It is exactly an options contract! But OP wants to write a short on a stock that isn't on the market yet. Which brokers do you recommend that allow this kind of trade?

Yes but you'd have to find a buyer yourself and write a contract to sell them shares - the brokerage won't do that for you.

Also interested if Yahoo! Mail will be doing this with their "pay for non-personalised adverts" thing - are they going to be giving all these profiles to advertisers (e.g. foreign intelligence agencies) as part of the "bid for an advertising slot" process? (even if your adblocker then hides that advert)

Anyone who repairs bicycles will have one for trimming brake and gear cables.

And even a famous fictional character! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_Recognition_(novel)

Plenty of those have been banned for a while already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_63_of_the_Criminal_Justice_and_Immigration_Act_2008

Asking AI to write code certainly gives off vibes of Asimov's robots - it can't be long before no human is able to write the next generation of code.

China's already got control of that!

Would be a bit weird expecting all those C++ people to use a language that will be invented 27 years after the language they chose to learn?

Even Debian is a lot harder to use than Mint if you want things like the login page recognising your external monitor and realising that it should be your primary monitor before logging in, especially if a KVM means that it wasn't attached when you first booted. Or wanting that setup to persist after an nvidia driver update. There's just so much stuff that a user-focused distro can make easy that most distros don't make easy!

Can follow JWZ for practical experience on this kind of thing - apparently it is getting so bad that even opening a connection to deliver the zip bombs is getting infeasible now.

This is why Satisfactory should have a built-in Kanban board!