I keep hearing about miracle breakthroughs whenever researchers need money but they never go into production.

Nobody knows what Napster is, try buying Crunchyroll and turn it into a 3D experience.

Why would I need a cryptographic ledger thingamabob, whatever the hell that is, in order to buy and own an image? It's as if people didn't buy and sell images all the time, for instance in stock photos websites. Not that I am terribly fussed over a wallpaper image being used by someone else, legally or otherwise.
When will reality catch up with the cryptobros?

Ask them to generate text with ChatGPT and analyze each assertion, explaining why it's right or wrong based on the officially recommended reading material, with citations and accurate page numbers etc.
Use your own book or another one that is not entirely mainstream so GPT won't have heard of it.
Grade them on how well researched something is and on the quality of their critical thinking and argumentative skills. GPT will not usually give you multiple citations for the same thing.
Memorization is for USB pens, not people.
I use AI to generate code in my day to day job (I'm tacitly expected to use Copilot in order to be productive, that's why they're paying for it)

Depending on what you call influential, the only game that really made me think and learn about something was Civilization (the first one of course).
I even lifted some bits of Civilopedia for a school paper once. There was no Wikipedia back then;)
Here are some things I am tempted to reflect upon:
- In Civilization nobody honors a peace treaty with you for very long. Today we discuss the same issue about Vladimir Putin or Russian history in general.
- Technology can revolutionize war (see the quick rise of advanced drones in Ukraine)
- Revolutions are crap, even if they result in a Democracy. 6 turns of Anarchy has parallels with real life. Better to have evolution than revolution.
- Irrigation really can change land a lot, these days we have farms that can grow food in the desert.
- Poor countries generally got a bad deal on their starting place.
- You really can pay money to incite revolts. See Putin's election interference etc.
- Trade is king. It seems that money can actually buy happiness for a lot of people and shit hits the fan when you're low on panem et circenses.

I can't see a damn thing on all these apps with tiny fonts, and I hung my big screen TV on the wall in front of my bed. And yeah I watch lots of Youtube videos on there. These days Youtube rewards creators who develop longer videos so there's actually lots of pretty interesting stuff, news, history documentaries, travel videos or even cooking.
Even Neil deGrasse Tyson has a show there.

SL is not VR though, more like a game engine where you can collaborate with people and see what they do using the included construction tools. Massively Multiplayer Online Blender, for Dummies. There is an OpenSim project where you can get a server for free and experiment with this "3D streaming" technology. It is quite an achievement in distributed physics simulation, You can fly around with things attached and they will have scripts inside them, which run seamlessly as you cross from server to server, and even have a ball roll down a mountain on a terrain that is mapped to a grid of multiple servers. It uses Havok for physics. If you consider this was running on 2003 hardware it was quite the breakthrough.

I started developing 3D content professionally in 2004 about a year after joining Second Life and we called ourselves "metaverse developers" back then. My company made $500k in 2007 at the peak of the hype cycle and petered out with the subprime crisis. I also founded the SL wiki, later hosted by wikia, now fandom.
https://www.secondlife.com/
https://secondlife.fandom.com/...
https://betatechnologies.info/

We already complained about "bells and whistles" / bloatware in the 90s.
Remember Clippy? Every release of Office was more complex than the last one. And other productivity software outside the Microsoft sphere also kept getting nore obnoxious. As far back as the move from CorelDraw 2 to CorelDraw 3 I have heard people complain about increasing complexity and that was 1991-92.

There are three times more Python jobs than PHP around here and nobody is going to hire a 45 year old for a Junior Python Developer position XD

After I had money I started trying out restaurants and walking a lot less. I ride Ubers all over the place so... I dont even have to walk to the nearest bus stop. And I can order my food online these days so I dont have to walk inside a supermarket even. Couple that with working from home and my leg muscles have completely melted away. Also I had a lot of time in my hands for outdoorsy activities when I was younger and now I barely have time to breathe. Every time I've been unemployed in the past I used to be out of the house a lot, visiting museums (they are free for unemployed people) and riding my bicycle, playing Pokemon Go...

Quick and easy way to uplift millions of people out of poverty, Scrooge.

It's more useful and both are bullshit.

I use mint xfce and I've had serious issues with it... had to reinstall the damn thing after some months. It started by making me login twice in a row every single time. Then at some point the WM decided it would not load automatically. Steam also stopped working after a while and I had to reinstall it (this happened twice already). And at some point the game I used to play decided it would only play some of the sound. People would sometimes start talking and their voice went mute. Or they wouldn't talk at all.
The constant stream of updates is a pain in the ass. I am pretty sure these are not critical updates or else that means OSS is shit nowadays and people are building code full of holes. I've been using Linux since 1997 and I am fairly certain I didn't get updates so often 20 years ago. Oh and there was that time it stopped detecting my nvidia and only the onboard intel shit would work. Maybe if they would stop messing with it so often, things would keep working.
I'm too old for this shit. My Chromebook works perfectly and Chrome OS is based on Linux. It's a shame that Android games are largely an excuse to sell ads, most of them look like they only took an afternoon to code XD

You must be joking. Also, not a physicist, but, if "micro" holes were formed 12 billion years ago wouldn't they have evaporated yet?
There are no gravity anomalies in the asteroid belt wtf