Serious question: at what point will it be worth it for the tech companies to investt directly into Taiwan's defense from a Chinese invasion?
With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, wouldn't it make sense to buy Taiwan some AA systems and coastal artillery, just to deter an invasion a little more and hence secure their investment?

What you are describing is, sadly, simply 'cognitive dissonance' at work. All our brains really, really dislike having two contradicting things face off in their mind, especially if one of them has a lot of emotional baggage. So, instead of doing the correct thing and coldy evaluating which is true, the brain loves taking shortcuts and simply ignores the fact it doesn't like, or somehow starts making up stuff to justify the more deeply held belief.
That's why it is so hard to convince someone that they have been fooled by their sect leader, or that the are simply and plainly wrong about something.
Cognitive dissonance is very very important for understanding us humans. It takes a lot of mental effort to really keep an open mind.

While I am all for research in general, how is low-power non-ionizing supposed to cause any interesting problems? This just seems like anti-vax level paranoia nonsense.
Also - similar to vaccionations - we already should have a gazillion data-points about this, and surely any significant patterns would already have been identified.

Assuming that their comms use top-notch encryption, what's the point of interecepting another satellite's signal and eavesdropping it?

I, for one, prefer the general move towards having diagnosis of stuff on a spectrum instead of cramming people and symptoms in neat either/or boxes. We should all get used that many phenomena should always be accompanied with a scale. We should really use stuff like "I have aprox 0.1 autism, so it's not that bad".
Even inside the previous defintions of Asperger's and Autism, there was HUGE variance inside the diagnosis.

do you have more information on that (that isn't a whole book)?

I don't understand Whatsapp's business strategy. There are so many valid revenue streams...and they go with ads?
I'd go with:

server-side storage for old chat data, to clear up valuable cell phone storage space

let companys pay for using their name/domain name as a Whatsapp 'number' instead of a phone number

make their bot-access more streamlined and charge for it in a normal way (not like now)

Something I don't get: Why don't people, for starters, just install a single cheap mini-split (with a reverser valve, i.e. heating funtion) in some room? Each time it runs, it should heat up the home at least a bit, which in turn should make the old-school heating furnance's thermostat swtich 'on' less often, right?
Next season, you install another mini-split or two, and go from there?
Sure, it will probably not be as super efficient as a perfect 'heat pump' installation or whatever, but that could be off-set by smart meters or whatever.
But we really need some gradual way to ween ourselved of out fossil fuel addiction.

I wonder why the governments don't really seem to have an opinion on the matter. WFH comes with so many benefits for the population, iwth only arguable or minimal "cost" to business. Less traffic, more family time, less urbanization, overall better quality of life, more dynamic workforce, flexibility to do stuff during the day, and soo many other things.
Governments should - as far as I can see - be pushing WFH like crazy and adapt incentives to it!
I simply don't understand why they are not

I looked it up. With it was way more funtions!

I have to do a lot of SSH things from my phone. I use JuiceSSH which adds a row above the Android keyboard with some useful CLI buttons.
I didn't know about Hacker Keyboard. Sounds interesting, but would you recommend it in portrait mode, too? Is it really better than what JuiceSSH does?

Amongst the AI 'chatGPT' hype, I think people haven't celebreated the incredible progress that OCR has made recently. I don't know how exactly, but the OCR capabiities of these multimodal models is incredible. You can e.g. take a kind of blurry photo of a menu in a bar or restaurant, and ask for suggestions. Just the OCR aspect of that is omething that was completely outside of OCRs league just a few years ago.

And yet, as far as I am aware, the only important network equipment that we KNOW has had rather obvious backdoors built-in were from Cisco.
Of course running any equipment on your network requires that you trust it. But why should we, especially outsido if the USA, trust US equipment more than chinese one?
The only kind of secure solution is audited open source software. OpenWRT, as others have mentioned.
There was also a great CCC talk by Bunnie about what could be done to make hardware at least kind of verifyable:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.ccc.de%2Fv%2F38c3-ir...

Not to defend Big Oil, but it's obviously not them as such producing that CO2. (athough I bet the fossil fuel industry is not clean by any measure). It's their clients that burn the stuff.
The solution is painful but simple and straightforward: the price of fossil fuels should not just reflect the cost of getting it out of the ground. It has to reflect the damage it will do later on. That money has to be collected at the initial producer and spent on recapturing the CO2 or mitigating the damage. A Carbon Tax.
Most countries have schemes in place that if you i.e. import or produce a fridge, you are responible for it once it ends up as garbage. Usually, that entails paying NGOs and goverments to take care of the rubbish in the correct way decades down the line.
It's just logical to apply the same logic to fossil fuels.
But we as a society are still hooked on too cheap oil and gas. And we will have to pay for this eventually. The lack of a carbon tax is just kicking the can down the road.

We as a species really look and behave so much like some drug addict. We know oil is really bad for us, but it (short term, economically) feels so nice, so we need just oooone more hit / oil field.