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!

You trying to start a war, or what?

I know demakes are all the rage, but I don't know if this counts. It's just... the game, but on console hardware from a decade before Portal. That's really impressive, especially given just how restrictive some of the limits of the N64 are.

We'll need some major spin to control the PR fallout of this leek!

Also that example of Tomb Raider is really disingenuous, the level of fidelity in the environments is night and day between the two as well as the quality of animation. In your example the only real thing you can tell is the skin shaders, which are not even close between the two, SotTR really sells that you are looking at real people, something the 2013 game approached but never really achieved IMO.

I've noticed this a lot in comparisons claiming to show that graphics quality has regressed (either over time, or from an earlier demo reel of the same game), where the person trying to make the point cherry-picks drastically different lighting or atmospheric scenarios that put the later image in a bad light. Like, no crap Lara looks better in the 2013 image, she's lit from an angle that highlights her facial features and inexplicably wearing makeup while in the midst of a jungle adventure. The Shadow of the Tomb Raider image, by comparison, is of a dirty-faced Lara pulling a face while being lit from an unflattering angle by campfire. Compositionally, of course the first image is prettier -- but as you point out, the lack of effective subsurface scattering in the Tomb Raider 2013 skin shader is painfully apparent versus SofTR. The newer image is more realistic, even if it's not as flattering.

At the moment, the voting-age American public seems to be split into pretty even thirds, with one third being slavering fascists, one third being generally opposed to the first third, and a final third who are either totally apathetic or steadfastly refuse to acknowledge any difference between the other two thirds.

Yeah, I'm not optimistic that a KBI under the leadership of Kris "K" Kobach is going to be in much hurry to investigate small town police corruption at the behest of a fundraiser for another MAGA nutjob.

Thigh who knows, maybe ol' Kris is too busy virtue signaling his blood-and-soil, anti-immigrant values to the xenophobes that make up his primary constituency to actually dirty his hands with the work of being attorney-general. Wouldn't be the first time he was too busy trying to get on TV to do his job.

I'm fairness, incomplete chunks is all that exists of Star Citizen.

Well, that and a whaling operation on the scale of Victorian England's.

Granted that all we have to go on is hearsay and speculation... but the fact that in one hand Obama commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence, while one the other hand former Obama staffers who otherwise would have been broadly aligned with Snowden's interests in disclosing domestic intelligence operations still speak about him with vehement disdain years after leaving government suggests to me that he sold the Russians something particularly damaging.

To play devil's advocate, when Social Security was established (bringing with it the concept of a "retirement age"), the age of eligibility was deliberately set such that less than half of Americans would live long enough to draw on it. The clear expectation was that you would work until you couldn't anymore.

That said, in an era when changes in life expectancy are starting to take on a K-shaped distribution and labor force participation has been on a long steady decline, tying governmental income support to age and employment duration is becoming distributionally regressive. I'd much rather have some sort of UBI system that everyone can benefit from.

The technique is not novel (a decade ago IBM even made a stop-motion film with carbon monoxide molecules to demonstrate it, and more than twenty years before that showed off "IBM In Atoms" as a proof of concept) but it's an interesting application. The real question in terms of application is, can this technique open the door to higher temperature superconductors?

I only want it if it comes with a college-level entomology textbook about bees packed in the box with it, like SimAnt had.