Never ever, will I return to big tech.

However, having said that, never ever, will I regret having joined. It was an amazing journey.

This is a massive understatement. Russia has announced, and probably tested, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik . This is basically Project Pluto reloaded, but now as a Russian instead of a US missile.

I remember reading about Project Pluto some 25 years ago or so. It was terrifying to read about. And now Russia has realized it.

I don't know the chemistry, and whether that'll make more hydrocarbons available for creating Jet-A, but I do expect that there will be massive overproduction of gasoline - and if price is left to market demand, it'll drop.

It won't get cheaper than solar though.

Has any of the big ones released articles on their storage systems in the last 5-10 years?

Am growing tired of Ubuntu though. Just not sure where I should turn. I want a .deb based system. Ubuntu is pushing snaps too heavily for my liking.

The Shockwave Rider was also remarkable prescient.

Funnily enough, I've saved instructions for ChatGPT to always challenge my opinions with at least 2 opposing views; and never to agree with me if it seems that I'm wrong. I've also saved instructions for it to cut down on pleasantries and compliments.

Works quite well. I still have to slap it around for being too supportive / agreeing from time to time - but in general it's good at digging up opposing views and telling me when I'm wrong.

Here, a friend and I created ourselves a "bubble". My family and his family hanged out with each other. My kid was playing with his kid. We went on long forest walks, with the kids, and they could roam and play.

We didn't have contacts with lots of others, and if we did, we stayed away from each other for ~4 days or so, until we shared the same social bubble again.

Worked wonderfully well.

- Walked in a different aisle at a store. My daughter started going to the store alone from she was about 7.

- Talked with neighbours without parent. Uhm. That's just weird. I'm assume she was around 4? That's when we moved here..

- Made plans with friends, yeah, from she was around 5/6 or thereabouts.

- Walked/biked w/o parent: From 6/7, to/from school, and to friends.

- Built a structure outside: She's been part of building various structures in scouts.

- Sharp knife: Since she was about 6 or 7.

And now I realize I need to wag my hands a bit back and forth with all the 6-7 stuff.

Anyhow; one of the best things we did was ensuring she joined the scouts. Creates incredibly independent kids. I've seen threads on reddit where people are wondering if it's OK to leave the 9 year old at home alone for 30 minutes, and I'm wondering what kind of lunacy that is. My daughter has been capable of walking / biking home from school since she was 6 or 7, and proceed to make her own afternoon snack before we arrive home from work. She's been baking since she was 8. Making toasts, omelets and whatnot since the same age. Scouts taught her how to use a gas burner outside when she was about 8 or 9.

I mean; come on.

I'm not so sure the Morris worm was the turning point.

Email, Usenet and IRC was great.

Email, however, went dogshit due to spam. From simply having the office mail-server, everyone went to Gmail and Office, who didn't always want to accept legitimate email. Thus, encouraging more folks to move to it.

Now we're in a situation where everyone is "forced" to use crappy interfaces, email is htmlified shit, and more and more companies require you to use the official client. Which in the case of Office365 means a very, very crappy web solution if you're on for example Linux. IMAP is often simply turned off due to whomever decides security has decided that's a bad idea.

Mailing lists used to be great. But got broken in a variety of ways due to spam filtering among other things.

Usenet was great once upon a time, with internal newsgroups etc. That died too.

IRC was, and is, an excellent way of having instant messaging. Unfortunately it wasn't business friendly enough so only the geeks used it. It was a great way to coordinate, though.

I seldomly add much beyond such things though.

I ran a mailserver for thousands of people on a 486 DX 33Mhz. It had smtp, pop3 and imap. It was more than powerful enough to handle it with ease.

I had a Pentium 3 w/1GB of RAM, and it was a supremely capable laptop.

These days I have a a machine from 2018 or 2019, which I upgraded to 32G of RAM and I added an NVME drive in addition to the spinning rust earlier this year.. because firefox got (extremely, more than a minute to start the browser) sluggish due to an HDD instead of NVME.

Now, it's obvious that an NVME drive is superior, but it surprises me how incredibly lackadaisical we've gotten with resource usage. It surprises me how little "extra" we get, except ads that requires more and more resources. Sure, we've got higher resolution photos, higher resolution videos, and now AI will require vast resources (which of course is cool). At the same time, we don't get that much more utility out of our computers.