I think that Starlink covers a lot of disaster scenarios.

More AI datacenters being planned.

“I think we’ve done a lot of damage with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative,” Huang said.

I mean, part of the role of science fiction is to try to look at the future as technology changes it. Not all of it is hard sci-fi, but I wouldn’t across-the-board discount sci-fi. A lot of changes have been in sci-fi before reality.

There are some products out there that do cater to people who want a physical keyboard on their smartphone today. It’s not the norm, but if you’re frustrated over it, it might work for you.

Amazon has a lot of portable Bluetooth keyboards that can basically collapse down into a pocket. Those are generally designed to be used at a table, though, not in a Blackberry-style thumb keyboard sense. I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen a few of the latter that can clip to a phone, though.

while visiting family in LA I saw a robot waiter which both (optionally) took orders and would serve as a mobile food/plate tray.

Yeah, I’ve run into these. That being said, I’d call them currently a novelty…but I also remember when using touchscreen kiosks for ordering instead of cashiers was a rarity.

There was some similar project that the UK was going to do, run an HVDC submarine line down from the UK to Africa.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco–UK_Power_Project

The Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project is a proposal to create 11.5 GW of renewable generation, 22.5 GWh of battery storage and a 3.6 GW high-voltage direct current interconnector to carry solar and wind-generated electricity from Morocco to the United Kingdom.[1][2][3][4] Morocco has been hailed as a potential key power generator for Europe as the continent looks to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.[5]

If built, the 4,000 km (2,500 miles) cable would be the world’s longest undersea power cable, and would supply up to 8% of the UK’s electricity consumption.[6][7][8] The project was projected to be operational within a decade.[9][10] The proposal was rejected by the UK government in June 2025.

Moore also noted its upcoming ID1 facility in Idaho, which is scheduled to come online in mid-2027. However, he warned that it will be 2028 before we see “real output, meaningful output,” in its DRAM supply chain.

Also, another thing to keep in mind: he’s going to be citing Micron’s target timeline for getting that new plant up and running. And I’m sure that they aren’t dragging their feet on that, probably not a lot of room to shave time off in any other areas if there’s a holdup of any sort. If there are any form of production hitches or problems getting it running, that’ll push things back further.

Well, if vinyl could come back, I suppose MiniDiscs can too.

Context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Gate

Well, @[email protected] reports claiming it with his tongue, so if enough people follow his example, I’d hope occasionally.

EDIT: Apparently a possibility that’s already been considered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Gate

Since the sculpture was expected to be outdoors, concerns arose that it might retain and conduct heat in a way that would make it too hot to touch during the summer and so cold that one’s tongue might stick to it during the winter.

“What this tomato needs is some tomato sauce.”

Dice 'em both, cook 'em together and eat them both.

Tomato and potato work together, so I figure that totato and pomato should too.

I have never used Arch. And it may not be worthwhile for OP. But I am pretty confident that I could get that thing working again.

Booting into a rescue live-boot distro on USB, mount the Arch root somewhere, bind-mounting /sys, /proc, and /dev from the host onto the Arch root, and then chrooting to a bash on the Arch root and you’re basically in the child Arch environment and should be able to do package management, have DKMS work, etc.

Boot into a live boot install of some distro on a USB drive.

I think another major factor for Linux gaming beyond Valve was a large shift by game developers to using widely-used game engines. A lot of the platform portability work happened at that level, so was spread across many games. Writing games that could run on both personal computers and personal-computer-like consoles with less porting work became a goal. And today, some games also have releases on mobile platforms.

When I started using Linux in the late 1990s, the situation was wildly different on that front.

Context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC

An ultra-mobile PC,[1] or ultra-mobile personal computer (UMPC), is a miniature version of a pen computer, a class of laptop whose specifications were launched by Microsoft and Intel in Spring 2006. Sony had already made a first attempt in this direction in 2004 with its Vaio U series, which was only sold in Asia. UMPCs are generally smaller than subnotebooks, have a TFT display measuring (diagonally) about 12.7 to 17.8 centimetres (5.0 to 7.0 in), are operated like tablet PCs using a touchscreen or a stylus, and can also have a physical keyboard.

considers

I’ve been in a couple conversation threads about this topic before on here. I’m more optimistic.

I think that the Internet has definitely democratized information in many ways. I mean, if you have an Internet connection, you have access to a huge amount of information. Your voice has an enormous potential reach. A lot of stuff where one would have had to buy expensive reference works or spend a lot of time digging information up are now readily available to anyone with Internet access.

I think that the big issue wasn’t that people became less critical, but that one stopped having experts filter what one saw. In, say, 1996, most of what I read had passed through the hands of some sort of professional or professionals specialized in writing. For newspapers or magazines, maybe it was a journalist and their editor. For books, an author and their editor and maybe a typesetter.

Like, in 1996, I mostly didn’t get to actually see the writing of Average Joe. In 2026, I do, and Average Joe plays a larger role in directly setting the conversation. That is democratization. Average Joe of 2026 didn’t, maybe, become a better journalist than the professional journalist of 1996. But…I think that it’s very plausible that he’s a better journalist than Average Joe of 1996.

Would it have been reasonable to expect Average Joe of 2026 to, in addition to all the other things he does, also be better at journalism than a journalist of 1996? That seems like a high bar to set.

And we’re also living in a very immature environment as our current media goes. I am not sold that this is the end game.

There’s a quote from Future Shock — written in 1970, but I think that we can steal the general idea for today:

It has been observed, for example, that if the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves.

Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.

That’s just to drive home how extremely rapidly the environment in which we all live has shifted compared to how it had in the past. In that quote, Alvin Toffler was talking about how incredibly quickly things had changed in that it had only been six lifetimes since the public as a whole had seen printed text, how much things had changed. But in 2026, we live in a world where it has only been a quarter of a lifetime, less for most, since much of the global population of humanity has been intimately linked by near-instant, inexpensive, mass communication.

I think that it would be awfully unexpected and surprising if we would have immediately figured out conventions and social structures and technical solutions to every deficiency for such a new environment. Social media is a very new thing in the human experience at this scale. I think that it is very probable that humanity will — partly by trial-and-error, getting some scrapes and bruises along the way — develop practices to smooth over rough spots and address problems.

Consider, say, the early motorcar, which had no seatbelts, windscreen, roof, suspension, was driven on a road infrastructure designed for horse-drawn carts to travel maybe ten miles an hour, didn’t have a muffler, didn’t have an electric starter, lacked electric headlights and other lighting, an instrument panel, and all that. It probably had a lot of very glaring problems as a form of transportation to people who saw it. An awful lot of those problems have been solved over time. I think that it would be very surprising if electronic mass communication available to everyone doesn’t do something similar.

I don’t know if I can count this as mine, but I certainly didn’t disagree with predictions of others around 1990 or so that the smart home would be the future. The idea was that you’d have a central home computer and it would interface with all sorts of other systems and basically control the house.

While there are various systems for home automation, things like Home Assistant or OpenHAB, and some people use them, and I’ve used some technology that were expected to be part of this myself, like X10 for device control over power circuits, the vision of a heavily-automated, centrally-controlled home never made it to become the normal. I think that the most-widely-deployed piece of home automation that has shown up since then is maybe the smart thermostat, which isn’t generally hooked into some central home computer.

I mean, the Newton hadn’t done well. The Pippin hadn’t done well. The eMate hadn’t done well. What were the odds of Apple doing a really successful new consumer electronics product?

I wouldn’t.

Depressions aren’t a zombie invasion or a nuclear war. They’re a reduction in economic activity. Some percentage of people get laid off, are out of work for a time.

If you get laid off, you’re probably going to want a financial buffer, and buying stuff ahead of time is most likely not a great idea. Better to have the buffer.

If you don’t get laid off, not likely a lot you can do to prepare.

I’d also add that while depressions affect a large area, it’s entirely possible for particular areas to see economic decline even if the country as a whole is seeing rising growth. Like, say a major employer in a small town goes out of business.