What did anyone expect? I think this is literally the central purpose of this: to make sure the population is less well-informed so they can be ruled more easily.

I really used to think self-declared western liberal democracies were better than this. I don't anymore.

I think there are free software devs (e.g. KDE) who livestream their work now too already.

What now?

With free software, I can just modify my client to tell any backend that I'm over 18 or over 21 or whatever the highest age bracket is. The backend is, as I understand, supposed to then take that claim at face value and deliver to me the version that is intended for adults.

There are many problems with the entire thing, but this one in particular is a non-issue.

No, but an SSD really does make the computer a lot faster, no matter the OS.

It wouldn't be any different if you did the same with a human brain (with the memory capacity of ChatGPT):

"Human, read and memorize this giant pile of written text, which is a mix of things on the Internet, almost every book ever written, and such things."

"OK, have done that."

"Now, based on what you've read, tell me: Who is Barack Obama?"

"Barack Obama is a man born in 1961 who was the US president from 2009 to 2017. [... other facts about Obama that were somewhere in the training data]"

"OK, and who was Konrad Adenauer?"

"Konrad Adenauer was the first federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. [... other facts about Adenauer that were somewhere in the training data]"

"OK, what's the current date and time?"

"No idea. How am I supposed to know THAT?"

oddly enough all these things have repeatedly appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in my lifetime, e.g. titlebars on Windows became transparent with Vista, then stopped being so in, I think, Windows 8?

Hasn't yet.

Is becoming, yes. There are still plenty of opportunities to stop it provided that the democratic process remains somewhat functional and governments have not gone into "we are the rulers, we decide whatever we want, screw the will of the people" mode yet.

I don't have the answer on how far on the path toward that aforementioned mode we are. :(

Do speedometers even measure such low speeds with anywhere near that precision?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese-eating_surrender_monkeys

Have you ever played a Pokémon battle frontier/tower?