The Culex quinquefasciatus (from Google's EPA request) is not native to N. America, it likely originated in Africa and came across due to human activity.

There are over 200 species of mosquito in N. America (worldwide about 3500). Taking one out will have negligible effect on the food chain.

Bats, specifically, will eat mosquitos but prefer larger insects. Mosquitos are small relative to the effort the bat takes to catch therm.

The specific mosquito mentioned is available in lots of places around the world (not native - see first point above), so we could repopulate if we notice a problem.

Google is breeding these mosquitos, so we have breeding populations and we could repopulate if needed.

It's the primary vector for West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis virus, Avian malaria, and Wuchereria bancrofti (a parasitic worm).

I've been following the progress of these sorts of activities for many years. With proper care and monitoring, it's possible we could fix a lot of invasive species problem such as Cane Toads in Australia, Mongooses (mongeese?) in Hawaii, and Aedes aegypti. A. aegypti strongly prefers to bite humans and is carrier to disease, and is also not native to N. America.

The US used to have screw worms. The screw worm would lay eggs in an open wound on mammals (usually domestic animals such as livestock, but sometimes humans) and the larvae would develop under the skin by eating healthy tissue.

The US government began a program of releasing irradiated screw worm males, which are sterile, into the environment to compete with healthy males. This reduced the population, eventually down to zero, and now the US is largely screw worm free. This only took about 10 years.

Good riddance.

Now do ticks.

The full explanation is Sterile Insect Technique.

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.

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.

A child-surveillance conservative is a liberal who was bullied in school.

... quite well: It's going to be chaos but in the end it's going to turn out good for everyone. We're just going to work less if the cheap bots do most of the work.

That was the rebound year from Covid. It's a statistical anomaly, and chosen by a lot of news reports to highlight the severity of whatever point they're making.

Comparing today's employment against, for example, 2019 is also difficult due to the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants that entered under the Biden administration. For example, today there is about 4.3% unemployment, the average is 5.7%, so we're doing pretty good on that front.

Statistics can lie. Our 4.3% represents 7.4 million unemployed workers, while the 2019 3.5% rate represents 5.8 million unemployed. When you bring in 10 million undocumented people, it's easy to see how 5.8 million unemployed can swell to 7.4 million.

Statistics lie by comparing our employment to a year that had record values because of an anomaly, or compare the number of unemployed by number to a year before we closed the Southern border.

You're assuming that having a healthy life is the primary goal, but it's not. It's secondary.

A healthy life is one of several secondary goals that you have in order to achieve your primary goals, whatever they may be.

For example, having a family/children is the goal of many people. Do you want to see your grandkids grow up? Have a healthy life.

Having enough money for retirement so you can travel (or just have fun) is another goal many people have. Want to enjoy your retirement? Have a healthy life.

Goals go hand-in-hand with motivations, and one way to increase your motivation for doing something is to identify how it contributes to one of your life goals.

So for example, that college course you're taking to get your MBA - are you doing that just for something to do, or does it contribute to where you want to be in 10 years?

It turns out that doing something "just for money" is not, by itself, a motivational goal. Doing something "for the money" that you will need to eventually start your own business, though... that's a motivational goal.

So no, living a healthy miserable life doesn't make much sense if being healthy is the goal.

Living a healthy miserable life *does* make sense if it lets you see your grandkids grow up.

I did a diploma in performing arts in the the 90ies. The first half of my 20ies was dancing 5+ hours per weekday. I still benefit from that phase. As a teenager I was into climbing. I still have the shoulder muscles from that time, despite totally slacking on strength training. But no smoking, no drugs, no alcohol. And I have been dancing Argentine Tango for the last 18 years, 9 of which where an artsy minimalist lifestyle built around intensely dancing Tango 3+ times a week. My sleep schedule was as off as with my other thing, software development, but otherwise my health was awesome, physically and mentally. Intensely hugging hot ladies 3+ times a week for hours on end does wonders for a hetero-males well-being. I regularly get judged 10 years younger than I am.
Processed foods are organic as much as possible, I avoid junkfood 95% of the time and I've started cooking for myself 10 years ago. Huge impact.

I've since have taken Tango down a notch and picked up motorscooter/motorbike as means of travelling and getting around. Getting slightly overweight for the first time in my life. Not good, don't like it. I'm roughly 10 years too late in picking up a daily excercise/yoga, cardio and strength schedule, a thing I definitely need to get going this year. Started hiking with my sweetheart, we want to pick up the pace and intensity of that to stay healthy in old age.

I keep telling my 28 year old daughter that she dare never not stop her daily yoga practice. I hope she can do that.

It's this simple: Objectively the very best retirement plan is actively working on your health, strength, endurance and flexibility multiple times a week. Way more significant than being wealthy at old age.

I'd rather be top fit at 70 living off 700 Euros per month than overweight with two bipasses living off 2000.

Where is the shovelware? Where's the killer app?
Shovelware requires some form of userbase. That doesn't exist anymore if every software solution any normal person can think of is just one Google query and one URL away. The Web has won. Nobody will go through the trouble of even installing software these days in most cases.

This ruling is from the NY district court, which in theory only has authority over its district, and then only over the plaintiffs.

That last point is contested.

Several district courts have made nationwide injunctions against the current administration. For example, a federal court stopped Trump's 2017 travel ban from nations that didn't have good controls against terrorists. (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen).

In a 2025 ruling the Supreme Court decided that federal courts do not have the power for nationwide injunctions. The courts *do* have power over the federal government, that's not thought to be beyond the court's jurisdiction, so a court can rule against a federal statute or executive order.

Suppose there's an issue (immigration is an example), and California sues New York in court to force some action and wins. The NY court can issue a nationwide injunction, but then Texas (also interested in immigration issues) can say that they have a strong interest in the outcome and were not party to the litigation.

The supreme court decided (outside of issues with the US government) that Federal courts should focus their remedies on the plaintiffs, and not the entire country.

So not only do countries outside of the US not have to worry about this, US districts that are not the Southern District of New York don't have to worry about it.

... might just give the IC industry the kick in the butt it needs, just like with spacecraft and electric vehicles. He recently stated that the whole IC-Fab thing is done wrong these days and that he might just end up eating a hamburger and smoking a cigar right next to a microfab with higher cleanroom efficiency to prove his point once the first Terafab is up and running.

I'm no engineer, but the "copy-exactly" and "clearroom design" of the late 70ies sure has become long in the tooth and my intuition says Musk might actually be on to something (once again). It's going to be fun to watch how this Terafab thing plays out.