I'm excited about the future of the tablet form factors.

And arbitrator companies (some of which are explicitly for-profit) know the hand that feeds them.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/27/tech/openai-pentagon-deal-ai-...

A unified front from tech companies could have stood a chance, but there's too much money to be made and the imbalance of power is too great without departing the area of influence of the US government entirely (and then go where? China, UK, Australia, etc. are equally not shy of coercing commercial capabilities in pursuit of government goals, including military goals).

> "Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities..."

Congestion charges. Limited licensing for TNCs. Dedicated public or private holding areas rather than "milling about". All of these have solutions.

> Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks.

It is already best practice in urban design to separate cars that need to quickly transit an area without interacting with it into completely independent routes where there are no bikes or pedestrians, and combine transit/bikes/walking into livable mixed mode streets where cars are not allowed. NotJustBikes has many examples of this, most commonly around Europe.

> To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity.

This is what already happens in places that don't have usable, safe, or car-competitive transit, modulo autonomous, including currently most of North America. The solution to needing fewer cars -- self driving or not -- is investment in transit and in ground-up overhaul of existing cities to optimize for transit and deprioritization of cars.

Most stuff I do that is long term isn't that critical and gets broken into reasonable size phases; the closest one is planned in detail, the next one has no major open questions, and the rest have a brief summary of what will be accomplished / what is the goal of that phase only.

That gets rid of a lot of the lack of flexibility of waterfall, and it does happen that priorities change a lot and many projects don't get to the latter phases (often, by definition/priority, the less "immediate fire" ones).

My iPhones typically get a fresh battery around the 3-year mark, or whenever the battery health dips below 80%, and do a second tour of duty with someone in the family. In all cases so far, the OS goes out of support and apps stop working before the second battery degrades.

And, of course, serendipitous collaboration rarely happens when everyone is sitting with noise cancelling headphones, focusing on hitting their ambitious individual goals for the quarter/half/year.

Linux holds on to a negligible share of the overall desktop market OS, but it is marginally more popular among tech savvy people, which have plenty of disposable income, meaning the platform has steadily growing interest for malware authors and distributors despite its relatively low usage.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ambulance-response-ti...

The federal government shifts the responsibility to the provinces, the provinces in turn try to download as much as possible onto the cities. There's not enough money for everything on every level of the government.

This also reflects on 911/dispatch systems, where there indeed might not be easy visibility of when an ambulance might be available, and even then it could be preempted by a higher priority call -- although a heart attack has to be close to the top of the list.

There are also occasional weather events, like the storm two days ago, that cause a surge in demand (>300 crashes reported and many of them needed attending to).

When more people get their information calories from sources that are not books, what the books say becomes less relevant.