"Where is the light coming from? Same place as the music."

Realism is all well and good, but telling a story is the first job of a filmmaker. If your viewers are complaining they can't see what's going on, they're not engaging with the story.

Back in the days where literally every manufacturer used a different charging cable, and some used different charging cables for different devices, this might have made sense. But as usual, the politicians only get around to dealing with a problem long after it's already more-or-less solved itself. When was the last time anyone here bought a phone that wasn't either USB-C or Lightning? Do we really need a law to turn two cable types into one?

It's a stupid idea anyway: By insisting on one standard for charging cables, we're effectively saying that we don't ever want chargers to get better. We've just removed the incentive for any one company to invest in trying to come up with more efficient or faster charging systems as a unique selling point for their phones.

But there was a "solidarity agreement" in place, whereby the countries of the EU agreed that nobody could start vaccinating until everybody had secured a supply. The theory was that if they didn't do that, Germany would buy up all the vaccines and the likes of Slovenia would have to go unvaccinated until the Germans were finished; which might be fair enough, but as a consequence, millions of people who could have been vaccinated earlier weren't, because the speed of the rollout was determined by the least efficient country.

A lot of people (especially in the richer, more powerful countries, obviously) feel that that was a mistake which has cost lives. And over in the UK, the pro-Brexit types are shouting "See? Look how many more of us would have died if we'd stayed in the EU!" - and you can certainly see EU officials wanting to shut those people up, or at least stop EU citizens from listening to them and getting ideas.

Not to be a cynic, but it may help to consider the following facts:

• The UK certified use of the AZ Vaccine a full month before the European Union did.
• The UK has now vaccinated 39% of its population (mostly using the AZ vaccine), whereas the EU average is just 11.8%

I don't think it's a huge reach to say that EU officials have an incentive to "prove" that the AZ vaccine isn't actually safe, and therefore that its delay (and the resulting deaths) are therefore not their fault; they were just exercising due caution.

This is not to say that they're wrong, necessarily, just that they have good reason to want to believe that there's a problem with AZ.

I'm sorry, what? You stand behind the underlying idea that news companies - who value the incoming traffic they get from search engines and social media so much that they hire entire departments of people whose full-time job is search engine optimisation and social media management - should now also be paid by the companies providing that traffic?

No, I'm sorry. Google and Facebook provide value TO news companies, they don't take value FROM them. This law is very obviously unjust. This is not about freedom, or rights. It's about money - Murdoch has the Australian government in his pocket, and wants to help himself to money he hasn't earned.

Yeah, you can't have your cake and eat it too. It's one thing to give a game away for free, on the understanding that adverts will pay for the cost of development. It's even OK to offer a discounted, ad-supported version of an expensive game, so long as the buyer knows in advance that that's what they're getting and have the opportunity to pick the more expensive ad-free version. But when you're charging full price for a game and STILL trying to foist adverts on people, you really are just taking the piss.

Yes, that's rather my point. Most people haven't seen those clips. Most people won't ever see those clips. Most people don't spend their days actively searching YouTube for clips of political candidates being creepy, and since they are "old news", the odds of them being widely played on TV news in future are minimal. You know what they have seen of Biden? Eight years of him standing next to Barack Obama.

And even if I'm wrong, and the clips do get widespread circulation in future, I doubt they'll have the kind of impact you're anticipating. People have become so used to political campaigns getting dirty, they're so used to seeing people throwing around allegations that the other guy is a creep, that they've started to tune this sort of thing out. How else do you explain Trump managing to get elected despite the numerous scandals surrounding him?

I hear this opinion a lot online, and I think you may be falling foul of the Internet's tendency to create echo chambers. This notion that Biden is creepy and weird seems to be mostly just shared among Bernie supporters, who are mad that their guy didn't win. But it hasn't spread much beyond that. Most of America - the part that doesn't obsessively follow campaign news - still knows him as just "Obama's Vice President", and after four years of Trump, they see him as a candidate on the "Any Sane Adult, 2020" campaign. Current polling shows Biden with a comfortable lead of around 9%.

What Asimov was REALLY good at, though, was sketching out a basic premise and some character archetypes, and then saying "OK, given all this, what would logically happen?"

At it's core, that's all there is to both I, Robot and Foundation. You get one big idea (the three laws / psychohistory), and then a series of little thumbnail sketches of how that idea would affect people's behaviour in a variety of different situations with slightly differing setups.

Or put another way, Asimov's works are a series of thought experiments. They may not include much speculative science, in-universe, but they kind of are speculative science in and of themselves. Hence the appeal to a certain subculture known for its love of the scientific method.

The dirty secret of the world is that most people are bad at their jobs. There are a handful of professions where incompetence is obvious, but even within those, in the vast majority of cases you can get away with it for a very long time - because the people who are nominally tasked with detecting incompetence are, themselves, incompetent.

Add to that, impostor syndrome leads even those who are NOT incompetent to think that they are, and therefore to be afraid of calling out incompetence in others lest the finger be pointed at themselves in turn. So what happens is we all just carry on as we are, pretending not to notice incompetence in others, pretending that the absurdly overextended budgets and timelines on our projects are normal.

It wouldn't surprise me if at any given time, for every three users actually watching something, there is at least one who's just browsing through the catalog, wading through 100 auto-playing previews for things they have no interest in before finding something they like. Simply turning off auto-preview would save that 25% bandwidth at a stroke.

Who discovered him?

There's no shame in saying "There simply isn't enough data available to know what is ACTUALLY happening, but if you use this model which assumes this much invisible stuff, the maths all works, so that's good enough to be going on with for now. When we know more, we'll update the model."

The important thing is that we always need to avoid falling into the trap of thinking the model is a perfect representation of reality. The map is not the territory.

Let's assume Clouflare are correct, and 8chan is a gathering place for people planning mass murders. In that case, surely shutting it down is the worst thing they could do? I don't know about you, but if there are psychopaths in my community, I'd want to be able to keep an eye on them - so if I know they're posting on 8chan, I can monitor 8chan and so I can know who they are and potentially be warned in advance if they're planning anything.

Shutting 8chan won't change those people, it will just make them move elsewhere - somewhere I (and potentially law enforcement) don't know about. Doesn't that make me less safe?

Yes and no. To get a little bit meta on you, isn't it true that just as different people need different amounts of sleep, different people also have different needs in terms of active monitoring of their sleep? Some, like you, are better off just trying to relax and not stress about the time they spend sleeping, but others actually do benefit from the certainty that comes from an accurate measurement. It kind of feels like you're trying to advocate your own one-size-fits-all solution ("Just relax and sleep when you're tired") while at the same time objecting to another one ("sleep 8 hours a day").

I think there's a decent parallel to the notion of dieting, where I too take a view roughly equivalent to yours - simply eat when you're hungry, and stop eating when you are no longer hungry (but before you're completely full). Trust your body to know how much it needs. For me, obsessively counting calories would be torture, and I have a vague belief that a lot of eating disorders are caused by over-obsession with calorie counts; but at the same time I recognise that for a lot of people, my approach simply would not work, and tools that help people stick to their diets are, on balance, a good thing in the world. And so it is with sleep monitoring apps - which are useful, if nothing else, for reminding you of when the right time to go to bed is.