ForbiddenRoot

First I’ve heard of that.

It is indeed a new thing. For the reasons you’ve mentioned this was an option for enterprise customers for earlier versions of Windows as well, but this time they are making the option available to home consumers too. I can’t really see too many people paying for this though. Those who care will move on to Windows 11 (or whatever is out there by then) and others will simply keep running an unsupported / not updated OS. In all likelihood, MS will keep providing security updates for the latter for free in the end.

This is true. I work in a related field, and my company and almost all of its clients are falling over themselves trying to identify what can be already replaced with AI.

Systematically processes are being broken down to identify activities that are “cognitive” are can be done by AI, with the goal of eventually replacing the human workers with AI almost entirely for those tasks. All these companies, including mine, are super profitable for most part but that is apparently not enough, and everyone fears being left behind and their share price tanking if they don’t adopt AI too. So there’s a mad rush to get it done everywhere.

I personally know a few former colleagues of mine from our Sri Lanka subsidiary who have left the country over the last year or so. Some to Australia and few to the UK. They all were having a harrowing time before they left, especially one who nearly ran out of some life-saving medication for his kid. We managed to get a few months of supply over to him from India. But that near-miss really shook him up and he left Sri Lanka as quickly as he could.

There are still some senior folks there who are in denial over the situation. Most of these have generational wealth and are largely insulated from on the ground realities that the middle and lower income people have been facing. They kept reporting back incorrect information on the situation at the peak of the crisis and kept saying that the media is over-hyping the situation, because they were concerned that we might shut down our office there (which we had no plans to and in fact we gave increased allowances to our staff to help them with the crazy inflation).

I guess every country has their set of weirdos from each end of the political spectrum, and it makes the local / national news, at least on a slow news day.

But as someone from the other end of the world, I can honestly say I do not care that US Conservatives are no longer going to be eating “Frosted Flakes” (which sound like something no one beyond the age of 5 should eat anyways, and probably not any age actually).

“World News” indeed