badpun

That's income, not wealth though. Some wealthy people don't have very high incomes.

Pirating is basically unlicensed use.

> The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.

Is there any evidence of this claim being true?

Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.

> Military technology will produce innovation in wartime but in peacetime it is a backwater.

The Internet and GPS were directly invented as a military technology with civilian usage allowed only much later. Integrated circuits's invention and development was largely done on military's dime as well.

Machiabelli was a big Florence patriot and was writing his advice specifically to help a prince better govern Florence and hence increase the chance that Florence will not be annihilated in the constant wars that raged on the Italian Peninsula at the time.

Maybe they must be so loud because people wear hearing protection?

Lack of support for type-safe containers (need to be hack toghether via macros) and overreliance on macros in general (which are not IDE and debugger friendly) are two aspects of C that are off-putting for majority of people in 2026. That's even assuming you're willing to forego pointer/memory safety.

What's the shakedown?

> I thought that was really interesting (and obviously wouldn't work in other countries).

I don't know about other countries, but in Poland you're just not required to cut down your lawn at all, unless it's a fire hazard (you have a lot of dead and dried up plants).

There's plenty of people for whom handling a PC is difficult. E.g. various popups (windows update, antivirus, microsoft nagging about microsoft account, printer nagging, "disk almost full" nagging, OneDrive file sync nagging etc.) alone are too much for my Mom, whereas she's handling her iPad (for example) just fine. Also, there are issues specific to gaming on PC - every time there's a technical issue with a game (which in itself is never a thing on consoles), the forum recommend installing different version of the video driver. It may or may not work, but it leaves you with an evening of technical troubleshooting instead of gaming.

Not to mention that games on Steam do break, esp. older ones which are no longer actively maintained [1]. I haven't heard of such fails on consoles, probably because they're a much more stable platform.

[1] E.g. Steam's Civ 5 has been breaking for a couple years now, going into low-res video settings and refusing to bring them back up. Why? Who knows! The only thing that seems to work is using "repair files" option in Steam every time that happens.

That's why I'd limit "meddling" to trying to inform and educate the local population. They don't have access to news (due to state censorship, the people are few propagandistic lies instead), at the very least foreign power can try and provide that, like they did with "Radio Free Europe" during the Cold War.

In 2026 a console is a streamlined PC that can't be used for anything else but games - but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating.

They could be shared, and work practically non-stop (minus nights, as that would wake people up). That'd bring the per-consumer cost down by a large fraction. The sharing would likely be organized by a commercial third-party, but still, it could be much cheaper than human cleaners.

Having said that, it could still be decades till the robot is ready to be released into human homes unsupervised. The variation in human homes, what people store in them etc. is not easy. However, it could be ready for hotels much sooner.

If I were living in brutal dictatorship that has majority support (that’s today Russia) I’d really want foreign powers to „meddle”. But an average Russian likes the current state and hence hates any foreign attempts at influence.

If you overthrow one autocrat and the society is not ready to self-govern, you'll just have another one taking his place. The best you can do is to fund some kind of democratic opposition on the ground and in exile, hoping to grow a political class mature enough that they will take over after autocrat loses power one way or another.

How many people do think would move into the US within the next couple of years if the country opened its borders to everyone? I think it's somewhere between a hundred million and a billion people. There are billions of people on Earth for whom having a crappy job in the US is a dream scenario compare to their current circumstances. Many of them would move if they could. Hell, millions of people are already literally walking through Central America jungles and deserts to live in the US illegally - that shows you how attractive it is, even if at risk of being deported at any moment.

The bankrupcy was over foreign debt in foreign currencies, obviously you can't print those. The government borrowed those monies in the first place a decade ago to buy some technologies (patents, licences etc.) from Western companies in an attempt to modernize the economy.

Yes, that's what I did and what I reffered to in my post (I forgot that it gave you C(2) and not just C(1), it's been a couple of months since I worked on this). There are still visual artifacts, they're just smaller. Even Perlin's paper on this showed a picture of the artifacts that the 5th degree polynomial still generates.

I've implemented 3D perlin noise recently and was surprised that the lighting was always off on the created model around the grid lattice (the model itself was continuous there, just the light was not correct). After a delightful couple of days debugging it, I finally learned that Perlin noise's derivative is not continuous around grid lattice, which makes normals not continous there (as normals are orthogonal to a tangent, and tangent is based on derivative). It's possible to improve it by cleverly changing Perlin's wavelet function, which makes the noise C(1) (derivative is continuous, second derivative is not) - this makes the visual artifacts smaller, but they don't go away.

I’m no longer sure about their quality though. Out of four Logitech mice I bought recently (four different models), two died within a year. At least their warranty repair/replace process was decent.

It's actually pretty hard. The most expected scenario after pumping hundreds of billions into a cleptocracy would be for most of that money to get stolen with little to show for it. Not to build a machine that stopped Russia. What Ukraine authorities managed to do, given the country's state (the coruption is truly mindboggling), is remarkable.

Public transport in communist Poland was horrible because it was severely underfunded. Remember that Poland bankrupted in the 1981 (when the West put sanctions on the country after the Jaruzelski's "coup", and sanctions kiled the economy) the whole decade was kind of surreal in terms of state's lack of funds and decrease of living standards.

Poland.

In my country studies are free, which means humanities (like "world literature") are full of young people who had no idea what to do with themselves, so they chose a major in something vaguely interesting and not very demanding, mostly so that they get to extend their youth by a couple of years (as parents will often support them while they get their degree, which means not having to work).

Big chain stores have their profit margins at below 5%.

European cities are doing it already.

You don't need a lot of land to do that. Just 0.25 acres is enough to feed a single person. You can do it basically in a city.

Due to population distribution, you're most likely to be born in a poor country. And, in those countries, you're way better off being born in 2026 than in 1970s (to be able to watch when the Internet was starting). Chances are, if you were born in China, India, Nigeria, Malasya etc. you wouldn't even hear about the Internet anyway.

No, not boycotts.

The influencial youtubers I think of actually can shape political debate and thus policy - what they say, if it gains enough popularity, sometimes seeps into the political agenda of the ruling party (which is always looking to "score points" with the voters and has its ears to the ground listening which issues and points people are currently responding to). It's basically like being a columnist of an influential newspaper, except you don't need to have the right connections to become one.