You’ve already had a recommondation for most of what I would suggest to you, but I will happily second the suggestions for the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds, the Teixcalaan series by Arkady Martine, and the Imperial Raadch/Ancillary series by Ann Leckie. All have excellent worldbuilding and tell stories that depend heavily upon how their characters interface with the worlds they inhabit.

A little pulpier in tone, but still very well put together, I’d suggest as well the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, and especially the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. The latter is a bit more fantastic space opera as opposed to some of the harder sci-fi you’ve mentioned, but Muir knows how to write a setting that is absolutely dripping in gothic horror, and still take you on an emotional roller coaster fully of highs, lows, and humor as you read it. It seems to be a bit of a love-it-or-hate-it series from the other conversations I’ve had about it, but I love it and I’d be remiss not to suggest it.

I’d also suggest, if you’re not averse, dipping your toe into the fantasy genre as well. There’s a broad range of authors there who have done excellent work building fantasy worlds that are structurally deep and compelling, and have many science-fictional qualities. Along these lines I’d suggest Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders trilogy, or N. K. Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy – though, fair warning, both of these broke me in the end emotionally. Worth it, though!

For China specifically and at the present time this is true, but China is investing heavily into solar and other renewables that will shift its energy mix dramatically in the coming years. Not to mention that even now, it’s still a net benefit to centralize that fossil fuel consumption into plants that can burn it more efficiently and with better pollution controls than are feasible on cars.

It’s not strictly true that it didn’t mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.

Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.

Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.

Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros’ vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta’s implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.

In reality, Meta couldn’t offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn’t have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.

You trying to start a war, or what?

Energy is only “available” when there is a region of higher energy density and a region of lower energy density, that you can extract work from by allowing that energy to flow from the former to the latter until they are equalized, at which point no further energy can be extracted from that system.

In the case of air conditioning, you can make heat flow “uphill”, so to speak, by applying additional energy from outside of the inside air / outside air system, usually in the form of electricity generated at a power plant. In the very large picture, though, it’s all just moving energy around from other regions of higher and lower densities, a losing usable energy with each transfer. That’s what entropy means.

Veritasium did a really good video on this idea a couple months ago, if you’re interested: https://youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA?si=bru50t1VYEKXKmKX

W/r/t Baldur’s Gate 3, I don’t think the bottleneck is the GPU. Act 3 is incredibly ambitious in terms of NPC density, and AI is one of those things that’s still very hard to parallelize.

Yeah, you guys have the Winter War and Continuation War relatively fresh in cultural memory, which probably limits the reach of Russian propaganda. Over here, we remember the Soviet Union primarily as our Cold War rival, and neither side of that conflict came out of it with clean hands. For a certain kind of person, the sins of the American CIA and State Department during the Cold War don’t just reflect badly on our government; they somehow also make the Soviet Union, and therefore Russia as its successor state, the Good Guys of the last century of global geopolitics.

There’s a certain kind of reactionary-left personality that I think is more common in parts of the west that used to be colonial powers, where if you’re far enough along the political spectrum that the mainstream parties all look like different variations on corporatist-fascists, you’re particularly vulnerable to messaging from geopolitical enemies of your own country for the simple reason that they’re opposed to the political structure you’re also opposed to. Here in the US I’ve run into a few such people, and it’s also clear that Russia’s soft-power operations have made efforts to cultivate relationships with the American left wing (people like Jill Stein and others in the Green Party). It’s pretty obvious, though, that they’ve had less success than they have on the right. It takes a particular kind of useful idiot to think, as a anti-colonial socialist or communist, that an oligarchic and socially-repressive right-wing autocracy is actually in your political corner.

This article from Jane’s lists their strength in 2021 at 45,000, which would imply a ~20% casualty rate.