Eevee's article from April 2012 was about PHP 5.3, not PHP 8. PHP versions 5.4, 5.6, and 7 came out soon afterward, fixing a lot of the flaws she pointed out. A retrospective eight years later showed how much the language had progressed on the road to 8.

"a few months"? I remember a decade ago when Hop took literally a year to go from theaters to DVD sell-through, and then another month after that to get to Redbox.

Until the grandmother asks you "Now how do I put my CDs on my iPhone? Under Windows, I put the CD in the drive and started iTunes."

I don't know what specific software Quasar1999 was running. In my own case, the proprietary Windows-only program is iTunes for loading MP3s onto my roommate's iPhone SE 3. In the case of other people I regularly talk to online, the proprietary Windows-only program is VRChat.

Say my roommate wants me to load MP3s onto her iPhone. I haven't figured out how to do that other than through iTunes for Windows, which does not run in Wine, or Finder for macOS. Am I "deliberately obtuse" or "stupid"?

Which handheld computer with a cellular radio that respects users' freedom is compatible with U.S. mobile networks? Last I checked, things like the Fairphone were made for the European market, with no attempt to get onto Verizon's or AT&T's allowlist.

RAM requirements are chosen by the content developers.

When I was at Opera, Nokia would brag how Symbian didn't need 16megs of RAM or a 133Mhz CPU like Pocket PC did, Symbian only needed 2 megs of RAM and 32Mhz of CPU. I of course showed them Opera running on such a Pocket PC device, it was fast, responsive and could have multiple tabs open. On Symbian, it WAS SLOW and had to keep redownloading things because of lack of RAM. They insisted Opera should run better on Symbian than Pocket PC. I explained, the web page your viewing contains 6megs of uncompressed data and JavaScript which constantly changed the page. It simply won't run well on a crippled phone.

Apple doesn't get to decide.

Huawei does this on a massive scale. They use 7nm chips to build gigantic racks (a meter wide) completely packed with NPUs optimized for PyTorch. They sell full data centers, solar panels, fuel cells, and most importantly, it's all designed for water cooling where the heat is recycled into other functions.

Per cubic meter, their tech is shit compared to NVidia, but they focused on scalability. Not only that, but they can easily recycle most of their platform. Oh oh... Unlike NVidia, Huawei can actually deliver.

If people use AIs to generate their porn and replace things like OnlyFans, how many British people would be out of work?

1. Bare minimum, we should definitely hold Chinese vehicles (electric or otherwise) to the same safety-testing standards as domestic vehicles, and enforce it absolutely relentlessly (like we haven't been doing with Boeing until very recently, but we should have been). There will be huge pressure to relax this, but we dare not, because any loopholes will be abused in the worst possible way and people will die. This one shouldn't be negotiable at all.

2. Tariffs and sanctions remain an option, to be used correctively whenever a foreign company receives inherently unfair advantages resulting from things like government subsidies, currency manipulation, and so on. The details here are potentially negotiable, but...

3. There's no point negotiating *anything* with the CCP until the keep a few of the promises they've already made. Send them an open letter that says "Do some of the stuff you already said you were going to do. We'll wait." When they call to try to negotiate a better (for them) deal, have an intern put them on hold and go to lunch.

Decent-quality aluminum ore is still abundant. In the first place, it was more common than e.g. high-quality iron ore; but the real reason is, we didn't really start mining it in earnest until we figured out an affordable way to refine it, in the late nineteenth century. So compared to just about any other metal you care to name, there's significantly more of the good ore left still accessible, for aluminum.

> Even with that, you're still not going to the stars, i think.

Nobody's going to the stars, regardless of technology level. They're much too far away, and the incentives are much too weak. Staying on a planet in a nice comfy habitable-zone orbit around a star, is just *overwhelmingly* more convenient, than setting out on a multi-generational voyage to a distant location that probably offers you nothing you don't already have closer to home.

We're going to continue to explore the system we're in, and we're probably going to put telescopes in a few more places (perhaps at a couple of the earth-sun lagrange points, for instance) in an attempt to *see* a bit further out. Maybe we'll even send probes. But actually going ourselves, is a total non-starter. It's fun to write stories about, for entertainment purposes, when you don't have to be realistic. But it's not even remotely practicable.

People underestimate how far away the stars are, and think things like "Oh, if we could go maybe a tenth of light speed, then a trip to the nearest star could be 40 years." But it couldn't, because you're assuming instant acceleration, and nothing can survive that. Spreading the aceleration out means you can't do most of it with the slingshot effect, so it becomes very expensive to achieve. Using thrusters, for example, the amount of reaction mass needed to handle a voyage that long in a comfortable way (acelerate for the first half, then decelerate for the second half) is prohibitive, even if the energy is free. The only *practical* way to do it is with laws-of-physics-optional sci-fi propulsion technology. Hyperspace or warp drive or wormhole generators or space folding tech or some jazz like that. None of which is consistent with what we think we know about physics. So unless we find out that the standard model is very very wrong in some fundamental way, going to the stars is not happening.

> I challenge you to find an example of any federal court ruling
> wherein it has been decided that foreign governments, have
> the rights granted in the US constitution. They don't.

And furthermore, if they did, some of the treaties we've made at
the ends of wars, would be violations of our constitution. The
agreement we made with Japan at the end of WWII, and the
constitution we forced them to adopt (certain points of which we
later regretted due to the Cold War), are a prominent example.
But no, the German inter-war and Japanese post-war governments
don't have second-amendment rights. If foreign governments had
fourth-amendment rights, most of what the CIA does would be
unconstitutional.

If you don't understand the constitutional basis for who has rights,
maybe look at the wording in the ninth and tenth amendments.
Maybe you will find a clue there.

I will say it again: the Chinese Communist Party does not have
rights under the US constitution. They have certain rights under
international law, but running propaganda companies in other
countries isn't one of those rights.

> I don't see any "except for foreign corporations" clause in there,

The word "corporation" here is disengenuous. We're talking about a genocidal government that has materially subsidized the platform's growth specifically so they can use it for propaganda purposes, not some kind of normal for-profit company. (In fact, converting TikTok _into_ a normal for-profit company is the entire point of the bill. That's why the Chinese government hates it so much. They don't want to give up control.)

And I challenge you to find an example of any federal court ruling wherein it has been decided that foreign governments, have the rights granted in the US constitution. They don't.

> not to mention all the users who are going to have their speech unconstitutionally
> abridged by this bill if it becomes law.

How does requiring a foreign government to divest their controlling share in a company, abridge the free speech rights of individuals? Have you even read a short *summary* of what the bill does? The bill does not in any way shape or form attempt to limit what opinions can be published. (It's the other side in the debate that wants to do that, by having the executive branch tell tech companies what "misinformation" they need to curtail.) It just requires ByteDance to sell the platform to a genuinely private company that's *not* run by the CCP. That's all.

But they really, really, really don't want to do that, because as far as they're concerned that would defeat the whole entire purpose of developing the thing in the first place.

Forcing ByteDance out doesn't violate the first amendment because ByteDance isn't the American public; it's part of the narrative-shaping aparatus of a hostile foreign power, which has no legal rights at all under US law. We should've had them on an entity list ten years ago.