superior judgement to avoid creating the bugs that would require the use of his superior debugging skill".

The risk in this scenario is that after a few iterations of people applying AI-generated "black box" modifications, users start reporting that the ancient app is crashing on them now and then, and nobody has the first clue why, or how to fix it... and since the crash isn't readily reproducible, you can't even do a "git bisect" to figure out which commit introduced the regression. Now you're left with two unappetizing choices: either live with the instability forever, or roll back all of the "blind" commits to the last known-stable version and never touch the codebase again.

This route already existed for years and Iraqis are using it to connect to Europe.

Those guys can't even vet their own social media posts, and those are ~100 characters of ASCII text. The chances of them being able to meaningfully review a multi-gigabyte binary file are exactly zero.

... other, more obscure platforms are also supported, but if you want to run NetHack on them, you'll have to compile it yourself from source. Kind of a baller move if you ask me :)

Trump's actions are 100% Trump's responsibility ("the buck stops here" is still part of the Presidential employment contract, even if Trump doesn't think so).

OTOH, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if Netanyahu played hardball to "encourage" Trump to help. It's one of the downsides of having a "colorful" sex life in your youth and then gaining political power later on -- too many people have solid evidence of your transgressions, and now motivation to use them to influence your decision-making.

So when Netanyahu phones Trump up and says "join my war, or else I'll release these Epstein videos of you having group sex with underage girls", does Trump do the principled thing and refuse? Or does he take the coward's way out, and allow Israel to dictate US policy in exchange for temporarily saving his own political skin? I think we know the answer to that.

Is every country rational enough to never actually use them, and also technically and organizationally competent to keep them out of the hands of private groups (e.g. Al-Qaeda) who would steal them and use them for them own purposes?

If not, then the MAD doctrine won't work there. It's either principled leadership by the major powers, or nothing.

Well, now we need to have a 50-post discussion on whether "goblins" and "gremlins" are really the same thing, or if they are in fact two distinct species. All the D&D training I received in my youth can finally be brought to bear on a real-world problem!

Perhaps, but one of the nice properties of a command-line app is that the addition of features needn't slow down people who don't need those features.

E.g. git could add 300 more keywords, and as long as the basic "git clone", "git update", "git commit", and "git push" keep working, I won't be effected by that at all.

A GUI-based tool, OTOH, will find its user interface getting increasingly cluttered (and/or cryptic) proportional to the number of features that get shoehorned into it.

You're right in that up-front costs often drove the decision-making, but what they didn't take into account is that software that is a nightmare to use means the admins get less done in a day, and the users keep requiring tech support, which means the company has to hire additional employees, so in exchange for a "cheap" one-time software purchase they are now saddled with expensive additional staffing costs, in perpetuity.

First-grader (raising hand): Why is Meta called "Meta"?
Zuckerberg: I don't want to talk about it

On the plus side, once the AI bubble bursts and 75% of the AI companies go under, there's likely to be a lot of electrical capacity (and GPUs and RAM) suddenly available at fire-sale prices, at least for a while.