There is a thing around conflation of "galaxy" and "solar system": I remember Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX many years ago, saying humanity would move out into the galaxy in the near future, and then mentioning Mars in the same breath.

Neither's happening in 5 years, though.

I didn't even catch that today's Squardle was all from the top keyboard row... Usually takes me an hour at least, so well done on the speed achievement.

And if we were supposed to be grateful to the machines for being here at all, how would that work? /end

So you can see how the Architect might have... massaged the truth when he told Morpheus: if he knew the machines had saved us, would he have supported the War? The Zion project, the search for Neo, the building of the eighth Matrix: it all hinged on a human resistance to machine domination. 10/

Billions of lives were lost to famine as the harvests failed. The machines got their first fusion reactor running just in time, but they had their own scaling issues; when they offered to house what was left of humanity in return for our brains as processing substrate, we jumped at the chance. 9/

They were wrong. It didn't take long for the bots to scrape every atom of titanium off the hulls of these satellites, and react it with oxygen; upper-altitude winds did the rest, and in maybe ten years there was a layer of white paint a few atoms thick, a hundred miles up in the sky. 8/

So at this point there were a whole pile of satellites in orbit around Earth, thousands of 'em, partially made of titanium; Rich Asshole and his team didn't think that would be a problem as his nanobots were looking for particles of titanium, not big hunks multiple feet across. 7/

(I keep referring to this asshole as "he"; we don't have a name any more, I expect he managed to scrub every bit of coverage he could find before the end came. All we know is that he was an overconfident man, which kinda fits the profile of other rich assholes of the time.) 6/

Of course he didn't wait for approval or research, he just sent up a test probe of replicating nanobots which would deploy into a cloud around a hundred miles up, and start pulling whatever particles of titanium they could find left in the atmosphere. 5/

Some Rich Asshole had the idea that if you could somehow harvest the trace amounts of titanium left behind, you could create titanium dioxide which is a brilliant white. Paint the skies with enough white and you'd reflect the Sun's rays back, cool the planet, Big Problem solved. 4/

And it was one of the Big Problems of the time (aside from, of course, the thinking computers and what to do about their rights and privileges).

Now, every now and then a heavy-metal asteroid comes streaking through the atmosphere and leaves those metals in the skies as it burns up. 3/

See, two hundred years ago the world wasn't frigid and barren: it was baking in far too much heat. Burning millions of years of fossil carbon in the span of 200 years had made a blanket of CO₂, trapping the Sun's infrared; they called it "the greenhouse effect", "climate change", what have you... 2/

It's happened before: the eastern seaboard collapse of the 90s was a single substation fire that shed its load to its neighbor, which failed due to overload, and shed to its neighbor...

I might still have the mashup I hacked together, of Brick over the instrumental from Lavigne's Girlfriend, if that sounds of interest.

I vaguely recall it works surprisingly well.

"Other Stories" at the bottom had a headline that stopped me for a second: "£3,000? Inside the hot market for discounted perfume"

Typical FT fare, right.

Until I re-read, and it actually says "discontinued"...

You assume they didn't turn off the backups for "cost savings".

And we all know the language the LLMs "know" best is JavaScript, so best of luck cashing in your $undefined social security checks.