If you were a teen playind D & D in the mid-70s, you would be about retirement age now.

Colossus: The Forbin Project ?

In theory, that's an argument for adding a "bathroom break" button to groupware more than for RTO. Managers would get metrics to find employees who misuse the break button in excess of what labor law encourages employers to allow.

Ultimately, that depends on the nature of the position. Do you work call center or something else?

I'm in development, not operations, so my manager tends to be more accepting of my habit of dropping offline for an hour at a time to avoid the 23-minute interruption penalty associated with complex problem-solving.

The Texas grid came very close to collapsing* in the winter storm of 2021. It hasn't had a widespread, long-lasting failure since.

* in this case, collapsing means either a grid-wide outage requiring a "black start" or the grid suffering major physical damage that results in weeks-long outages or rolling blackouts. Texas's was able to survive without serioius physical damage or having to do a grid-wide "black start" by heavy load shedding. Much of the load shedding was planned/announced hours in advance, but some was unannounced or lasted much longer than planned (days instead of hours). Once the weather cleared up and fuel was able to get to the plants that were fuel-starved, the major parts of the grid came back up in a controlled and orderly fashion. There were no doubt some longer-lasting local outages but those were local issues, not grid-scale ones. Since then, the state has made its grid more resilient, so it should be able to withstand a similar situtation now.

Lower if I was writing new code that stretched my abilities, higher if I was doing code-monkey stuff that I dould do blindfolded with two hands tied behind my back.

I could "stretch" it if I had "breaks" like so: 160 hours one month, 200 the next, then back to 160 and so on, with weekends off all the way around.

My peak efficiency is lower now "because age."

Say an employee with attention deficit or sensory processing disorder uses Teams on a separate device as a way to improve productivity on their primary device. Refusal to accommodate these conditions can get an employer in trouble under the ADA and foreign counterparts. If you end up fired for this, ask an equality lawyer about your options.

Don't know about a refinery in every backyard, but there were lots of oil wells per square mile in parts of East Texas during the early oil boom:

Beaumont's Spindletop early 20th century oil wells

Apple had a culture of authenticity. Culture dies pretty hard in most cases. I think we will see the last of that culture dissipate, as it eroded so greatly under Cook and Ive. Then the extractive, enshittifying corruption will spread from Apple, too.

There really was something, that began with Jobs and Woz. It wasn't perfect, and Jobs had a way of twisting ethical stances in ends-justifying-means sophistry. But Steve Jobs would never have prostrated before Trump, proffering a solid gold token.

Oh, you want profit? This is a surveillance spyware wrapper around the entire MacOS user experience - so if you thought Microsoft's Copilot Recall was invasive monitoring, you haven't seen anything yet.

If Apple won't monetize a user panopticon and partner with governments to do it, OpenAI will be right there, to take the cash.

I will argue against strict adherence to this statement. Gnome applications written to the project guidelines have become very fine, since the introduction of GTK-4 and libadwaita. I prefer many of these to their equivalents on MacOS.

It's true that most of these fall into a general category of "utilities", and that Windows enjoys a broader ecosystem driven by commercial incentive. But Windows programs are hardly "better' for this, and the widely varied usability is generally sub-par compared to level that's become norm for Gnome/Adwaita software.

Some customers may not be able to move their data off-prem without violating existing contracts or the law.

I guess they will have to go with Office 2024 LTSC or go non-Microsoft. Even that will go unsupported in 2029.

A bully club, a taser, a pepper-spray gun, or even just a guard who is much bigger and stronger than any unarmed attacker* is better than an unarmed guard who is not strong enough to take down the attacker with brute strength or special skills.

* bonus if the guard knows how to fight well

Chrome Web Store and addons.mozilla.org already implement "extensions".

A "page" is an HTML document retrieved through an HTTP or HTTPS URL. I think PPH is proposing enforcing a stricter same-origin policy. Instead of CORS, the document's origin server would have to act as a proxy to retrieve any third-party resources needed by the client-side script.