>If gamers had a choice, they wouldn’t be on Windows anymore

What would we be on? MacOS is hardware-locked, and Linux on the desktop is a fucking nightmare.

I mean it's not wrong - a progress bar makes users more likely to "tolerate" an unknown wait time (vs. just thinking the site/app is frozen and closing it). And perfect accuracy isn't really necessary as long as it visibly updates often enough.

But yes, it is evil and manipulative to use a fake progress bar that's not even attempting to show real progress. Just use an animated spinner, and make sure the spinner animation is linked to some kind of occasional "are we still doing meaningful work here" check.

Active vibration cancellation is already in use in semiconductor fabs and other sensitive manufacturing applications. But it has technical limitations: just like active noise cancellation, it works better for lower frequencies, lower amplitudes, and smoother waveforms. So it's sort of the final layer of protection: first you choose a quiet site, then you construct the building and the equipment footings using passive solutions that dissipate as much vibration as possible and smooth out the jerks, and then you use active solutions on the equipment itself.

It's much easier to isolate the contents of a low-rise building from wind than from the ground. The internal structure of the building can be made self-supporting, with the walls basically just 'floating' around it.

You can't really 'float' a floor over the ground - you have to transmit the force of gravity from the contents of the building to the ground, and any connection capable of transmitting force will also conduct vibration. There are all kinds of complicated engineering solutions for reducing the amount that's conducted, but they take up space and cost money, so it's usually more efficient to choose a 'quieter' site than to build a better isolation system.

It's very unlikely that US domestic investment will catch up to, or even keep pace with, global growth in demand for semiconductors. The entire world will continue to have a major stake in Taiwan's stability for the foreseeable future.

(The specific Western national-security interest in Taiwanese independence and liberal democracy may be weakened, which could be a long-term problem. But there won't be any impact on the West's willingness to defend Taiwan from a military invasion, armed coup, or other destabilizing attack.)

There's an orders-of-magnitude difference between the amplitudes of ground vibrations produced by cars and by jackhammers. Vibration isolation systems designed to handle normal traffic etc. would be overwhelmed by heavy construction equipment.

And when you say "asking for trouble," what do you see as the alternative? Space manufacturing isn't even close to being viable, so either we don't do nanometer-precise manufacturing at all, or we do it somewhere on Earth, and the latter means dealing with the possibility of ground vibration. (Or water motion, which is even harder to isolate.)