The geo-politics of climate geo-engineering is set to become a thing. A good example is the recent finding that tweaking the Californian climate to lower temperatures would likely result in heatwaves in the EU.

It's as though we're running out of different ways to find out we all share the same atmosphere.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/21/climate-engineering-off-us-coast-could-increase-heatwaves-in-europe-study-finds

Some EU officials know nothing about how technology works but know what they want. And they're on the verge forcing technology companies to make everyone much less safe by destroying strong encryption and eviscerating personal privacy.

https://netzpolitik.org/2024/client-side-scanning-chat-control-is-pure-surveillance-state/

(Tweaked to be clear it's not all EU officials...)

“As a rule software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications. Generally, many uses and many failures are required before a product is considered reliable. Software products, including those that have become relatively reliable, behave like other products of evolution-like processes; they often fail, even years after they were built, when the operating conditions change.”
— David Parnas et al

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/78973.78974

I'm blown away by how good introductory programming resources are nowadays. I tried out the JS / TS / regex / sql stuff on executeprogram.com and it's just way better than anything that existed 20 years ago. Likewise for PHP stuff at https://laracasts.com/. I don't love that it's video but, even so, it's much more beginner friendly than a ruby or perl book from 20 years ago.

See also, Julia Evans's work for systems, as well as https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ for a not quite beginner text, etc.

How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT:

https://danluu.com/seo-spam/