Hand-wavy predictions like this scare me - it suggests people don't understand space travel or the distances involved at all.

Sure, if you think of the Earth as a game of SimCity plus Kerbal Space Program, these discussions about exponential growth are interesting. However, they miss the part where the intervening 30-100 years become literal hell on Earth while space travel ramps up.

I started my career at NASA. I'm working on an asteroid mining startup. I'm well aware of the vastness of space :)

The GP said 400 years. That's the time since the age of exploration until now. That's a vast era of time, and exponential technology development goes both ways.

Reddit achieves much the same effect by constantly insisting that I install the app (I never will).

Yep, in the last few days it’s become fully unusable. Niche forums are now walled with:

> Unreviewed Content — This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.

My ISP doesn’t block Reddit, but Reddit has effectively blocked me.

Enabling desktop mode usually fixes this for me. I think changing the domain to old.reddit.com also works.

But yeah, reddit is really shooting itself in the foot with this nonsense.

The latest kindles offer a terrible user experience compared to the original - the device has just become yet another way to force ads and shopping portals into people's faces.

Are there any e-readers which do offer a simple, minimalist interface? I've given up hope of finding a low-distraction alternative to an Android tablet for reading PDFs, but have never had the opportunity to try any e-ink devices other than Kindles and Remarkables (which are too expensive and seem like imminent abandonware given the backlash against their subscription model).

Kobo, they have a variety of sizes, have pretty minimal interface and work great. They also support overdrive for libraries. https://www.kobo.com/ereaders

Boox and Kubo have nice readers. I have a Boox Poke and it's pretty nice e-ink that isn't too expensive. I personally just use a Kindle Fire 10 HD for reading though.