I love scapegoating individual developers as much as the next guy, but if you take a look at the Win32 API, you'll find loads of fun "features" such as:

- Every single function that takes a string has two implementations: one that ends with the letter A (and takes its strings as ASCII) and one that ends with the letter W (and takes its strings as UCS-16). And then it has a preprocessor-define (with no suffix) that gets expanded to either one implementation or the other, based on your compiler settings.

- windows.h defines preprocessor-tokens for min() and max(), which means any C++ program that ever calls std::min() or std::max() will error out with a very strange compile-time error, if it included windows.h first; the work-around is to define NOMINMAX first to prevent windows.h from polluting the namespace.

- Modern windows is perfectly capable of arbitrary-length file-paths, but ships by default with a 260-character filepath limit anyway, "to preserve backwards compatibility with older software that expects that limitation to be enforced". To get correct behavior you have to hand-modify your registry; otherwise you find out about this limitation when you go to unzip a .zip file and the unzip mysteriously fails even though the .zip file is valid.

These are all defects that other OS's simply don't suffer from, either because the other OS's were designed correctly from the beginning, or because the people in charge of the other OS's long ago took the hit (in short-term breakage) and fixed the problems rather than letting them linger forever to preserve backwards compatibility.

All Windows developers (good and bad) have to deal with these issues, probably forever, and every line of code they add to work around these problems has to be supported and debugged and tested as well, hence the damage compounds.

Before Trump, it was a cultural norm that a President of the United States was expected to follow ethical and moral guidelines as well as laws; not only because anything less would be dishonorable and a disservice to his country, but also because otherwise he would pay a steep political price for his unethical behavior. Trump's most significant political innovation has taken the form of figuring out how to convince a plurality of the American public that the only real standard for Presidential behavior is "whatever you can get away with".

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?

Right now, we have AI models that are good enough, what we need is for someone to focus on making them affordable, because even the Enterprise level for Github Copilot doesn't let you do anything remotely resembling the level of usage I was at before they changed their business model. I used to talk to Copilot all day long and I didn't really do anything manually anymore, with excellent results. It coded a lot better than I ever did and since it freed me from mundane work I could focus on making an excellent OOP architecture with great performance and security. Including refactoring legacy code to bring it up to the level of quality you can get in minutes. Now instead of minutes everything takes me entire weeks. Ah the joys of old-fashioned artisanal coding. After 3 years I barely know how to code anymore.

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

Lead, arsenic, hexavalent chromium, mercury all sorts of nasty stuff. A lot of Chinese stainless steel is just a bunch of scrap metal alloyed into something that looks right. You never know if you get 201 stainless or some amalgamation of debased material.

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.

...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!

For generations the women in the family took care of the financials of the family. They kept budgets, wrote checks and balanced the books. Females are quite capable of doing math.

I think the problem is 1) families are going the way of the dodo. 2) virtue signaling is now included as a category to be balanced on the books for egurls, and that virtue signaling is disproportionally weighted against everything else. Gotta spend a lot on clothes and travel for your instas so you can pull a whale that doesn't exist and wouldn't want you even if he did.

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.