Quetzalcutlass

If you can't serve as an example, serve as a warning!

I would want to be friends with every character in this fictional story.

In a sane world Oracle would be laughed out of court, but Larry Ellison is a major political donor who's been cozying up to the Trump administration, so who knows if the facts actually matter anymore?

And when 64-bit support first came to Windows, Microsoft artificially limited the amount of RAM you could use unless you shelled out for the much more expensive editions. On Vista you were arbitrarily limited to 8 gigs with the basic edition, 16 with premium, and even the business editions had a limit of 128 gigs, a tiny fraction of the addressable space under a 64 bit architecture.

Even now there's a limit, though it's insanely high (over a terabyte) and you're unlikely to ever see it unless you're running a server on Windows instead of Windows Server (still limited, but in the dozens of terabytes) or Linux (which has a "limit" in the petabytes).

Look upon my woods, ye mighty, and despair!

*slaps stomach*

As always, it works at the Speed of Plot™.

Which somehow becomes much slower the second players come up with a use for an infinite source of unclean water.

It's A Cauldron of Endless Bog Water. The merchant lost it a while back and came here to retrieve it after tales spread of a new swamp popping up out of nowhere.

The Gods Must Be Crazy?

Deniable encryption like that will be a lifesaver if things get bad enough. Though I'm thinking more the kind where the encrypted content on a computer disk is indistinguishable from free space, and you have multiple passwords that decrypt different parts of the filesystem. That way you can be interrogated and/or beaten, "give up" and unlock your computer (using the decoy password), and still hide any incriminating evidence since those files remain hidden with no way for adversaries to even detect that they exist.

They're warming the golf cart's seat, of course! Can't you see how hard they work, even on vacation?

They'll use AI LLMs to summarize meetings, write emails and "advise" them on business decisions, all while still touting their importance despite automating what little work they still did.

I'd say they at least act as seat warmers, but you can buy one of those for a couple of bucks.