Exactly, stuff like this will just drive more people to the extreme right. Great job...

And the company owners do not walk or have to deal with customers.

I get the sentiment, but in this time and age and with the internet, I think the information most likely to be at risk of being destroyed or censored is the one that is not commonly available, or in the hands of law enforcement.

A fascist government will more likely effectively prevent creation of new dissenting works, than suppressing existing ones.

One notable software business professional interviewed by RBC thought that the West’s decision would “adversely affect the life of the developer community, mutual trust within it, and therefore the quality of the product.”

It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.

In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.

While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.

My shower thought since I watched Star Trek: In a world where universal translators are ubiquitous, do babies even need to learn any common language, or do they each develop individual languages and let the UT handle the rest?

UT translating baby noises into articulate language, should have been in an episode.

I have nothing against any meta search engine, they are very useful, and I use them primarily as well.

However, they are not a true alternative, because they depend on third-party services. The same as Invidious is a very useful, but also not an alternative to YouTube itself, just a different user interface.

The best "server-side" anti cheat mechanisms online is streaming the game, and I am sure that eventually some talented developers are able to even write some aim bot (or more) for that.

Competitive games need a fully controlled environment. Doing it online with random unknown people should not be taken as serious as they currently do.

Alot about video games is not standardized. To be competitive all players should have the same hardware, internet connection, etc. So that it is actually individual skill that is measured, not just the size of players wallet.

But even then, developing skill takes alot of practice and time, which also, in our current system, can be converted into money. There just is no fair competition here anyway. Still many people believe in meritocracies...

Tesla's CEO; The Inspiration For Tony Spark

Elon "Baby-Brain" Musk as the inspiration of "Tony Spark" the cheap knock-off Tony Stark.

There is no such big differences between a light emitting (LED) and a light receiving diode (photodiode), they are just the reverse of each other. In fact photodiodes can even emit light, but very inefficiently. Same in reverse, LEDs can also detect light, just badly.

It seems like most efficient energy conversion methods can be used in both directions.

These radio telescopes don't transmit anything at all, they listen to radio waves coming from the cosmos. Much like a normal telescope doesn't transmit light.

If you invert the flow of the electrons, a receiver becomes a transmitter.

Speakers can become bad microphones and vice versa. Pretty sure that a radio telescope is a very bad transmitter for human music, but it could be possible with some changes...

Well, you and I just have a different understanding of "search engine" then. For me a search engine is something that doesn't forward queries to third parties.

Which other trustworthy search engines are there? And I don't mean some different frontend or a meta search engine like ddg, sp, kagi, searx(ng), etc... that mostly just use googles, bings or even yandex and beidu results?

Ages ago I configured and hosted yacy for myself, but that was a different time... Are there any real alternatives? With mayor internet companies like cloudflare, social media sites and many others restricting the access to the net and information, searching becomes more and more impossible if you aren't a huge corporation...