OMG, I'm so stealing that ;)

Do they also provide build tools and allow customers to build and install their own images?

You have to have punishments to stop the people who are stopped by the threat of them. Those people do exist. We don't think about them much because the existing deterrents work just fine on them.

But you also shouldn't waste your time either believing that they will deter everyone, nor that stronger punishments will deter statistically more people. There are always those who think they won't get caught, and those who don't care.

Somehow authoritarians always forget the carrot. The stick isn't invalid, it just isn't a complete solution, and you shouldn't be rushing to apply it in all situations.

What's stopping you? There's definitely people doing this right now. Around a quarter of the continental US is BLM land. Last I looked pig tags were free.

"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?

Where are you seeing anti-china war mongering? I haven't seen it.

The population has been dropping three straight years, I don't know where you found that AI site.

As for the economy, the article and even the summary says clearly:

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 :)

It's an indication of economic retraction.

Traditional Saudi Arabian architecture is based around keeping things cool. Like the high walls in this building complex keep everything in the shade, and retain the coolness from the night as much as possible (because hot air rises, the cool air stays in the building). At the same time, it still allows natural light which overall makes a very comfortable effect.

Having a line allows you to enforce hierarchy. The people at one side will never want to go to the other side, that's where the lower class people are.