I'd like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to "deal with" isn't "AI" (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniques...) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for "sounding convincing", without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humans' time will be wasted reading invented or counterfeit stories (with no easy way to tell); first-hand information will be harder to source and acknowledge by being increasingly diluted into the AI-generated noise.

I also haven't seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case: you end up typing more, for the sake of "babysitting" the LLM, and get more to read as a result (which is, again, aggravated by the fact that you are now given a single source/one-sided view on the matter, without citation, reference nor reproducible step to this conclusion).

Last but not least, LLMs are an environmental disaster in the making, the computational cost is enormous (in new hardware and electricity), and we are at a point where all companies partaking in this new gold rush are selling us a solution in need of a problem, every one of them having to justify the expenditure (so far, none is making a profit out of it, which is the first step towards offsetting the incurred pollution).

You can always give a shot at using a third party client (possibly acting as bridge for other/better protocols, like e.g. slidge.im>xmpp or the buggy matrix equivalent), but you need to keep in mind that they will all require you to authenticate (and remain authenticated) using a smartphone, and that usage of 3rd party clients is forbidden from WA's terms and conditions (which may lead to your account being blocked/deleted).

How about nextcloud with only the bare minimum amount of plugins? Filles alone is pretty snappy.

Pydio used to be called ajaxplorer and was a pretty solid and lightweight (although featureful) solution, but then they rewrote the UI with lots of misguided choices (touch controls and android inspired interactions on desktop devices) and it became so horrendous, heavy and clunky that I almost forgot about it. I wonder if they reversed the trend (but from the screenshots it doesn't look so).

Aren't they not the same thing at all?

Russia supplied 77 per cent of China’s purchases

Not exactly a surprise, then. And good luck for the Russian's arm industry bouncing back, considering its performance on the battlefield and its interleaving with western tech that it hasn't managed to decouple itself from since 2014. China's only taking a reasonable stance there.

and how much of this troubled history is linked to Java Applets/native browsers extensions, and how much of it is relevant today?

Yep but:

• it's one runtime, so patching a CVE patches it for all programs (vs patching each and every program individually)

• graalvm is taking care of enabling java to run on java

Or rather a Dunning Kruger issue: seniors having spent a significant time architecturing and debugging complex applications tend to be big proponents for things like rust.

Why? What's wrong with safe, managed and fast languages?

I agree with the sentiment and everything, but the whole gaming console industry has gone to crap after they started putting hard drives/storage in them with the goal of needing you to be online and not owning anything anymore. They are all equally despicable for that. Which makes emulation even more essential, just for preserving those games into the future when the online front will inexorably shut down.

I'm with you. Hg-git still is to this day the best git UI I know...

Well, if you have a GitHub account you can be notified about new releases with one click. And if you don't, just use the RSS like it's the 00's ;)

I've been on the prusa slicer side of things for a long time, and you won't see me arguing in favor of cura. That said, you should probably consider doing daily backups of your home folder, using something like Borg/restic which have great incremental and compressed backups (practically backing up TBs in seconds).

I have no idea what this is about, but was kotlin native considered here? And what ruled it out in favour of rust?

I've seen multiple JVM languages going the route of AOT/native compilation and now taking the spot of systems languages in some use cases (CLI utils, low footprint "cloud native" stacks, things requiring tight os-level integration) with often outstanding performance.

According to https://www.notebookcheck.net/ , a framework 13 with a Ryzen 7840U will run out of battery 22% faster than the macbook but will outperform the macbook by 85% on some benchmarks. I wouldn't pick the mac.

Like vscode except extensions work together and not against each other and you don't have to go on a wild hunt to have a cohesive environment :)

The problem I've observed with XMPP as an outsider is the lack of a standard. Each server or client has its own supported features and I'm not sure which one to choose.

That's a valid concern, but I wouldn't call it a problem. There are practically 2 types of clients/servers: the ones which are maintained, and which work absolutely fine and well together, and the rest, the unmaintained/abandoned part of the ecosystem.

And with the protocol being so stable and backwards/forwards compatible in large parts, those unmaintained clients will just work, just not with the latest and greatest features (XMPP has the machinery to let clients and servers advertise about their supported features so the experience is at least cohesive).

Which client would you recommend?

Depends on which platform you are on and the type of usage. You should be able to pick one as advertised on https://joinjabber.org , that should keep you away from the fringe/unmaintained stuff. Personally I use gajim and monocles.

They both qualify as "open, federated messaging protocols", with XMPP being the oldest (about 25 years old) and an internet standard (IETF) but at this point we can consider Matrix to be quite old, too (10 years old). On the paper they are quite interchangeable, they both focus on bridging with established protocols, etc.

Where things differ, though, is that Matrix is practically a single vendor implementation: the same organization (Element/New Vector/ however it's called these days) develops both the reference client and the reference server. Which incidentally is super complex, not well documented (the code is the documentation), and practically not compatible with the other (semi-official) implementations. This is a red herring because it also happens that this organization was built on venture capital money with no financial stability in sight. XMPP is a much more diverse and accessible ecosystem: there are multiple independent teams and corporations implementing servers and clients, the protocol itself is very stable, versatile and extensible. This is how you can find XMPP today running the backbone of the modern internet, dispatching notifications to all Android devices, being the signaling system behind millions of IoT devices, providing messaging to billion of users (WhatsApp is, by the way, based on XMPP)

Another significant difference is that, despite 10 years of existence and millions invested into it, Matrix still has not reached stability (and probably never will): the organization recently announced Matrix 2 as the (yet another) definitive answer to the protocol's shortcomings, without changing anything to what makes the protocol so painful to work with, and the requirements (compute, memory, bandwidth) to run Matrix at even a small scale are still orders of magnitude higher than XMPP. This discouraged many organizations (even serious ones, like Mozilla, KDE, ...) from running Matrix themselves and further contributes to the de-facto centralization and single point of control federated protocols are meant to prevent.

What do you believe is so unique about China's PV production that couldn't/haven't been reproduced by the rest of the world? I mean, other than the ability to undercut developed countries by ignoring externalities and the damage caused to the environment by the extremely polluting extraction and refining process...

Don't get me wrong, I'm as happy as the next guy for more renewable, but here we are cheering for the kleptocrats.