I base this only on claims made in Adam Curtis' new film TraumaZone, in which the final Soviet experiment is detailed. The one in which they tried to create a computer system to run communism in a single city. Perhaps the details of this are incorrect, but it's not important.

It seems that what the software does is push the rent as high as possible, to the extent that it calculates having some apartments empty is worth it. The supply is being de-facto withheld, by pricing out of the reach of most people.

Lower than they could be, not lower than they needed to be. This is peoples homes, after all.

I believe this is false. The rents are being set by software, designed to seek the highest rent possible. This suggests that rents are currently higher than they need to be, and that supply and demand are in fact not the main factor in setting the levels of rent. You know what other system set prices centrally using software that gathered information from consumer activity? Communist Russia.

And a forklift can lift much heavier weights than the person that built it. That doesn't mean that we are about to be taken over by forklifts.

Those artificial neural networks are incapable of output without the billions of images that they are trained on. And even then, if you ask them to create something original. Like, say, typing into Stable Diffusion "Please create some original art for me", what do you think it will do?

There is, still, zero intelligence in anything we have created. This is true of the chess computers, the "AI" image-making software, the "AI" code-writing software. None of it. Whether or not there ever will be is perhaps an open question, but nothing so far created suggests that there will be.

And you would be wrong.

Your argument is really strange. They aren't "refusing to provide" a charger, you can buy one from them at an additional cost that comes to 2.3% extra. You think that if they were bundling that charger, you'd be getting it for free? No, of course not, you'd be paying that 2.3% extra - and you'd be adding to your drawer-full of chargers.

And so what if people keep iffy chargers lying around? Are you suggesting that if Apple always shipped a charger with the phone, that nobody would use their old chargers? The kind of people that keep those old chargers are exactly the same kind of people that don't even both to pull their new charger out of the box.

It is a FACT that the vast majority of people already own multiple USB chargers. It is a FACT that shipping a brand-new USB charger with every single iphone shipped in the world is increasing the amount of waste by an EXTREMELY LARGE AMOUNT. The two facts matter. They matter alot. You don't need a new charger with your phone, and neither does anybody else.

No, now your choices are:

1) Don't buy a new one at all, you probably already have several USB chargers.
2) Buy one much cheaper than the Apple one, at a slightly higher risk of malfunction etc.
3) Buy one from Apple, and get slightly higher quality.

So, that's three choices. And, of course, Apple didn't "eat" the cost of the BOM, they passed that onto you.

Let me ask you this. How many USB chargers do you have kicking around your house? I probably have at least ten, maybe more if I really started looking.

Your comment is absolute, total and complete drivel. It is not even remotely based in reality, not even a small amount. Stop with your internal idea of what's going on in the world, and actually go and look at the top critics movies. Count how many contain the things you appear to have a problem with (brown people, gay people, gay people kissing... stuff like that), and how many contain the things you don't have a problem with (white people, straight people, straight people kissing, killing, explosions, hot women in nameless roles etc). Come back with an honest assessment.

Magic Mike was art. And so was Crank. Other than those exceptions, you have a point.

One point of disagreement that my wife and I cannot quite seem to reach consensus on is the Minions. I think they're hilarious. She thinks they're stupid.

I'm right, obviously.

TGM was fantasic. It was a straight-up non-nonsense great film. The editing of the flight sequences was perfection. That opening sequence in the hypersonic plane was visual poetry. It might well have been a perfect film.

There were so many great films this year, just as there will be next year, and the year after that. The culture wars do not exist.

Citation needed. Definition of "Cancelled" required. Use of plural possible hyperbole. I can find no evidence of this supposed cancellation.

21st Century cinema is just perfectly fine. It's not difficult to find great movies. "Nope" is absolutely fantastic, "Elvis" was great, "Enemy" (from all the way back in 2013) was totally fantastic.

There is no such thing as "woke", or "anti-woke". Even believing in this division is playing into the hands of those who stand to profit from the "culture wars", which is to say advertisers and hyper-partisan news outlets.

AmiMoJo is just talking perfectly normal and reasonable common-sense. This is an American website, and American's views are for the most part quite... peculiar. Just look at the small thread below. AmiMoJo points out that having non-white and non-straight actors is nothing more than reflecting reality, and is responded to with "Unrelenting pursuit of identity politics... neo-Marxist.... undermining Western Civilisation".

Sensibly, AmiMoJo chooses not to respond to this.

You're right. And, if you're smart enough to be able to do that, you will produce the highest-performing code anywhere.

And if you're not, or you lack the discipline, then you won't. And so, you should use a less-performant language. There will still be traps in that language, and you will still write code that either crashes, or locks up, or whatever. But for some reason, you might feel happier about it.

It does not throw an exception, it crashes.

If one were to try to access the array element using the "at" function, then it would throw an exception.

Why does nobody here appear to understand the language they're either bashing or supporting? Personally, I try to never use any language other than C++ for anything, because I'm old fashioned and believe that performance (in modern terms, this means energy efficiency) is vitally important. I'm also well-versed enough in the language to not get tripped up by it... very much. Certainly no more than I do with any other language I know well.