The actual reality.

The reason why their cars don't last is the reason why their sales are high. They're selling cheap cars that last less than a decade in normal use, and then they get to sell another new car.

Cheaper Chinese models intended for domestic market often don't even have galvanic rust protection. They become rust buckets in just a few years in wet regions. And almost all of PRC's rich areas are in fact wet.

But even for more expensive models, UV exposure makes plastic come apart after a few years, and breakages begin around the same time. You're supposed to buy a new one at this point. In PRC, there's a reason why there are new EVs and older ICE cars, but there are almost no old EVs other than Teslas. They don't last, because they're not supposed to last. They're supposed to break down and look like shit after a few years, so you get a new one.

I don't think you want to make any claims about UK trains being "proper".

At least not until you try them out.

This is on the level of saying that "US projects housing is really nice for aspiring 19 year old white college girls to live in". Don't say this nonsense until you see what you're talking about.

The irony is that this reveals you to be the "old internet user" who's used to "people on the internet" being different from "people I know in real life".

For younger internet users, there is little difference. Internet is where they interact with schoolmates, work colleagues, friends, teammates, etc. They see people like you and I as "these weird boomers who think internet isn't full of real people".

Meanwhile interest based groups are reasonably localized. I know something like 75-80% of people in most of those, and have met them face to face at least once. Same goes for those massive snapchat/whasapp/discord/etc groups. While some are international, for most of the young people these have in fact replaced bars, gentlemen's clubs, book reading circles, bowling alleys, etc social gatherings. They're the normal place where they socialize with friends and acquaintances now. And these old ones are slowly withering and dying as youngsters don't see a reason to go to a bar to meet up with friends any more.

What happened to "AI factories"?

Also, it would seem that they have overhired on PR people, if they're this desperate for something to do.

Small "we focus on interest X, we retain with comment sections and we monetize through ads" websites got killed a decade ago by facebook that centralized that model to their site. If you want to do basket weaving or local HEMA re-enactment group or anything in between in your area, your state, your nation, etc, there's a facebook group for that now. That is vastly superior in connecting people and generating good articles that aforementioned websites ever were, which is why facebook won.

Then reddit killed the actual forums in the exact same way. It's both better and more convenient to have a centralized depository for everything, with common interface and rule set from perspective of 95% of users (I pulled that number out of my ass, but you know exactly what I mean).

What's left is mostly various wikis, and similar "we provide information" websites. Those are getting hammered by AI being able to answer faster and better than having to go through a wiki for a few minutes for that specific interest you're looking for. This is notably why google is losing profitability. It's bread and butter was monetizing the search that found those sites, and then monetizing their ad stream through google ads that were common on such sites. Today, google's AI search is better at answering those questions (not to mention just asking questions of other popular models), but on top of that if your AI answer to the question being asked is on point and answers the question user is searching the answer for... you don't get to monetize it nearly as well.

But the hilarity is that internet is more alive than ever. It has more actual users than ever, as older generations who don't use it are dying out, while newer generations basically live their entire lives on the internet the way older ones couldn't even imagine. But with people being more and more able to specifically select for their more and more specialized and narrow interests, those of us used to much broader communities with broader interests are left with a feeling that everyone is gone.

Meanwhile every football guy and every party girl is in fifty snapchat/whatsapp/discord/etc groups that have to be muted because otherwise the phone wouldn't stop going off with notifications from other people in those groups talking.

A small percentage of a few billion people is a big problem.

Yes, regardless of whether their name is Muhammed or Breivik.

Why not here? Because for starters, humanism isn't a religion (and I say that as a humanist). It's a philosophical stance within atheism. And atheism is the absence of religion** (it's literally right there in the name), not a religion. You can't claim "religious" exemptions as an atheist. What this person actually wants is a philosophical exemption, akin to, say, a vegetarian wanting an exemption from having to cook meat at a restaurant or whatnot.

** - Well, except for those atheists who worship Athe.

Yeah, nothing insular about the Amish.

(Oh wait...)

Headline from 1845.

Agreed. If you don't know what you're doing it's hard to even ask for the right thing or know what's possible. For example: I'm currently developing a system that uses a local AI to help debug internal issues. The initial incarnations of it were very slow to start up each command; clearly, it wasn't doing proper KV caching and was having to prefill every turn; it required patches on the llama.cpp fork and our API wrapper, and also adjusting the system prompt to keep variable content at the end. But if you have no idea about KV caching issues, how do you even know something is wrong with the backend, let alone what to tell the AI to fix? You'll end up deciding you need to upgrade the GPU instead.

(That said: "lovingly handcrafted" code is a hilarious phrase that should give any developer who's ever worked on a big corporate software project the giggles, and also, these software devs are clearly people angry at knowing they're going to be let go looking for revenge by badmouthing their boss to the press)

Google's fundamentals are web ads on its search.

AI search is more relevant and popular than ever, whereas web search results are less and less so. And AI search is proving to be less monetizable than web search.

Ergo, fundamentals have changed. More monetizable search is slowly getting deprecated, whereas less monetizable one is replacing it everywhere.

Escape from Pluto is much easier, and the Pluto-Charon distance is 1/20th of the Earth-Moon distance.

Thank god for that. It was hard enough to learn 9 (now 8) planets at school. Can you imagine having to learn all the names if the hydrostatic equilibrium definition held?

Since when does science work by a standard of "what is easy for children to memorize lists of"? Do we say "There are 8 rivers in the world, and all others are dwarf rivers, which really aren't rivers" to make it easier on kids? Do we say "There are 8 bones in the human body, and all others are dwarf bones, which don't really count as bones"?

That's not how science works. Science is focused on practical distinctions about how things developed and their physical properties relative to each other. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a very practical definition. The process of undergoing relaxation induces metamorphism and releases heat, altering bodies. You go to non-equilibrium bodies if you want to study the primordial makeup of our solar system. You go to equilibrium bodies if you want to study tectonics, volcanism, non-primordial chemistry, and search for past or present life. The boundary could not be more meaningful. Yes, there is a bit of fuzz between equilibrium and non-equilibrium, but the same applies to pretty much all scientific fields.

Supporters of the IAU definition (which I should add was a deeply biased sample, in that it looked like they were headed toward no definition or a hydrostatic equilibrium definition, so most supporters of that left, but the people trying to switch it to an orbit-clearing definition stayed) will argue that it's cleared if the remaining objects are trivial transients or in orbital resonance. But that's not what the IAU definition says. Also they'll point to the Stern-Levison parameter, but (A) that was based on the ability to scatter today's distribution of asteroids, not the primordial distribution, which included outright planetissimals**; and (B) Mars didn't even clear it's own orbit, Jupiter did. Also, in the paper that introduced the Stern-Levison parameter, they argued for a better definition where you combine adjectives and nouns (each with specific implications about the body) as needed to describe its size, composition, etc.

But the OP's point stands, in that it's stupid to say that something is a "dwarf planet", yet not a planet. It's like saying dwarf stars aren't stars or dwarf galaxies aren't galaxies or whatnot. An adjective-noun is almost always a noun, that's how language works. In the cases where an adjective-noun isn't a noun - say, "shooting star" or "slow worm" or whatnot - we treat these as scientifically erroneous colloquialisms, and formalize corrected scientific terminology. We don't do literally the opposite and have science codify misleading language.

This seems to be a part of the android's ios-ification.

Block installing unsigned APKs, and likely eventually all APKs by users entirely. Then when no one can install alternative app stores from APKs any more, and anti-monopoly people come knocking, have this "program" to show them.

Smart.