Everyone here is reading the comments page of a Slashdot article, speculating about what will or won't happen at an upcoming Apple WWDC.

I think we can take 'incredibly dull lives' as a given.

That seems like short-term thinking. A better approach would be to figure out how to do the future-prediction optimizations in ways that malware cannot exploit, so we can reap the benefits of the optimizations.

Hell, what stops one of these rich people from using his money to take care of those who need it now? The only one who tries is Gates, and he gets routinely villified for trying.

I'd wager very damned few apps are ever distributed via sideloading. meta makes Facebook and Messenger available via sideloading, mainly to get around some locked-down non-Alphabet Android devices, but for the vast majority of users, if it's not on the default app store on their device, it might as well not exist.

these treacherous profiteering companies will be broken up, and their execs will go to jail, IG Farben-stylee. Personally, I can't wait for Zuck to go cool off in the slammer.

The difference is that tech companies used to feel like they had to at least maintain a polite fiction that they were ethical and in some way serving a greater good. Now we're in the Trump/Musk era, where being unethical is considered morally superior to being pointlessly encumbered by ethics/morals/empathy/etc, so there's no need to pretend.

I swear to God, if I ever meet someone in the flesh who tells me something or someone has been slammed, blasted, destroyed, torched, trashed or grilled, I'm gonna punch them in the face.

It's impossible to read any headline without those toddler English-level verbs used and abuse all the fucking time these days. It's really annoying!

I doubt it can be done for even ten billion. I mean, sure, you can get a spaceship into orbit and point it out Mars. We've done that enough times now. But putting people in that ship and having them arrive at Mars without them being irradiated corpses, that's where the money will go. And then you've got to get them down and back up out of a non-unsubstantial gravity well, and again, get them back to Earth without them being irradiated corpses.

No way any of that can be done for ten billion. Ten billion is the number the project manager feeds to Congress hoping they'll buy the sunk cost fallacy when you come back five years later with a bill that's three or four times that high.

I think the hard part is surviving on Mars for any extended length of time without suffering severe radiation-induced illnesses. Heck, surviving even getting their and back has the same issue. We've basically never gone further than a week or so's round trip to the Moon, with only part of that outside of Earth's magnetic field. Now you're talking years (at least 2.5 years round trip), and while for no other reason than the sheer awesomeness of humans walking on Mars, there are vast technical and biological challenges. Any kind of shielding is going to add significantly to the spacecraft's mass, and we still build these things on the ground, even if we build them in modules.

None of it is impossible, but the costs, even for a nation like the US, are enormous, and ultimately will require more than just stripping NASA's other resources (which add enormous value on their own). With Trump basically, through intense idiocy, ignorance and malice, fucking the US economy over, those huge expenditures are going to take more than just turning NASA into the Mars guys at the cost of everything else.

fund NASA to the tune of $1bn.

Of course, your South African Nazi friend wouldn't profit from that, which is your main concern really.

You'd think so, but I've seen plenty of very good answers get downvotes as well, and if you look in the voting records you'll see certain SO accounts that simply carpet-bomb every question and every answer with a downvote, reputation costs be damned.

Why they do that, I don't know. Some weird form of trolling?

It might be a personal problem, but I suspect it might also depend on the category of questions the questioner asks. For example, a person asking a C++ question on StackOverflow might have a very different experience from a person asking a CSS question on StackOverflow, simply because the development communities associated with the two languages have different cultural assumptions and thus attract different types of answer-ers.

You're not wrong, but StackOverflow's methodology for handling this problem proved (in hindsight) to be inadequate, because it maintained the experience quality for established users at the expense of new users, and a site like StackOverflow needs both kinds of users to thrive.

A better mechanism might have been to allow repetitive newbie questions, allow people to answer them as well as they care to, and then have an asynchronous "garbage collection" background process (either human-based or automated) that digests the redundant newbie questions into improvements on the canonical ones, and/or collates them into a second tier of non-canonical questions that are deprioritized in the search results. That way the newbies get the help they are looking for ASAP (which is what will bring them back) rather than the pain of rejection, while the experienced users get a well-organized, non-redundant site experience (ditto).

Always remember this when you talk about a company's "success".

Probably a woke lunatic who believes in a spherical earth and heliocentrism. Doubtless the Administration has a Pentecostal pastor who believes in Creationism and the healing power of CO2 to run the agency.