Application portability doesn't enter into it, nor does this have anything to do with code at a binary or library level. Nothing to do with Windows drivers! Not sure why you brought that up.

This is the Linux kernel we're talking about. This extension allows slightly cleaner, easier-to-read syntax in certain circumstances. As I understand it, it's syntactic sugar that brings a bit of C++'s ability to cleanly extend structs to C. This is clearly shown by some insightful comments above.

Nice dig at systemd, but completely nonsensical. All three major compilers support these extensions to the C language. Application developers can use them as they see fit. And have for decades.

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

There are obviously many reasons why Spotify and other industries definitely don't want you to think clearly! If you want to call it a conspiracy, that is accurate. A conspiracy to distract, prevent clear thought, prevent the forming of deep social bonds, and of course spend money unwisely. Like was said in the summary, Spotify's goal is to get you to waste your time.

Have you asked yourself why this is so?

However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".

Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose output is negative. They may pick X apples or whatever, but they might do it while making everyone around them work slower.

Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.

So... you didn't actually look at the size of WikiMedia Foundation's bank account.

WikiMedia absolutely has enough money to run Wikipedia indefinitely if they treated their current pile of money as an endowment and just used the income from it to support the site. They don't have "billions upon billions", but they do have almost $300M, and they spend about $3M per year on hosting, and probably about that much again on technical staff to run the site, so about $6M per year. That's 2% per year. Assuming they can get a 6% average return on their assets, they can fully fund Wikipedia forever, and then some.

So, what do they do with all of the donations instead, if the money isn't needed to run Wikipedia? It funds the foundation's grant programs. Of course, you might actually like their grant programs. I think some of their grants are great, myself, and if they were honest about what they're using it for I might be inclined to give. But they're not, and the fact that they continue lying to Wikipedia's user base really pisses me off, so I don't give and I strongly discourage everyone I can from giving, at every opportunity.

Context is Everything! Before people start going off about how dumb of an idea this is, this is about SINGAPORE.

In the US, light-duty trucks (pickup trucks) emit nearly 5x the total annual GHG than commercial air travel and a huge proportion of those pick-up trucks are vanity vehicles. This airline levy isn't nor should it be a high-priority levy for the US.

For Singapore, where it's very difficult to own a car ($20k/yr + fuel + parking), vehicle emissions aren't really their focus and commercial air is.

Me too, but it took a lot longer and I was a lot less thorough. I would skim a half-dozen links from the search result, the LLM reads a lot more, and a lot more thoroughly.

I do. I tell the LLM to always include links to its sources, and I check them. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the LLM is accurately representing them. Granted that other people might not do this, but those other people also wouldn't check more than the first hit from the search engine, which is basically the same problem. If you only read the top hit, you're trusting the search engine's ranking algorithm.

That seems like a potential risk. I have't actually seen that happening in any of the stuff I've looked at.

What if you listen to podcasts? What if you're not afraid to be alone with your thoughts, or meditate in quiet? Why does life have to have a soundtrack? What did people do who in the 19th century when they had to walk for days without a steady supply of algorithmic music? What would happen if you contributed meaningful statements instead of rhetorical, mindless questions?

Adverts pay for the web. And also clutter it up. Both of these things are true. Without advertising, there would be very little content that isn't paywalled, and there would be far less content than there is. Slashdot wouldn't exist, for example. The key is to keep advertising sufficiently profitable that it can fund the web, but not so intrusive that it make the web awful.

How do we do that? The best idea I've seen is to use adblockers that selectively block the obnoxious ads. But not enough people do it, so that doesn't work either.

Would have to say no. Trump sees everything as a zero sum game.

Apparently good conversation, thinking, and occasional good music don't mean anything to that person which is a sad commentary on where we are today as society.

This. There seems to be a widespread assumption that random genetic changes are somehow less problematic than carefully-selected ones because they're "natural" or something. It's not like cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals, transcription errors and other sources of random genetic mutation are somehow careful not to make harmful changes. Engineered changes might not be better than random mutations, but they're clearly not worse.