Is the prevailing advice still not to bother with self-hosting email?
Unfortunately, yes. Here's a fantastic blog post from someone who gave up on self-hosting last year due to the vast number of problems with self-hosting. The post also does a great job at pointing out why the death of self-hosting email is so bad in general, but still regrettably concludes that it isn't worth it in any scenario right now.
Maybe the Cuban president should ensure vital infrastructure can be maintained and holds an inventory of spares?
Something that'd be significantly easier to do if it weren't for the US's continued immoral blockade and sanctions? Cuba does not have the resources to maintain the plant purely on their own, and they can't hit a magic button that will suddenly let them find an abundance of spare tools and equipment to repair their infrastructure in a disaster scenario without wider access to international trade.
They're not, they've had the bZ4X for over around a year now. It's kinda mediocre but certainly not the worst BEV I've seen.
Even as an embedded C developer I use "idx" and "count" instead of "i". Not just because I'm a member of the "slightly longer but more descriptive names are better" gang, but also for searchability. If I'm trying to track down where an array is accessed in a loop, for example, "idx" is more likely to take me only to the results I'm looking for and not also the "i" in int8_t or whatever.
"left-wing"
A self-proclaimed "proud Democrat" that is a poor caricature of a milquetoast neoliberal is not left-wing, but I guess I shouldn't expect even the bare minimum of political literacy from WaPo.
Which apps are you using? I use Liftoff and have four instances added that I regularly browse, but I'm only logged in to two (because I only have accounts on those two). I haven't had problems browsing or sharing content on the instances I'm not logged into on this app and the links open in browsers just fine without a login wall for people I share with.
Going from $20 to $30000 clearly shows it has value
It has increased in price due to artificial scarcity and speculation, not on its merits as a payment system or technology. Even most dedicated crypto traders these days don't even try to pretend that the price is tied to it's underlying value as a system, they are well aware that the price is largely tied to being traded as a speculative asset. Price does not inherently correlate to underlying value, especially since I was never talking about monetary value to begin with and you bringing this up distracts from my point that it provides no additional broad systemic value as a platform.
I saw the value of bitcoin and the blockchain as a payment system in 2013
And yet it has failed to provide any real value in that front in over a decade of existence. Bitcoin itself and similar L1 blockchains are too horrifically inefficient and (aside from debatably Monero?) they haven't truly been any more private than traditional payment methods. L2 blockchains don't even help solve the problem of transaction speed/efficiency enough for widespread adoption, and other techniques such as sharding have problems of their own that harm viability as a valuable payment system. And none of this even touches on the instability in value of the currencies themselves - even "stablecoins" aren't safe, as we've seen from the collapse of several in recent years. The blockchain does not provide any broad value that is not already provided in better ways by other solutions that already exists - hence, "a solution in search of a problem".
It eludes you because you're a reasonable person who understands it's not necessary lol. Cryptobros and the blockchain are the very definition of "a solution in search of a problem" - a lot of great work has been put into this technology that sounds cool on the surface and that seems like it might be able to uniquely solve some problem, but they've yet to actually come up with anything of value (unless you see broad value in more efficiently scamming people or laundering money).
Shit, Microsoft docs are better than most other large companies with broadly used software even, not just random undocumented BS from smaller companies and products. In my experience, Microsoft's Xamarin docs are somehow often a better guide for Android development than Google's docs (good god are the official Android docs some of the hottest garbage that a company of Google's size and talent could put out), and I've yet to find a better general reference for any language or library than Microsoft's .NET documentation. I've seen a lot of people dunk on it for it's verbosity and/or "example bloat" but I love the length of their docs for breaking down different use-cases and giving examples of each, along with potential misuses and recommended alternatives.
That said, they do still have some garbage docs (like what OP is pointing out), but my general experience with their docs, especially for their larger/more mainstream products, has been surprisingly positive.
Am I missing a reason for such a change?
They wanted to fall in line with what all the Chromium-based browsers do.
That said, there is a way to get it to start asking you what to do with files again (though I don't remember how), but it still always saves the file to your Downloads folder (because that's what Chromium-based browsers do) which there is no option to change yet as far as I'm aware. To be honest, I'm not sure they ever will implement that as a feature, but I really hope they do because I hate having to go manually cleaning out my downloads when just letting me dump them to a temp dir would make life so much easier.
Oh boy, another AI CEO feigning concern about the development of AI in order to convince governments around the world to implement their regulatory capture schemes.
Yes, AI models will be used maliciously by companies and governments across the world, just like every other advancement in technology has been. Instead of creating an artificial barrier for new players to the field with no money while helping governments write the rules on what's acceptable in a model to block out others, we should be educating people on the potential dangers and biases of AI models and punishing actual malicious uses. I know it sounds like some "free market will punish bad actors" bullshit and I hate to tread down that path too heavily, but if the alternative is to allow early birds with big money to be the ones who write the rules governing themselves so that they can lock out everyone else, I'd much rather take the option that allows greater free access to this field that has so much potential to help humanity as well.