usefulcat

> If we still had a half-dozen major largely reliable news outlets that may have had some political leanings, but could still be (hah) trusted to largely report truth, rather than crafting narratives to maximize profit, it would have been much harder for the lies to spread.

I think the problem is that what you're describing is no longer a viable business model.

Back when there were only at most a half dozen or so news sources (newspapers and TV stations) in each major market, it didn't make sense for any one of those sources to lean hard left or right because that would only alienate a significant portion of the market.

Today, any given individual has access to thousands of different sources of "news", and everyone chooses to listen to only those sources that confirm their existing opinions. To me, that seems more than sufficient to explain a lot of things, including a lack of widespread agreement on basic facts.

Objective reality is frequently very nuanced, but nuance is a PITA when it comes to comprehension, so people tend to very much avoid it (knowingly or not).

In the books, it is suggested (if not stated outright) that the protomolecule was probably intended to work with much simpler forms of life, but is also able to make use of higher forms like humans.

The reason so many were infected on Eros was because humans deliberately infected everyone on the station. Likewise with the human/protomolecule hybrids.

Yes, the same Netflix that gets ~90% of it's income from subscriptions.

I never claimed that ads can't be profitable; I was responding to a commenter who implied that ads are necessary in order to have a viable streaming business, which is very obviously not the case.

No one if forcing them to use ads for revenue; they could choose to start charging directly for the content. Seems to be working ok for Netflix.

Dunno, maybe all of the above? Believe it or not, I didn't really keep in touch with them.

My point was that kids are disproportionately likely to treat other kids badly, especially when adults aren't around. That kind of situation is common at school, but much less common at home, unless the parents choose to allow it.

There are certainly tradeoffs, but it's not all negative. In my experience, what it boils down to is that home-schooled kids tend to have more experience with adults and less experience dealing with a wide variety of other kids, particularly assholes.

When I was a kid in public school, there was no shortage of assholes and I definitely would have preferred to not have to deal with them. OTOH, I don't doubt that there is also some value in that experience, not to mention interacting with all the other people. Also, we didn't have social media or semi-regular school shootings when I was a kid. So yeah.. to me, it's not at all obvious which set of tradeoffs is preferable nowadays.

What would be a better solution?

Agreed. I've long thought that it's much more the case that a person's religion is a function of their values, not the other way around.

Or, put another way, if a person's religion conflicts with their values (including prejudices), which one is more likely to give first?

Maybe in the long term, but not necessarily in the short term.

Today, all of us have many choices about where we get our news from, and by and large we overwhelmingly choose to listen only to those sources that confirm our existing opinions.

This means that people who voted for Trump are unlikely to ever hear about this sort of corruption, or if they do it will be spun as "his enemies attacking him" or something.

That’s reality cool. My first job out of college was implementing an image generator for the simulator for the landing signal officer on the USS Nimitz, also using SGI hardware. I would have loved to have seen the final product in person but sadly never had the chance.

Shrug. I think Minecraft qualifies as basic, and it runs just fine on a five year old M1 Air.

It can also depend on how much effort the developer has put into a particular platform. Macs have not historically had a reputation as being a big market for games, not even in a relative sense, so some developers may not much effort into a Mac port.

I don't get it either but me using it is a great way to annoy my kids.

I get (and partly agree with) the point you’re trying to make, but do consider that the fact that Trump was ever elected at all, let alone twice, is really not helping your argument.

> every single white collar job provides an employer healthcare plan that

The key word there is employer. Contractors often don't get health insurance, and contract jobs are not uncommon in the US.

I don't now about Japanese manufacturing per se, but I definitely wouldn't say that finished Japanese products were considered dodgy in the 80s. Sony, Panasonic, Honda, Toyota, various camera brands, Yamaha.. I recall all of those being at least "pretty good".

I definitely remember the sense that Japanese cars posed a real threat to the American auto industry, and in hindsight that seems to have been well founded.

I bet they had a really clean kitchen floor afterwards!

Also Leibniz, and a bunch of other historical figures from the time.

The point is that it can compile most existing C and C++ code as-is, and do it while providing complete memory safety.

That's the claim, anyway. Doesn't sound all that niche to me.

So they say, for now, for some definition of "telemetry" and "sharing", caveat caveat caveat..

The point is to muddy the waters, to sow uncertainty. To have the ability to apply the law arbitrarily, as opposed to uniformly. The absence of a specific definition very much aids that use case.

"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"

Maybe there's some other subtext here that I'm completely unaware of, but based on what I've read here, I gotta say that this is an impressive level of hostility, even by internet standards.

*bosmang. I'm not sure it's mentioned in the show, but it is in the books.

I heard that the Navy (historically, at least--don't know about today) placed a greater value than the Air Force on engine redundancy. Hence why we have both the twin engine F-18 (Navy) and the single engine F-16 (Air Force), even though functionally there's a lot of overlap between the two.

San Antonio and Austin are around 80 miles apart and have nearly identical climates. But they are both about the same distance from the coast, which is probably the main driver of climate in TX.

Agreed. If the F150 is Ford's "light" truck, what does that make the significantly smaller Maverick?

That was a bug, not at all the same thing as enshittification.

I went to a good university with a decent CS program, and I'd definitely say I learned a lot more on the job than I did in school. I didn't always have any mentors to speak of but I did have at least a couple who were good.

> int* p

I very much prefer that syntax, because the '*' is part of the type, not part of the variable name.

> You might never declare more that a single variable in a statement

    int a, *b, c, *d;

Yes, you can do that, and in fact if you want to declare multiple pointers on the same line, you are required to put a '*' in front of every pointer variable name.

Personally, I've always considered this to be a defect of the language. Would it really be so awful to have to write instead:

    // Both are of type 'int'. Pretty straightforward.
    int  a, c;
    // In my fantasy world, both of these would be of type 'pointer to int',
    // but IRL b is a pointer and d is an int. fun!
    int* b, d;

But of course that's not the language we have.

I'd be very curious to know the motivation for requiring a '*' in front of each pointer variable name, as opposed to once with the type. So far the only ones I've thought of (not mutually exclusive) are:

a) we REALLY love terseness, and

b) ooh look at this clever hack I came up with for variable declaration syntax.