Couple of years ago I bought a FairPhone 4. It has replaceable battery, and almost everything else. I am not sure about guarantees, but the company is still supporting previous versions. It can be opened without tools for battery and sim card access, and the rest just needs one screwdriver. Unless it gets stolen or seriously broken, I hope to keep it for 5 or 10 years more. Extra bonus is their policy of fairness, taking care where they source their materials and components from.

Also from the Finnish news: The police is investigating this as a crime, the ship is being held back both for the criminal investigation, and now also for a private suit from the cable owners. 9 members of the crew are forbidden to leave the country (a bit less severe than getting arrested). They have found traces of a dragging anchor that are over 100km long, and the anchor itself right where the ship was stopped. Even if they can not prove it intentional sabotage, the ship owner is still responsible for the damage it caused. The authorities are carefully not blaming Russia, at least until they have all their evidence laid out. It may be difficult to prove Russian influence. But there is not much question that it was this ship that broke the cables, and it sure doesn't look like an accident.

Once upon a time programmers struggled with writing machine code. Then some clever people came up with a system for specifying what you needed in almost plain English, and the computer would do the rest. It was called COBOL, and coding was never quite the same. But still, programmers were badly needed, and once everyone was on board with these newmodern "plain English" ways of coding, the requirements just escalated so we still had more than enough work to do. After COBOL, ALGOL, and FORTRAN, there came new and improved languages, and yes, the machine coding guys were a dying bunch. But there always was work for people who could make computers do the things that were needed. I guess it will be the same this time...

Could we please get a maximum noise limit on cars, motorbikes, and scooters. At least within city limits.

I have not seen a single case where daily micromanagement meetings contribute anything. Except frustration.

Now that I am (semi?)retired, I have decided not to accept any work that involves such.

When making an item for yourself, like the kayak paddle in the article, it makes good sense to use your own body measurements as a starting point.

I have heard of a modern harpsichord maker, who starts every instrument by defining the inch for that instrument. If I remember right, it was the width of the wide ("white") key. Everything else was derived from that with geometric methods, so the proportions of the instrument came out right.

I have read that in the middle ages, most European cities had engraved some (local) standard measurements in the walls of the city hall. That was good enough when there was not big need to standardize things. But today things are more international. A German M6 nut is going to fit on a Chinese M6 bolt, without any big discussion about the thread pitch etc.

Long time ago there was a movement to explain what the computer should do, in more or less plain English instead of mysterious codes. It was called COBOL. It, and other high-level languages of that time did indeed change coding a lot. But the need for programmers did not go away, at all.

The real art of programming includes being aware of different failure modes, error handling, and considering malicious user input, as well as a deep understanding of what the program is supposed to do, and finding an acceptable compromise between the clients vague specs and what is technically possible. Maybe an AI can some day handle all that, but not in the near future.

Bet most of you have never heard of it, but my first computer was a Telmac 1800, built from a Finnish kit. Loosely based on RCA's Cosmac. Running on a RCA 1802 processor, with 2kb of memory (and room for another 2kb, if someone can use so much), audio cassette tape for storage, a lousy keyboard, and using an old TV for display, all of 64 pixels wide. Me and my dad soldered it together somewhere around 1975. Later we got an extension board with 16kb memory, and a better display, 16x64 characters, and a Tiny Basic interpreter. Soon after that, I dived into machine code... At a time I had nightmares directly in hex.

The phone system must know the actual number where the calls come from, as well as the "official" one the scammers fake. If the phone could display both of them, it would be trivial to block or ignore calls that look suspicious.

According to a graph at https://ourworldindata.org/gra... Nigeria is expected to have some 733M people in 2100, way behind China (1060M) and India (1450M). Of course such predictions are full of uncertainties.

Naturally a "software tool", with enough buzzwords like AI and blockchain, must be so much better than a few experienced analysts.

Mister President,
do we really have to work *every* Wednesday?

If everyone is required to give quick feedback after reading a post, the system would have a lot of data. Bit like the moderation here on slashdot. The system could learn to predict your opinion of a post based on who has recommended or disliked it. You could set your reading threshold according to your mood. This could easily lead into bubbles of like-minded people reading only the same kind of stuff, but the system could add some opposing views that have got very positive ratings.

The article assumes a "super intelligent" AI that "could feasibly hold every possible computer program in its memory at once", and then concludes that we can not control it. Sure, if you make impossible assumptions, you get impossible results. That is like assuming we have an all-powerful and all-knowing god, and asking how mere humans could control such a thing.