Wealth isn’t zero sum, it’s created all the time (and at a rate literally not achievable simply by underpaying employees, to pre-refute the expected response).

Explain. In a very basic sense wealth is created by acquiring resources (some of which are finite), then adding value through labor. So, the way I see it, the workers are creating the wealth, then the business/owners/investors/shareholders take a significant portion of the employees’ surplus value of labor. I.e. there is a pie of value/wealth that an employee creates, and the more of that pie the business/owners/investors/shareholders get, the less the workers/wealth-creators get.

Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).

At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?

I’ve tried a couple rolling distros (including Arch), and they always “broke” after ~6 months to a year. Both times because an update would mess up something with my proprietary GPU drivers, IIRC. Both times, I would just install a different distro, because it would’ve probably took me longer to figure out what the issue was and fix it. I’m currently just using Debian stable, lol.

Those type of bags are usually used to hold illicit substances, and typically only bought by small-time drug dealers.

TBF, compression is related to ML. Hence, the Hutter Prize. Thinking of LLMs as lossy compression algorithms is a decent analogy.

I guess most of what I’ve heard from her wasn’t “bad,” but it wasn’t “good,” I’d describe it as just “uninteresting.” It’d probably start annoying me if I had to listen to a full album of hers, because it’s not the type of music I enjoy at all.

I wonder what kind of diet vegans are following that get deficiencies. I’ve been vegan for years (started because I had high cholesterol levels), and the only thing I’ve worried about is B12, which I get from enriched soy products or nutritional yeast. I try to just buy what’s in season locally, then find vegan recipes or recipes that can easily be substituted to make vegan. I don’t even eat much of the trendy “superfoods” like quinoa, kale, lentils, etc. More like collard/sweet potato/beet greens, chickpeas, pinto beans, root veggies, etc. I dunno where I get my iron from; probably greens. I also use veg or olive oil pretty liberally, especially in recipes that traditionally include beef or pork.

CK2 was a complete game at launch IIRC. They just kept releasing new DLC for it for many years, much of which was outside the scope of the original game (playing as Arabic rulers, vikings, Indians, etc). I think that’s fine. Them selling music, portraits, and new models separately was kinda shitty though.

Yeah, I hate wearing headphones. I built most speakers I own from online DIY plans (mostly from Paul Carmody and Lou’s Speaker Site), and they sound better than any of the factory speakers I’ve ever owned.

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Considering many electric cars also spy on their users and have anti-features, it’s probably a good analogy :)

In my area, drought and heat have been so bad the last few years, a lot of native trees are dying. You could try reforesting with trees native to a dryer, nearby area, but that’s generally thought of as bad practice, and there’s no guarantee they would do well in that particular soil. It seems like the climate in my area is changing to be incapable of supporting forests.

TBH, I initially had a strange reaction to Discovery. It seemed to me like it was virtue-signalling and pandering to an audience to increase viewership or profit. Similar to how you sometimes see fake stock-photos of a business where they contains exactly one person from every ethnicity. I think the word I’m thinking of is “tokenism.” I still watched it for a couple seasons, and it was decent. I didn’t really realize at the time how prevalent and dangerous bigotry still was in the U.S… Now I think it’s probably good some shows and movies over-represent minorities.

From my experiences, I think most people know how to cook a few dishes. But many people only cook on holidays or special occasions. Otherwise, it’s mostly boxed dinners, meal kits, frozen food, take-out, or drive-thru. A lot of people feel they don’t have time to cook and clean afterwards. I really only started cooking when I became vegan.

For the time being, most countries can get a younger population by letting in immigrants (who are statistically younger). Would probably result in a softer landing than otherwise.

Debt and money are make-believe anyway. Just tokens in a game we play called capitalism.

I’m not sure about the infrastructure claim. Generally, if infrastructure is used less, it requires less maintenance.

50% of all habital land is already being used by humans and being degraded, which doesn’t seem sustainable, especially since so much of the world still lives in poverty. World population doubles every 61 years, so it seems like it would be nearly impossible to stay on the current trajectory for much longer.

Yeah, I’ve worked on embedded systems (some projects involving automotive and heavy machinery), and the amount of penny-pinching they used when selecting components was pretty crazy. On one project I worked on, they didn’t want to spend an extra 30 cents for a microcontroller with more flash, so we had to be very cognizant of every byte we used. Flash was so tight, our firmware would only fit if we used the highest optimization setting on the compiler (making debugging very difficult).

I think most of those design patterns originated from C++ (Gang of Four). Java was designed to be a simpler, opinionated C++, and inherited many of the nuances of OOP-style C++. I actually kinda like Java. I think its restrictiveness is nice for large projects, so everyone uses the same programming paradigm and style (no mixing of template, procedural, and OOP programming). Code execution is relatively quick (compared to things like the Python interpreter). Don’t need to write header files or manually manage memory. Has fairly advanced features built in for multi-threading, concurrency, remote objects, etc.

I haven’t programmed in Java in many years, but I’ve been programming in C# lately, and it just seems like Microsoft’s version of Java.

Yeah, much of the web is nearly unusable without adblockers; especially on mobile. I don’t quite understand why. You’d think it would be both harmful to the site and the advertisers. I.e. the site would recieve less returning users, and advertisers would recieve many low value impressions or accidental clicks (which I think they pay for).

Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s probably because most traffic now comes from search engines and other kinds of aggregaters/recommendation engines instead of people purposely returning to sites. Search engines also run ad networks that charge companies on an impression/click basis. So, search engines actually have an incentive to promote shitty ad-filled sites. Still doesn’t explain why companies use ad networks that allow this behavior. Also doesn’t explain why search engines that don’t run these ad networks often return the same results.

Large “activist” shareholders (usually fund managers, I believe) often step-in and make demands when the stock isn’t performing as they would like. Gabe could be CEO, but shareholders could threaten to dump stock to get the company to act in a certain way. I believe that was behind all the tech layoffs. My conspiracy-biased mind believes these shareholders sometimes push for things that aren’t exactly in the company’s best interest, but are in the investor’s best interest. E.g. if the fund management company is also heavily in commercial real-estate, they may try to get other companies they are invested in to institute return-to-office mandates. My guess is these big players do all kinds of shady shit (use their influence to control media narratives, politicians, etc).

It always seemed over-complicated to me to use web technologies to create a desktop application and run it in what is essentially a browser. The tool-chain of modern web and electron apps also seems overly complicated to me (writing in a slightly different language then transpiling to an interpreted language).

I don’t find JS any more accessible than any other language with automatic memory management. JS is actually a bit of mess due to bolting on new features while keeping backward compatibility.

I don’t mind using electron apps. VS Code is pretty great.

I think Java Swing was the apex of desktop development :)

I’ve been using Joplin for a few years, syncing through Dropbox, and I like it. Mostly through the Linux terminal UI + vim though.