Previously its been possible to do contained fusion but the energy cost of containment was as high or higher than what could be gleaned from the reaction. Youre right to assume there can't be any new energy out of nowhere, it comes from the atoms smashing together and becoming a new element.
Advertising is the art of manipulating people into spending money. When they are made to spend in a way that is harmful to themselves or society, you could argue that it's evil, and I would.
I'd go farther and say the economic system we have which elevates people to demigod status pretty arbitrarily and is ravaging the Earth is by extension evil. No one with any sense has control sufficient to stop us from spiraling into cataclysm or at least an unnecessary dystopia. Malicious advertisements don't have any right to exist, they just happen to be allowed because of our prevailing principles.
Or the glitch that makes your input disappear if you try to use the site in desktop mode on a mobile phone. Malicious bugs are at this point an obvious FB tactic for plausible deniability in bad UX directed at users with certain behavior.
The point of modern society would seem to be to enable the existence of people so wealthy they are practically gods and never have to work, except on what they want to.
How naive to think we aren't just being farmed like cattle. Of course, there is always a pressure on workers to be money makers. When the means don't matter to investors, neither do workers.
I don't see what's bad about signal UX honestly. I have a few private 1on1 conversations in it and it feels like any other text messaging client. However, the only place I use it is on my Android phone, and there may be features others are missing that just never interested me personally.
You mean everyone assumes he doesn't abuse the data. That's different than knowing. It's just the lazy and thoughtless stance to take. "Why would they be allowed to have the cameras if they were up to no good"? Businesses are assumed to do no wrong and meet some high moral standard because it's easy to.
Wow, let's just put people in bubble suits so they don't hurt themselves. It's ridiculous to say people shouldn't drive cars because it's possible to hurt themselves or others. We might as well outlaw pregnancy for all the harm that can come to people as a result of being born.
Good (and improving steadily) compiler feedback, centralized package manager, thoughtful approach to language versioning, a syntax that I like (very subjective), and the flexibility to write unsafe code blocks if for some reason you need to. Those are some of my reasons for liking it.
We already know this. They have a mandate for total information awareness. Collect everything. They just claim they haven't collected the data until someone views it in their database for a specific purpose, but that's misusing the word "collection" so they can pretend they aren't shitting all over the 4th amendment.
Facebook, being huge and hugely invasive, is among those doing the most damage to EU citizen privacy with their collection, so it makes plenty of sense to focus on them.
Getting people to buy something doesn't always mean you provided them value. Some methods of making a buck are exploitative, like if they rely on deception, for example. There are scenarios where "middlemen" exist to take part of the wealth and not create any. Or where people are paid to be destructive for various reasons. A corrupt politician paid (in campaign donations, whatever) to pass a law to create a barrier to a market is being destructive, not constructive. It is a net loss overall.
in my case, it makes me feel double-plus un-good. which is why I go to the trouble of killing the ME on any system I can, despite the at-best trivial impact of doing so.
I do the same thing for a "virtual gaming pc" on proxmox with qemu/kvm. it was a pain to get working right with my specific hardware and with proxmox as a base, but is pretty nice now that it works.
Many people use Arch linux or redhat distros to do this also, but pretty much any major distro should be capable.
AFAIK it works on VMware ESXi too.
Who wants this digital Bluetooth garbage for playing music? I'll stick to my analog crap that doesn't know one source from another, and isn't overpriced, thanks.
I think we agree. For living that way to not be massively depressing, as you say, it would have to be a different world. Social media would need to be different. Sociological lessons would have to be learned that prevent the internet and social media from being what they are in reality.
Thankfully at least my imagination can step out of this reality. I can see a scenario where people are spread thin and just use remote conversation instead of in-person.
I can see a world where politics and profiteering don't end up in the way of quality communications tools.
Consumers don't as a group "choose" anything independently in the sense that their biases and psychological faults and the structure of incentives in our society are all used to make consumers act against their own interests and the interests of the whole. When our "best and brightest" are only committed to profit, we cannibalize ourselves. It isn't progressive. There is no scenario where shitting on the masses to help yourself results in a win for humankind. Not at this stage in history.
I don't think that's hard to imagine. I'm imagining it right now. I don't think we're going to get there without some strange forces acting on us, and idk if that's a society I want, but we are more malleable than we give ourselves credit for. People seem to think that life as we know it is life in all it's possibilities rather than one permutation of an infinite mess of dissimilar outcomes.
I think the things we struggle over which will determine our future are battles of coincidence and not fated. I don't think communism and capitalism needed to compete through their representative nations in the cold war, that was just the way we dressed up a power struggle, where power struggles are the actual predictable thing.
No, nihilism is the denial of any intrinsic value, we are still all free to make up and agree on our own values if we want, but it would be because we decided to, as untethered things in a meaningless expanse.
This is pretty broad criticism, but you are at least right that there is no sound principle on which to protect a website from "automated" interaction.
it's an entirely pointless arms race, where the scraper always wins, because web browsers are just a piece of software saying the right things at the right time over TCP.
The only deterrent to scraping is the cost of running a web browser to interact using a real javascript stack, so for some really lame spammy uses of scrapers (the most common) headless browsers are often not cost effective.
Data science is one of the most imposter-filled "professions". It's a recently-established category of worker that falls across multiple disciplines and is very effected by technological progress. I have met "data scientists" who aren't really good at any aspect of it, but they still get by because of the supply/demand and lack of any existing expertise to say "hey, you know, this person we hired is barely competent and just googles everything we ask of them"
We'd need a better binary representation of uncompiled code, then. Moving around lots of code as ascii is kind of suboptimal... I wouldn't want that. By all means, show it as text to the user, but don't store it that way.
The author is way off base in saying software engineering is about assembly rather than discovery. That's only true of the lowest-skill non-innovating software shops, and even then, developers are constantly having to discover how to use the new tool of the month.
On an unrelated note I don't really buy into the idea of data science as a distinct thing from computer science.
My ~2011 motherboards BIOS lets you reflash it from INSIDE the BIOS, from a connected readable storage device, i.e. a flash drive. It eliminates any need for OS-specific update tools. I am surprised this isn't more common.
Removing ME [almost] entirely by editing the official bios image with me_cleaner.py and then updating the bios the normal way sounds like it is simpler, if you don't need the extra network-connected ME features there.
I'll admit I was a little afraid of bricking the PC, as with any kind of BIOS modification, but it worked like a charm.