> China's 200TB optical disk

This exists in a laboratory and nowhere else. The technology used for it hasn't been commercialized and might not be able to be. It's good science for sure, but pretending it's a real thing that someone somewhere can use for data, is dishonest. Extant optical media is very slow compared to magnetic media (including tapes) and electronic media, so is this high density disc something that has a good speed or a bad speed, if it were developed more? Hard to predict based on the pretty much nothing we have to go on.

It would be nice to see more progress though. Optical media done correctly can outlast everything else we use day to day, which is its own sort of interesting thing. If you put your family recipes on some high quality blu-ray and put it in a drawer, that could be readable longer than any other way- even potentially books.

You lose a capability and still pay for it in the sticker price, and you get nothing with the space.
It's an absolute ripoff and I bought correct laptops until the big companies just stopped making them correctly. Now I have to drag around little USB external guys, which isn't great at all.

>It's bizarre because you can just install off a USB stick and it's much faster but I guess that's just not what they are used to.

For installation media specifically you have to use up a USB stick entirely for the duration of its life as install media. This is true of optical media as well, but the USB stick costs way more. The installation disc you made also just sits around until you throw it out in a year or whatever.

But installation media is kind of a carefully picked example right? I mean, it's something that USB generally does better. Being able to back up valuable stuff to optical media- especially M-disc- is pretty great. USB sticks aren't suitable for any kind of longer term backup solutions- they die all the damned time. Also when I started my latest D&D campaign, I did actually hand out cheap little USB sticks with campaign documents on them, but that was a special case; I'm going to hand out discs later. Obviously discs are cheaper for this purpose, and you wouldn't have any problem handing out a hundred CDs if you wanted to.

For Blu-rays and reading and playing from them, there's some decent piracy forums that I read over when I was picking out drives for my newest mainbox, because I wanted some that could support that sort of thing, and there definitely are still plenty of great models for that. The two drives I have now are an LG WH16NS40 (which I believe has no useful piracy capability, but seemed great for burning and reading blu-rays and M-discs) and a Pioneer BDR-212V which is allegedly suited for such purposes if you flash it (I've done none of that; it was just something I wanted to have in the box for now). It doesn't support all discs before you flash it. Anyway, if you look around I'm sure you can find a way to get a drive that can reliably play all your official anime opticals, and of course you should be able to burn them too in such a way as to play elsewhere which does seem to take effort but does seem to be things people do.

Anyway, I think a machine without an optical drive is incomplete, and the fact that all the good laptops lack them means that I have to have external USB blu-ray burners, which is not the end of the world but it is certainly not ideal compared to them being inside the actual laptop.

>I mean I have put quite a bit of money into arcade cabinets back in the day so I'm not completely opposed to the idea of temporary entertainment.

I don't think there's any comparison here really. A subscription MMORPG is the modern equivalent of dropping a quarter into a pacman cabinet; a series of hard boosts and purchases, soft boosts with the expectation that the consequences persist- these things all assume the game will go on as long as it plausibly can. Games with a decent amount of active players being targeted for closure (to prevent the game from competing with the next thing) are just top scummy.

Obviously you can play all these games without spending a dime, but equally obviously that's not the intended way of playing these games. Done properly, the games that sell you stuff don't turn around and delete it the moment they have convinced themselves that you'll buy it again.

100 seems a better number for a test like this.

Apple TV now means "the device and the shows". Maybe it won't be ALL the shows, but it will be plenty, and it will be free, and it will be on that Apple TV device. And then there will be a subscription tier- or more- that remove the advertisements.
That's my prediction!

>Despite doubling their expected livespan

This is incredible but it's mostly down to germ theory, antibiotics, and to a much smaller extent vaccines; things that really help infants make it to childhood is a lot of the lifespan increase. Science hasn't been able to enlarge the max human lifespan, and there's still plenty of diseases that the treatment is lacking for, so I could see being disappointed in that. And lets be real, the fact that science was responsible for many of these gains in the past means nothing about how funding is spent in the future, nor does it speak to fields relatively far removed from what's being debated- "Semmelweis being correct when everyone else wasn't" is pretty far from string theory.

>they'll never have to worry about starving to death

Also strangely mostly down to a relatively few discoveries. And I'd pair this with the ability to access a lot more energy, as making a very large difference between modern life and most of human existence.

But one of the main points brought up by the article is string theory, and string theory had an era where it was almost exclusively considered the most respected academic darling, but many string theories got discarded when the colliders reached good enough energies that a lot of scientists expected to see something. Of course, none of this was ever going to block off string theory as a group, it just eliminated a set of them. Check this >10 year old article:
https://profmattstrassler.com/...
And you'll see that, theoretically, string theory is still perfectly healthy. But the article really smooths over what did get eliminated, which was lowkey what a lot of people were hyped about- a solution to the hierarchy problem ("natural supersymmetry" in that article), and string theory isn't helping with that, and high energy collisions have eliminated the types of string theories that would (not entirely, but like, to a degree).
While you'll find no shortage of physicists defending this, and pointing out *technically string theory never promised this*- including this wall street journal one which tries to politicize it by implying that the critics are conspiracy theorists- the simple fact is that the reason string theory got so much interest and funding wasn't because of the barely-falsifiable high-flying stuff, but because it implied that we were gonna get something better and more explanatory than the standard model, something that, once we had seen a few real pieces of, could have experimental results plugged in that would then yield even more insights into reality. That isn't happening, but that's why string theory captured so much for so long.

Isn't it fair to criticize a system that appears to have gotten kinda lost in the wrong caves, for about two generations of scientists? Even if just the magnitude of resources allocated, men and money.

Fully retarded take.
AI already has tons of uses. It can draw ok, extract answers well enough to answer some technical questions problems, search ok, and summarize decently.

It is an amazing tool, and everyone should disregard irrational opinions like yours.

The system hates the American worker so much that they vetoed hiring cleared Americans to do the coding.
The system hates the American worker so much that they vetoed hiring cleared Americans to oversee uncleared Americans to do the coding.
The system hates the American worker so much that ONLY hiring cleared Americans to oversee foreign nationals working remotely was considered acceptable. And only, I'm sure, because they couldn't talk everyone out of needing cleared Americans to do the supervising. That was probably what they were trying to work on next lol.
That's the level of hatred. That's absolutely wild.
Anyway, way to hand Hegseth a big fat win, whomever you are and whenever you were when you implemented this shitbag policy. At least it's gone now.

For now.

I doubt catbox will last as long as imgur, but it is much easier to use and very much cooler. Plus it has anime girls, which is a benefit without any disadvantage.

They aren't issuing a currency if it is 1:1 backed with dollars.

Sir, you use monero to buy drugs. You don't use other cryptocurrencies for that unless you live in some third world country with no ability to trace shit. Assuredly you don't pay in bitcoin in the US, and that has been the case for years now.

Well we have tgz for the same reason we have zip and bz2- it is a way to get software WITHOUT package management in this context.

The others all do the same thing more or less- manage packages.

Fuck that. It is a purpose; not just that, a SINGULAR purpose. It arose solely in response to Debian switching to systemd. If Debian switched back tomorrow, Devuan would be utterly without purpose.

Terrible idea, terrible company, terrible users.