> If anything, video games were late compared to something like the music industry, where not owning your music has been the status quo for a while now!
My perception is that the music industry is better than other parts of the entertainment industry in this regard. I imagine what the author is thinking of is streaming, which I treat as a sort of on-demand radio. There is an understanding that it is ephemeral. A customer concerned with “owning” their music would not be confused by this and seek another avenue, which in the case of the music industry is both wider, richer and more free than those of adjacent industries.
The common dedicated formats used for distribution: the compact disc and vinyl record, do not have copy protection, which is a better situation than what movies and video games are in. Online music stores invariably deliver you music as a simple computer file, with no copy protection or platform or connectivity requirements. This is the rule rather than the exception, which is not the case when making movie or video game purchases on these types of stores.
Maybe because those programs were not doing anything as graphically intensive as this. Or perhaps this programs caches more. When OS 9 was relevant were there any programs with comparable capabilities? Such statements are meaningless unless you have insight into how much memory this task should take (and even that is highly variable depending on how one wants to trade-off CPU vs memory usage). Only then can you determine the difference between a “RAM hog” and your computer being too small.
That claim rests on their being the successor to another state (the Ottoman Empire) whose claim rests on the right of conquest. “Roman Emperor” was one of the titles of the Ottoman sultans and it received some recognition from both their subjects (who continued to call themselves “Roman” for centuries) and other states.
I find it surprising that logarithms and e (a.k.a. Napier’s constant), were developed and discovered only relatively recently in the history of mathematics despite how natural and fundamental they are.
The idea of exponential growth and the practice of charging interest in finance are both ancient. Surely an ancient mathematician would have investigated these in depth and discovered what Napier, Bernoulli and others found?
A while ago I was solving several infinite series of exponentials in the context of a problem concerning the half-life of medicines and I made frequent use of logarithms. That is when I started to wonder about their history.
Your response is scarcely comprehensible. A supposed “preference” for something I had yet to discover? Indeed. Your second charge conflates two categories, so that the conclusion does not follow from the proposition.
It is clear that you have no argument and have devolved into constructing straw men and ad hominem.
The formulaic and predictable style of that commentary only betrays a lack of effort and conveys no original insight. The disinterest, therefore, is unsurprising. Instead it invites contempt and has accusations of hypocrisy, insincerity and pretentiousness.
The subject of censorship in LLMs and the wider technology world in general has little bearing on this model specifically, that is, a model with a high token speed, which is what is of interest to me here and why I, and I presume many others, chose to read that particular article and this comment thread. It is unnecessary that such a digression should be attaching itself to all manner of threads with only the most remote connection to that subject.
Yandex and TinEye satisfy all my reverse image search needs. Google Maps is the only Google service I use. There is simply no substitute for Street View and it is fantastically useful and interesting. Even so it is only a secondary option and I use maps from OpenStreetMap through Organic Maps 90% of the time. I am satisfied if that is the extent of my relationship with them.
> I mean honestly, how large is an English dictionary? 100 KiB?
If it contains less than 50,000 words, perhaps, but most standard print dictionaries contain ~500,000 entries. The size of /usr/share/dict/words on my system is 954 KiB and the small version of the cracklib dictionary is 481 KiB.
The original reasoning can be found in medical texts from the mid to late 19th century when it was first discussed. My recollection is not strong enough to repeat it with confidence but it was to the effect of: the removal of the foreskin should restrict the ease of movement* and therefore restrict the ease of “self-abuse” as it was termed then.
* the foreskin functions as a sleeve which eases movement and reduces friction during sexual acts.
New fads seem to be springing up to replace the old ones. The latest is the removal of the lingual frenulum in infants, supposedly to ameliorate breastfeeding difficulties. Yet it would seem that this is common and that there are natural mechanisms for their resolution as well as simple modifications of technique on the mothers part. Moreover there is a lack of evidence for its effectiveness, not to mention the unknown long term effects.
> Example: The average height (a trait with very high heritability) of Dutch men is...
I would not give too much credence to the various figures often given for the average height of men and women in x country without careful research, since they have highly variable degrees of support.
For years I had heard repeatedly that the average height of a man in Indonesia was 158 cm or 5ft and 2 inches. This seemed so absurd to me and provoked enough scepticism that I eventually attempted to track down the source of that figure. It turned out to be from Wikipedia and the citation was a study that measured the heights of the elderly yet all of those repeating that figure neglected to mention, or were in all likelihood entirely ignorant of, that detail. I am similarly sceptical of some of the claims made about the average height of the Dutch, the subject of which seems to be a particular favourite among height myth-mongers.
With respect to young adult men I have found that figures based on measurements obtained as part of fitness screenings for mandatory military service are the most reliable due to their large sample size (at least an order of magnitude larger than the largest academic studies) and overwhelming lack of selection and sampling bias. A minority of nations have such systems and fewer still publish the data obtained in public. Yet even this would not answer the question for the whole population.
In my personal experience that "scenario" is a wearisome but stable job with a good income that would afford a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Yet this unfortunate circumstance was so intolerable that they would rather risk, and have in fact realised, the complete financial ruin of themselves and the ruin of the prospects and happiness of their children than continue to suffer it. So I had little else other than contempt, for them and others like them, when they came to me asking for money.
Even with their proposed “improvements” to Windows Update it would remain inferior in principle to what it was in Windows 7 (or 8 which I never used) and prior when you could “pause” updates indefinitely or, in non-dystopian terms, refuse them. If a third party, even one that you trust, can mandate changes to the software on your computer, then it is not really your computer.
That should have been a red flag.