As a joke, that doesn't feel quite so far-fetched these days. (https://xkcd.com/353/)

(more seriously: I think both authors understand their markets and are savvy about delivering what they want, critics be damned)

It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.

I switched provider the other week, after the old one discontinued a discount. All I had to do was sign up with the new provider and provide the connection number. They organised everything else and my old provider _refunded_ me for part of an unused pro-rata month.

Suspicously easy.

It doesn't really matter if they did the right thing or not - enough people were looking to punish them regardless.

Cripes I wish people would explain who "we" is. "Flutter Foundation"? Which is "Flock" but not "Flutter"?

Always lacking in these conversations is a proper definition of "social media". Kids want to talk to their friends, many want to be social, so if we're going to talk about the dangers of social media we need to be specific. E.g. the problems with algorythmic content are entirely different to the issues of bullying and inappropriate direct messaging. Conflating them under a "social media is bad" banner doesn't help us build healthier, safer systems.

That depends entirely on the capture device.

I'm no economist, but inflation should reflect an increse in growth and productivity. The fact that these coins don't tend to consistently devalue might say something about how useful they are for doing the job of a real currency.

The real world is resistent to clean abstractions and abstractions are distressingly subject to change. What made your row unique today is quite likely to become non-unique in the days/months/years to come.

Always use surrogate keys. Your future self will thank you.

Constructing a ship of sufficient redundancy / self-repair capability that can carry embryonic life to another star seems like something we could achieve. The engineering problems seem hard but quantifiable, and the resources required are likely available. If humanity decided tomorrow that we needed to put "a human" on another planet, I think it could be done (sent) within a lifetime. (surviving there, another matter)

OTOH the scale of resources that would need to be deployed to begin construction of a Dyson sphere would seem to be immense, let alone the systems required to harness it for anything useful.