I don't disagree with you, especially in the short term, but Noah Smith (economist at https://www.noahpinion.blog/) does have some eye-opening opinions on the industrial might of China, and what that could mean for USA influence if China wanted to push things. (All this assumes no one uses nukes, of course.)

I'm going from memory, so errors are probably mine, not Mr. Smith's. But, basically, wrt manufacturing, China is already where the USA was during / near the end of WWII. Even if we had the tech and raw materials, the USA would not be able to up with China's factories if it came to war. They could basically just keep throwing drones and bombs at the USA until we literally ran out of anything to defend ourselves with, much less fight back with. Even if much of the rest of the world's factories were on our side.

CHIPS act is one way the Biden admin was trying to restart strategic manufacturing in the USA. We'll see how that goes.

Education is one area where GenAI is having a huge impact. Teachers work with text and language all day long. They have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ideally, for example, they should "differentiate" for EACH and EVERY student. Of course that almost never happens, but second best is to differentiate for specific groups - students with IEPs (special ed), English Learners, maybe advanced / gifted.

More tech aware teachers are now using ChatGPT and friends to help them do this. They are (usually) subject area experts, so they can quickly read through a generated or modified text and fix or remove errors - hallucinations are less (ime) of an issue in this situation. Now, instead of one reading that only a few students can actually understand, they have three at different levels, each with their own DOK questions.

People have started saying "AI won't replace teachers. Teachers who use AI will replace teachers who don't."

Of course, it will be interesting to see what happens when VC funding dries up, and the AI companies can't afford to lose money on every single interaction. Like with everything else in USA education, better off districts may be able to afford AI, and less-well-off (aka black / brown / poor) districts may not be able to.

I think "interactive clipart" is a great description. You are, I believe, totally correct that (at least for now) GenAI can't do what professionals can do, but it can do better than many / most non-professionals. I can't do art to save my life, and I don't have the money to pay pros to make the mundane, boring everyday things that I need (like simple, uncluttered pictures for vocabulary cards). GenAI solves that problem for me.

Similarly, teachers used to try to rewrite complex texts for students at lower reading levels (such as English Learners). That took time and some expertise. Now, GenAI does it prolly many tens of thousands of times a day for teachers all over the USA.

I think, at least for the moment, that middle / lower level is where GenAI is currently most helpful - exactly the places that, in earlier times, were happy with clipart.

Am I correct in seeing this as the company is claiming that courts of law cannot require them to transfer control of an account from one user to a different user? This despite the fact that doing so has been fairly standard practice for years now?

Personally, I think the lawyers for The Site Previously Known As Twitter have a very weak argument. However, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, so there's also that.

Gentoo on my home computer. Started way back in the day when you had to recompile source RPMs on RPM-based distros to get CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language support. Debian language support was excellent, but I didn't enjoy always being 5 package versions behind, especially as fast as some software was being developed.

CJK isn't an issue anywhere anymore, but I stay on Gentoo because it has all the packages I want, and it doesn't force systemd on me.

Will be moving away from Ubuntu on my work computer because of all the foolishness with 'is it deb or is it snap?'. Not sure what I'll go to.

Haven't used it in a few years, but if it is still like it was, I highly recommend it for regular users. Solid, good choice of packages (for regular people). Don't remember ever having any problems with PCLinuxOS.

(I switched away only because I'm not a "regular" user.)