Yes, but half the people have below-average intelligence.

We won't have a stable society if they're constantly scammed.

And I know some High-IQ people with no street smarts who got scammed by "Raj from Microsoft Support".

Really some dude from a trailer park might have a better BS detector, having lived a less coddled existence.

> It's impolite to ignore robots.txt, but it's not illegal.

Put something fake in your robots.txt and block the IP that accesses the fake URL.

AI people: "oh, that's where all the good stuff is!"

You can get permanent residence easily, this gives you access to the all-important Chinese ID card and all the rights of residents. Including an ability to register a business. Naturalization is possible and technically you don't need anything special for it, but it's exceedingly rare. You also need to renounce your other citizenship(s) for that.

China is now becoming a popular emigration destination for Russian scientists. It's now very hard for them to emigrate to Europe/US, but China is easy. It's also helpful if the emigrants still want to visit Russia from time to time.

OMG, I'm so stealing that ;)

"Woke" simply means "I'm conservative, and the thing I'm calling 'Woke' is something that I hate". It has no well-defined meaning beyond that. I've heard things as diverse as "the concept of the Metaverse" and "removing copyrighted content so you don't get sued" described as "woke".

No call by push value or P vs NP or complexity theory etc.

So a different set of things that are also useless to the vast majority of people?

Even when Chrome adds support, we'll have to wait ages before we can actually reliably use the format without having to implement fallback logic and fallback formats for legacy browsers.

AVIF is also painfully slow. And if I recall correctly, is outperformed by JPEG XL at moderate and low compression (but - again, if I recall correctly - AVIF wins at highly compressed images). Also, AVIF faces some patent threats. And misses a lot of JPEG XL's interesting features.

A practical issue with a circle is that it is not a circle until it is finished,

That's not the reason at all, AFAIK. The reasoning is, okay, we want people to be able to move from one place to some distance place in the city at the maximum comfortable speed, which is limited by G-forces. You have some guaranteed G-forces from first accelerating and then decelerating. But if it's linear, that's your only G forces. If it's curved, however, you also have radial G-forces.

The Line's train going from one end to the other (170km) nonstop is supposed to do it in 20 minutes, aka with a mean speed of ~510 kph. Let's say a peak of 800 kph. Now if we shape that 170km into a circle, that's 54km diameter, 27km radius. From the centripetal force formula a=v^2/r, that's 222,22...^2 / 27000 ~= 1,83 m/s^2, or a constant ~0,2g to the side. This is on top of the G-forces from your acceleration and deceleration. You can probably deal with ~0,2g in a train if everyone is seated without much discomfort, though it's double what's acceptable for standing passengers. But you can eliminate that if the city is linear (at the cost of increasing the mean distance that the average person has to travel to go from one arbitrary point in the city to another)

That's not to defend this concept. Because the city doesn't need to be 170km long; you can just made it more 2d and have the distances be vastly shorter (at the cost of just needing some extra lateral travel within the city). Honestly, if I were building a "designer" city from the ground up, I'd use a PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system rather than trying to make it super-elongated.

What got me is that I don't see why this isn't readily resolved by active damping, the same systems that many tall towers now use to resist earthquakes or resonant wind forces. Big heavy weight at the top (or in this case the bottom) hooked up to actuators that make it move in an inverse direction to the sway.

Again, this is not to defend this colossal waste of money. I just don't see why there aren't ready solutions for this specific problem.

Agreed - but that said, there are space elevator alternatives, like the Lofstrom Loop / Launch Loop, which at least theoretically can be built with modern materials (and have far better properties anyway - not latitude-constrained, provides dV, vastly higher throughput, far more efficient, stores energy / can add cheap energy at off-peak times, etc). One could always "waste" money on them trying something new :)

Back in my day we called 'em shills.

> Bruh. Apt already relies on Perl, which has no formal language specification. What nonsense is this?

You are right, which is why I don't think this is a huge deal.

Though perl5 compatibility back to c.2000 is pretty good.

Today's rust code most likely won't run in 2050 on modern compilers.

But perl4 code doesn't run well today either.

Yet nothing in trixie needs to run anything from buzz - so as long as everything works within a version or two it's hard to imagine anybody being negatively affected.

I have a UPS package shipped Overnight/Saturday Delivery on Friday and it now appears to be on a truck near Chicago. It was originally scheduled to transit from South Dakota to New England.

New delivery date is Tuesday. I hope the sender gets his money back!

(I didn't need it that quickly but the sender was making good on a delivery date guarantee, at a loss of his profits).

I have a floppy controller on order that doesn't know how to read disks; it just passes through magnetic field data to software which is supposed to be able to reconstruct the disk image.

Hopefully these tapes will be OK to read as long as somebody can build a magnetic read head of the correct type.

Maybe with ML there will be a reasonable chance of reconstructing faded regions. Old audio tape is still mostly fine, so fingers crossed.

BTW, what a great job these folks have!