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While I totally agree with your pov and sentiment from my personal experience (raised in a bilingual family, now speaking 4 languages), I don't see such loss as a terrible tragedy. Cultures that have lost the evolutionary race, who failed to instill competitive world comprehension in the carrier population, are not really useful. Imagine a language that has no concept of future tense, no understanding of planning. Do you really believe it ought to exist? Who are the poor souls that you would sentence to having such a limited and uncompetitive world view just for the sake of diversity, while you go on thinking in in much more advanced concepts? Such a handicap is not something I would knowingly impose on any fellow human being.

Entertainment can also have negative value. That's what the parent meant: your entertainment is provided by someone exploiting your gambling-addicted (and gambling may cause an actual addiction afaik, no less so than opioid addiction although based on different biochemistry) dopamine circuitry in order to extract actual (social) value.

Coordination is hard, otherwise this would already have happened. I recommend "Inadequate equilibria" by Eliezer Yudkowsky https://equilibriabook.com/ if you want a better grasp on how and why such situations arise and cannot be easily optimized.

I'll play the devil's advocate and say that I'm actually disappointed by this development. A very long time ago when AdSense was young I was thrilled by the idea that instead of being bombarded by stupid ads designed to cater to morons people (including myself) will be getting relevant ads - ideally, ads about stuff that I am actually willing to buy right now. Kinda like legilimency. Too bad that this will be impossible for a long time to come now.

This is incorrect, as far as I know. The FSF page [1] says as much. IANAL, but the relevant portion of the license appears to be this:

You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:

d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements. [2]

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html [2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

So basically yeah, Google would have to distribute the source code as well. Hence the ban.

I suppose we should be overjoyed anyway. This update means that Google is not shutting Scholar down - at the very least, not today. Knowing their habit of axing products that do not quite attain civilization-level scale, it's always a grim possibility I keep in mind.

Instead of becoming a more or less of a clone of Facebook news feed for researchers, RG has become infuriatingly full of nag boxes, and in its efforts to get you use the website more prevents you from actually using it at all.

They definitely did, at least in the JPL 360deg stream (can't say if the commentary was identical across all locations, but probably not).

Facebook is annoying and grabby? This guy obviously hasn't ever used ResearchGate. Facebook is the paragon of non-intrusive user experience compared to RG.

A screencap of Alexandra Elbakyan's rant: http://imgur.com/a/xGwD6.

Basically, she expresses her disappointment that other people get awarded for promoting and popularizing science in Russia while she never did.

She is also unhappy that a group of Mexican researchers named a parasite insect in her honor, because it's Elsevier and other publishers who are parasites and not Sci-Hub (this is crazy, I know, but it's her logic, not mine).

So she says her farewell and wishes researchers in Russia to boil in their own shit.

This is not the first time Alexandra does crap like this; she is also known to purge all critical comments from SciHub's social accounts and to ban anyone from the community who disagrees with her or praises someone she doesn't like (such as Dmitry Zimin, who was a longtime generous sponsor of some of the most important scientific and educational foundations in Russia).

It probably does well when translating general human speech, but I was rather interested in its performance on a paragraph of a scientific text (it being a much more challenging task, obviously).

* "The impact of the solar wind protons on the surface of Mercury" became "Der Einfluss der solaren Windprotonen auf die Oberfläche von Quecksilber". Note that 'solar wind protons' should have been translated as 'Sonnenwindprotonen' instead, i.e. the word 'solar' was to be a part of the noun's modifier, but it was pushed out.

* The lack of domain-specific training is especially obvious with the case of the planet's name being translated as "Quecksilber" instead of "Merkur" (Quecksilber being the name of the metal).

* "pure northward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF)" became "reines interplanetares interplanetares Magnetfeld nach Norden (IWF)". Aside from this being a poor translation, it's worth noting that DeepL didn't properly process the introduction of an abbreviation (IWF being the abbrev. for the International Monetary Fund in German).