I don’t think that’s the whole story. Like with all of their products, the primary goal of big tech here is to maximise engagement. More engagement means more subscriptions. People are less likely to keep talking to a chatbot that tells them they’re wrong.

The situation would probably improve somewhat if AI companies prioritised usefulness and truthfulness over engagement.

How about Real Humans/Äkta människor? It’s a Swedish show about androids. Good drama and acting. IMO better than the British adaptation, Humans.

If you l like J.K. Simmons, character development and science fiction, you should check out Counterpart, if you haven’t seen it already. It’s a solid spy thriller where the main plot device is a cool sci-fi concept.

Knowing anything about the story beforehand will tell you about this plot device, which is a bit of a spoiler for the first episode.

Just finished watching. I give it an 8/10.

On an emotional and psychological level, I thought the show led to a pretty satisfying conclusion. Viewers should not expect to have any off their questions about the sci-fi stuff or the intrigue answered, though. Too bad it was cancelled after one season!

But I can see why it didn’t gain a massive audience. It’s too slow and psychological for a lot of sci-fi fans, yet it has too much silly sci-fi stuff for fans of realistic psychological dramas. The Spanish parts with subtitles may also have put off a few English-speaking viewers.

Depends. If you use Google docs or the browser version of Office 365 (or whatever it’s called now) you’ll be fine. If you want to use an offline document editor, you’ll need to be technical enough to understand the difference between file formats like doc, odf and pdf.

If you receive a doc file, edit it in LibreOffice and send it back, the recipient might complain that the layout has shifted slightly.

If you need to be absolutely sure the recipient gets the document layed out exactly as you created it and they don’t need to edit it, exporting to pdf is a good option.

If you need to send or receive Excel/spreadsheet files you might have a bad time, I think. Though interoperability there may have improved since the last time I tried that sort of thing.

Before switching to Linux, download the Windows/Mac version of LibreOffice or OnlyOffice and see if it suits your needs. If not, it should be possible to run Office 365 on Linux using Wine or Winboat. However, Wine might not work or require too much tinkering for the average noob. Winboat should be more foolproof, but will increase the startup time of the application because you’re running it inside a Windows VM.

Just watched the first episode of Night Sky. So far it strikes me as a really good psychological drama about getting old. Not a lot of sci-fi stuff yet.

J.K. Simmons is a really good actor, especially by American standards. I’d say he’s on the level of a good Scandinavian or British actor.

Anyway, I might just have to binge this. Thanks for the recommendation!

Edit: The mysterious sci-fi stuff gets interesting around episode 4

Fun fact: every episode featured a musical performance so that The Young Ones could be classified as a variety show, which got then more funding.

Some shows you may not have heard of:

British comedy:

• The Young Ones - Absurdist British comedy about a group of students who live together.
• Bottom - More silly comedy with Rick Mayall and Adrian Edmondson who were also in The Young Ones. They play two loser roommates who can’t get a date. “Bloody lesbians!”
• The Office - IMO much better than the American adaptation. Ricky Gervais at his most painfully awkward.
• Little Britain - Quite possibly the greatest sketch show of all time. Very popular at the time, but some younger people haven’t heard of it.
• Peep Show - Mitchell & Webb of “Are we the baddies?” fame are roommates and frenemies who get into a lot of very awkward and painful situations.

American comedy

• Jack of all Trades - Bruce Campbell plays an American spy who is forced to work together with an attractive English spy on the fictional French occupied island of Pulau Pulau. The kind of cheesy fun you’d expect from Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell.
• The Comeback - Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe from Friends) tries to stage a comeback.
• The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret - David Cross plays the titular character who moves to Britain for business. Things only get worse from there.
• In the Know - Claymation by Mike Judge about an extremely progressive radio host.

New Zealand comedy

• New Zealand Today - Comedian and wannabe journalist Guy Williams covers some of the most important issues facing everyday New Zealanders.
• Wellington Paranormal - Two local police officers investigate paranormal cases in a semi-competent manner. A spin-off of the What we do in the Shadows movie.
• Flight of the Conchords - Two musicians from New Zealand try to make it in New York City.

Science fiction

• Lexx - Large parts of this show are a slog to get through. If you do, however, you’ll be rewarded with some unique and bizarre moments, like the Netherlands being eaten by a giant space ship.
• Travelers - Proves that great sci-fi does not need a massive budget or a lot of special effects. A team of time travellers tries to save the world.
• Murderbot - A security android gains sentience and free will. Decides to spend most of his time watching a cheesy sci-fi show.
• Alice in Borderland - A group of friends find that suddenly almost everybody in Tokyo has disappeared. They have to compete in a series of bizarre games to survive, a bit like in Squid Game. Season 3 was unnecessary.
• Counterpart - Solid spy thriller that revolves around a very interesting science fiction concept I’d rather not spoil.

Drama

• Waiting for the Out - A man deals with his daddy issues while teaching inmates about philosophy. Highly recommended if you’ve already seen Adolescence and Baby Reindeer and need more British Drama.
• Slow Horses - A team of MI5 (domestic British intelligence) misfits and outcasts save the day.
• SAS: Rogue Heroes - War drama that chronicles the creation of the (in)famous special forces unit.
• Cobra Kai - Could a Karate Kid spin-off be any good? The answer might surprise you!
• Landman - Extremely American/Southern/conservative gentleman manages the day-to-day business of running a company that drills for oil.

Dead satellites do add a much larger risk than satellites that can be steered, sure. If we stopped steering all our satellites right now, I believe it’d only take a few days before a collision occurred.

However, every satellite in orbit adds to the risk, especially if a chain reaction starts happening and it becomes very hard to avoid the shrapnel flying around. Or if a once-in-a-century-type solar flare takes out a bunch of satellites.

Edit: Basically, the best way to prevent Kessler Syndrome from occurring, is to keep the number of satellites in orbit below the threshold where it could occur.

There’s another problem that nobody mentions. Putting thousands of additional satellites into space would seriously increase the risk of Kessler Syndrome occurring.

Better to use winget, though. That way you don’t even need to bother with Edge’s initial setup screens.

I’d suggest getting Linux Mint or another distro with a large user base like Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse or Debian. That way if you do run into problems, there’ll be a lot of people online that can help you.

The main advantage of gaming-focused distros like Bazzite is that Nvidia’s proprietary drivers and Steam come pre-installed. However, if you’re a gamer and a streamer, you’re probably used to a little tinkering, so you should be able to install both of those by hand. (Both can be done through a GUI.) You might also get marginally better performance from these, but IMO this won’t be noticeable enough to be worth the trouble.

If you do choose to go with Mint, I recommend installing the Nvidia drivers through the “Driver Manager” and a newer kernel through the “Update Manager”.