Instead of headlights 2 feet off the ground, now we have overpowered searchlights (brighter = safer, amirite?) mounted 4 feet high, guaranteed to blind pedestrians and any shorter vehicle's driver.

What I don't understand is that the most desirable areas (home price, population growth) in the US are also very prone to natural disasters: floods in Carolinas, fires in S California, hurricanes in Florida, extreme heat in Texas and the southwest. Meanwhile, Great Lakes / rust belt area does not get many disasters, still has seasons, has access to fresh water, and yet, cities/areas populations are slowly decreasing or staying flat.

WTF. I knew AI shortens your attention span, but there was the Humane AI pin 2 years ago, and company then bricked all of their devices last year.

How about a derivative of old meme, AI;DR.? Goes into fully aggressive category.

They will laugh and then keelhaul you.

Was waiting for my car, guy walks in and says to the manager "Hey, can you fix my girlfriend's car? It's, like, all fucked up" without elaborating further. As any public-facing job, they have some tolerance for bullshit and will probably ignore it.

IMO the "visual concept" is a weak argument - those are very abstract shapes.

each character conveys a word or concept rather than a single letter that has no inherent definition.

And each character consists of strokes, or even unjoined glyphs, making them more eqivalent to a word rather than a letter.

they even have words that are “swapable”

In languages that I know, order of compound words mostly matters but order of words in a sentence can change a lot. In Ukrainian and Russian, it could be used for emphasis without tone, e.g. "она пошла домой" (she went home, neutral), "домой она пошла" (she went home), "пошла она домой" (she walked home). But in English, at least in conversational, non-contorted way, word order has to be preserved.

alphabets (as those are based on sound)

Well, yes, but, actually, no. Alphabets co-evolved with pronunciation. While Ukrainian and Belarusian (AFAIK) are very close phonetically to written text, Russian has a lot of a-o sound swaps, and English, in addition to a = æ and the th sound is... Well, you just have to know how to pronounce every word because they could derive or be borrowed from Spanish or French or any other latin-script language, but for some reason they keep the original spelling.

Lyrics in songs while trying to talk to someone or read something. Have to turn the music down or off. Maybe has to do with English being my second language, but I can process only one stream of audio information at once.

Not just mechanical stress, but sugars and carbohydrates in those foods feed the bacteria in the mouth, whose byproducts damage the enamel. Few people are blessed with teeth that withstand it, or mouth flora that is non-damaging, but there is no natural selection for that... Because we have dentistry, thankfully.

"The future" being 59,000 years ago! Neanderthals drilled cavities to treat a toothache

German and Russian?! Maybe to a person not at all familiar with either Germanic or Slavic languages, but they are not as closely related at the other 2 pairs.

Curiously enough, spoken Farsi sounds like Russian to me (I cannot understand it, but it must have the same sounds, phonemes, or pauses, not sure), and I am fluent in Russian.

I saw a little change from the beginning of the game/competition (or whatever they called it in the book) forward.

Oh, I clearly remember he gets worse. Starts out with noble intents to be the least like the upper class (gold?) and not harm anyone, by the end of the book, MC is happily slaying security guards and "lesser" personnel.

/uj

The "money spent on survival" is the standard deduction and deductions in general. Deductions are viewed as if you never made that money in the first place. Whether standard deduction should be larger is another question.

...made by developers with a special student/hobby account, only for a limited number of devices.

Half-assed "solution".

forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider

Whose CEO publicly stated that "Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses". Oh, the irony.

No vibe coding needed. Many years ago, my friend, a new yet overly-confident web developer, pulled the entire list of usernames and passwords from the back-end when the login page opened. It was to "check if password is correct faster".

(And yes, he stored passwords in plaintext)

Using tap water for cooling is such an idiotic engineering decision it feels like it was suggested by an LLM chatbot.

Power plants use water too, but they draw it from the nearby river or lake, recycle it through cooling towers, and/or dump it back out into the river or lake. Or course that has its own effects, but at least it's not depriving a nearby town of drinking water by existing.

Some years ago, mentioning Linux for daily non-gaming use:

Guy: "Installing Linux is complicated though"

Me: "It wasn't bad 10 years ago, and now it's as hard as clicking Next a few times, even faster than Windows"

Guy: "Well duh, you have ten years of experience installing it!"

Difficult to argue with this non-logic.

Edit: Author says GenAI was not used for code, see below.

Original comment, observing signs of GenAI project:

What's up with these brand-new "Discord alternatives" being cranked out en masse? Would be easier to contribute to XMPP or Matrix IMO.

Initial commit 14,203 files changed +2872320

AI? Or "i worked on this for 10 years and uploaded just now"? /s

Overabundance of emojis in description. Probably AI.

Would be cool to see if anyone manages to get it running.

Were you able to run it yourself? What.

Has been since 2018, and acquisition news caused quite an upset at the time.