> And studios aren't social institutions, money needs to come in to be able to support the development of a new game for many years and make a bit of profit, you need a lot of money to be able to support it, and if more money is going out, that means you have to do something to prevent that, or close up shop.

Looks like you're operating under an infinite (or at least continuous) growth assumption. But a company doesn't have to be like that. id software accumulated some "fat" over the years, they could have used it to keep going for a while. They could've continued working on things they enjoy working on, doing passion-driven development; and perhaps they could've produced another revolution.

Yes, they may eventually run out of "fat", but if they were an independent company - it would've been the consequence of their own choice. But now, this choice was forced onto them by Microsoft; and as a result - the world may have lost something valuable (which is not easy to quantify in a monetary sense).

https://world.openfoodfacts.or...

> Homemade bread is ultraprocessed, but it's unquestionably good for you.

How so? According to the NOVA classification, bread falls into group 3 - processed foods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A simplified definition would be "does the food contain ingredients one cannot find in a typical kitchen?". Of course, one's definition of "regular kitchen" varies, but it is good enough for a quick assessment.

Van Tulleken's "Ultra-Processed People" covers these points, here are some examples, off the top of my head:

> * Fizzy drinks - Carbonation isn't a problem, it's the sugar.
When a drink is served cold and is carbonated - you are less sensitive to its sugar contents. In other words, you can smuggle a larger quantity of sugar into your body this way. If, in contrast, you let that fizzy drink reach room temperature and get rid of the fizz - it would taste too sweet.

This is an example of a deliberate design meant to make you want to buy more of the stuff. A company uses precise measurements and tests to find the optimal range for temperature and fizz.

> * There's nothing bad about fruit juice concentrates except when they use insufficient water to reconstitute the concentrate or if they remove too much pulp.
In the book he mentions an experiment, the setting was like this:

- group A eats an apple
- group B drinks the juice made from that apple, with the pulp
- group C is like B, but without the pulp

Blood sugar levels are measure before, during and after consumption. What they found is that for groups B and C there is a sudden spike, and then the level falls below what it used to be before consumption. With group A - the rise in sugar levels was very gradual, and then it also fell gradually.

This shows that the 3 categories are not the same, even though in each case you ate the same apple in different forms. The researchers hypothesized that the actual fruit has a property, they called it "matrix" - as I understood it, the "form factor" is very important, it is not just a matter of consuming "the same molecules".

As in the example of the fizzy drink, I think of it as "sugar per unit of time" - eating a real apple takes time, you have to chew it, the body's "digestive pipeline" gets enough time to handle the input. The juice is different, the time is short, there's no chewing, no effort.

I enjoyed the book very much, I think you'll like it too. The audiobook is narrated by the author himself.

> but billionaires are drop in the (expanding) ocean.

In terms of headcount - yes, but in terms of power and authority to do something - no.

These people can exert a greater influence on policies, and could therefore be seen as bearing a greater responsibility, no?

> Europe kills about 50,000 of it's citizens because of lack of AC

You pinned 50K deaths on AC, that's not an accurate view of the situation.

Think about it more generally, there are many factors at play - diminishing tree coverage in the cities, lack of freely available water sources scattered around the city, rigid work schedules that force people to be outside at a time where they could have stayed at home, lack of regulations that allow only energy-efficient homes to be built, lack of subsidies for upgrading the insulation of existing houses, subsidized or free public transport, etc.

If you rely on AC to solve the problem, then what happens during a power outage (such as the recent one in the Iberian peninsula)?

Last, but not least - powering an AC requires energy, that costs money. What about the people who cannot afford AC? Climate change affects unprivileged people to a larger extent.

> Protocols like ACME do exist, but really only exist for web servers.

That's not so, an example I mentioned in another thread is the Certificate Management Protocol (CMP, RFC 4210 and its follow-up RFC 4210bis), it is versatile and applicable in context other than web-servers. There are open source CMP client implementations, even OpenSSL 3.x has one - so it is easy to start prototyping and automating your workflow by wrapping `openssl cmp` into scripts.

Start with https://docs.openssl.org/maste...

If ACME is not to your liking, consider other certificate management protocols, like CMP (RFC 4210 and RFC 4210bis). Modern versions of OpenSSL have a built-in CMP client.

Got any references to support the "declaring Sharia law in their newly settled communities" part of the message? I didn't notice anything like that in Germany.

> studies that show homework is less than worthless

Can you point to your favourite studies that look into this matter? I am intrigued and surprised by your assertion. I was under the impression that the amount of time spent on a problem is positively correlated (at least up to a point) with the likelihood to solve it.

When I read "thin blue line", I thought of how the atmosphere protects life on the planet from the rather hostile environment of outer space.

My understanding is that the model is not a program that can execute any logic on its own, open network connections, etc. The model is a huge data file, which is then loaded by another program (like Ollama or llama.cpp) that deals with the user.

Some software that uses neural networks has functionality to perform HTTP requests and fetch some data that are then used to enrich the prompt for the model (e.g., OpenWebUI, if I recall correctly), or execute commands in the system (e.g., the Cline plugin for VSCode). However, that is not the jurisdiction of the model itself, but the jurisdiction of the software *you* choose to run it with.

Perhaps a model can be designed to take advantage of these real-world connections (e.g. make HTTP requests or run commands) if it detects that it is in an environment that has them. It could use some obfuscation techniques to squeeze in additional commands (e.g., phone home, download remote access software and set it up, modify your SSH authorized keys file, etc.) which the users would approve without thinking or understanding.

Social media can make things worse in several ways. First of all - the bully doesn't have to do it in person anymore, it can be done remotely. Second - anyone can get onboard, some random people on the Internet can press "like" or type mean messages, scripts can automate it. If a teen's life is centered around social media - they are much more exposed than they were before. To summarize:

Real World interactions
- embodied
- synchronous
- primarily 1 to 1, or 1 to several, with only one interaction happening at a time
- take place within communities with a high bar of entry and exit

Virtual world
- disembodied
- async (except video call)
- many one-to-many interactions, several can take place at a time
- low barrier of entry and exit

These are different stories. Munich is in the South, in Bavaria, whereas Schleswig-Holstein is in the North by the Baltic sea. There is no centralized authority that controls them, these are unrelated, independent initiatives.

One of the reasons why such sites are profitable is that users are hooked via means like infinite scroll, or autoplay. This fast and smooth UI is what keeps users glued to their screens, nudging them towards mindlessly watching whatever comes next and spending way too much time on the site.

Slowing it down deliberately could drive people away from the platform, because they will have more opportunities to reconsider why they are on the site and potentially break the loop of mindless surfing.