Actually, I think people can and do grow past 14-- but quite a small number of people do this. The bulk of the bell curve is around 12 like you said. I would argue that this is not important. You have a conscious mind, called System 2. That is where you exercise free will or as close as we have to having that and it is not emotional; it controls those teenage impulses but it takes a lot of energy to activate so we run on autopilot most the time. Logical thinking must be learned as does impulse and emotion management.

You(parent) might think some mature adult is 14 years old but they are simply better at self control and could be 8 years old. While somebody who is 18 probably doesn't stand out too clearly from self controlled people and simply being emotionally evolved. I can't spot them too easily; people going thru really hard stuff and not turning off their emotions but processing them really well are hard to find given the test that has to occur to make it visible. Most well coping people go into a rational robot mode for a while and suppress their primitive System 1 "teenager" inclinations at least for a while. The delay helps a lot but it's only a delay, it'll come back somehow but most likely not as intensely.

This society is engineered to promote impulsive thoughtless behavior because that makes for great consumerism. Self control is too difficult; even our super heroes these days are encouraged (and desired by the immature audiences) to let loose and give into their power and desire for vengeance etc. Even if it is just a petty mean thing to the bad guys, so the teenage audience can get their kick without turning it into a vigilante story.

They can create many issues for superman and retain the optimistic positive and superior nature of superman. He's not supposed to just be a man with powers; but an alien who is an example... for children, quickly turning into a Jesus like figure but with only the necessary amount of punching... he takes all the punishment then sets things right without spite, murder, etc. The child sees him getting beaten up like every cliche fight show and even though they learn he wins it's enough to make some suspense and tension that can evoke the joy of the tables being turned. The inner child remains in us all but it's harder to reach or impossible if our guards are all the way up.

It is HARDER WORK and writers will work hard to be lazy!

For example, you can go quite heavily into the mystery genre since he's over powered, he has to figure things out and then the whole part of bringing justice or making right can be quickly handled by super powers. One reason they had a smart human as his main foe was that it created puzzles for him to work his way out of. Of which was the powering down problem that got way way too old and became poison instead of just powering down... hell, he didn't fly at 1st which is where the leaping over buildings came in. Another tired thing is being in 2-3 places at once; something Flash has to deal with almost exclusively...

Like magic fantasy, an unknown made up magical (or newly disclosed ability) whatever just solves every trapped plotline... or going back in time by flying really fast around earth (which was supposed to be the lame escape for superman 2 the movie but was stuck into superman 1...either way it was LAME! 2nd movie ended better because they put it's planned ending on the 1st movie. 1st could have simply had her survive in a hospital with him helpless with human doctors being the only ones that could save her...then him praising them with a good line that might have inspired a bunch of kids to get into medicine and be REAL heroes! There, that took no time and effort...who do they get to make these movies??? In a few minutes I made a better movie that had real consequence.)

Adults get hung up on this stuff because we're still children inside but cling too much to our childhood these days.

It's all about maximizing profit far too often. Spend too much and you have to earn it back with more customers... and either sucker them (marketing, which is hard with an opposing social media campaign) or you have to please a large majority of people to overwhelm the trolls.
Lowest.
Common.
Denominator.

That said, when something takes up a brand such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman, etc. It is supposed to represent the source material not just mine it for shallow references to fool simpletons. We are cynical now because anything good is exploited as they cos-play (or re-themed) any crap whatsoever treating us like mindless idiots... and for entertainment we generally are tuning out... Fans can go either way: if they are suckered by nostalgia they will eat shit, if they want more of what made them fans (which they may not even be conscious of) then it'll fail or even find it insulting beyond just a desperate money grab.

A historic motive was that prisoners can not vote and felons lose their voting rights. If you didn't know, that was a plan to take black people out from voting. The tradition continues with other excuses covering for it. It's way more about poor people today and there will be many more poor people... with AI powered policing and legal processes you could be a felon quite easily in the future. Hell, if you just oppose fascism you are now a terrorist Antifa supporter (look it up, it's actually happened. BTW, quickest way to spot a fascist is they hate/fear Antifa.)

OUTSIDE OF PRIVATE PRISONS: the unions for government prison workers are also a problem; sometimes the police unions are a problem too.

If you have a major illness and are broke, you need to rob a bank. More people need to realize we have minimalist universal healthcare after all...

I knew an excon. Tried as an adult. He said prison was like going to college for crime. He also had no trouble getting certain drugs in prison, had a harder time getting off prozac (easy to get) than he did cocaine (hard to get in prison.)

Conservatives (not the tribal brand, actual meaning) are only correct by accident:

The philosophy is founded upon appeal to tradition which is a logical fallacy. They will fire up their brains sometimes and rationalize excuses in a reactionary defense which is inherently flawed and anti-science; rather than use their brains to discover truth, they do what feels good (often selfish) then use their brains to excuse what is arrived by thoughtlessness.

Contradiction, hipocracy and distraction a constant problem for them - for some (now a majority) they give up that fight and just embrace it. Their #1 representative believes it's a virtue and you are weak if you limit yourself to sound reasoning and this has accelerated the adoption of what is beyond even comic book villain monologues.

Crime is largely controlled by conservatives defending their profits by using fear and tactics of "the other." They should be called "right" rather than the better sounding "conservative" label, they prefer "conservative" because they can make up principled arguments for that. Facts do not actually matter, unless they are useful props along with the lies, it doesn't matter it's just another tool for maintaining their position.

The "right" historically was the right hand man of the wealthy establishment who serve the powerful above all else; to most, it's corrupt - to them, it's protecting their small group of people from the masses who they fear will ruin their advantages. USA's "conservative" today is stripped clean of principles and constantly demonstrate that they are rightwing stooges.

The "right" comes from France where they literally kept brawling and nothing got done so the pro-king establishment was put on the right side with moderates separating from the left side republicans (term vs name are now ironic) just to keep them from killing each other... just for a while because the two sides were killing each other often in those days. Back in those days, the wealthy ruling elite were connected with monarchies which is why republicans were against the rich kings, but today we have dictators and wealthy ruling elites (some with more cult status than a king) which serve the same purpose. It's a shame that republics / republicans ONLY means no-king because severely limits the scope of the problem so many people fought against for centuries. It's more dangerous now as more people believe they can someday join the royal family if they just make enough money or marry the right person (we've not come too far from back then have we?) This is why USA Republicans look so much like a contradiction in terms.

amen, brother!

Americans can't solve any problems and the place is stuck in a doom spiral. It's like trying to convince a believer their religion is just a mythology inherited from their upbringing not much different than flat-earthers of the past ( present ones bring up a whole another example of fools.)

The USA always was #1 for cults for a reason!

Besides lacking critical thinking and an anti-intellectual culture (largely countered by educated immigrants but that no longer the case) the culture is all about SHIFTING BLAME, the customer is always right, and so on. It's like they are all a little bit narcissistic. Frankly, every flaw here combined into 1 man turned out to be perfectly represented in their president who they identify with (but not a few things they do see and object to, just everything else they don't see is like themselves... "He's one of us.")

It's not obvious to the blind masses. As the French said, common sense is not so common.
AI is wrecking critical thinking so this will get worse.

The greedy lying fucks and their bribery schemes do more than enough without China helping slow them down. They can use a water LOOP but instead they just want to destroy all the potable water; they can plan for slower sources of power but they have to run jet-engines 24/7 popping up louder than airport in areas that never planned or were priced to be next to an airport... They raise power rates too... Selling it as a job / career killing revolution hurts them while it makes the actual capitalists ecstatic! (They only employ people when forced by necessity, they never were willing job creators.)

The Chinese space program exists because of fools like you. Yes countries have spies in corps around the world trying to learn secrets; that is not news. A lot of stuff is published scientific work... now manufacturing, that tends to be secretive. They are quite different things.

Yes! Far too many people just blame the "teacher" when students fail... The culture in the USA of blaming everybody but yourself has been growing significantly over the last few generations and it began with the gen X parents (I know teachers old enough to have perspective.)

That said, I see students making an honest effort using the bot to tutor them. I've seen students who tried to use online "tutoring" services before that. In both cases, when I had honest interactions with those students, I noticed their questions were "bad" and their understanding was retarded by something. Normally, to get to the point where they would ask a question it would follow logically from where they were in the learning process but when they had the steps skipped to get to that point they may not even know what question to ask and it'll be a non-sense question that was never seen in the wild before.

When you see the answer explained to you with all the reasoning and steps and you do not fully grasp them and this builds a bit without any real progress the subsequent problems that build upon that foundation become extremely difficult and it's so shaky one can't find where the problem is. It takes incredible discipline few have... it is like the 80s programming "help" that merely described code printouts and thinking that would teach you programming skill. It's far easier to use little brain power and essentially memorize the answer and the explanation; it takes a lot more actual brain energy to digest it and learn from it to get the full benefit which one gets from figuring it out and fully using their brain. There is a process in education where you practice or APPLY the knowledge which is needed for greater understanding of the material that takes a great deal more effort than just recalling the information. What I think I'm witnessing is this with some learning mixed in; so it's not clearcut, as most psychology is - you won't have clear results to look at. I've had more screwball questions or simply ZERO questions than ever before over the decades. They do get stuck but seem to give up if the bot can't take them out of their quagmire... or ask me for help but then it's an issue of them not understanding my help or needing so much that I'm simply taking the place of the bot. Then they complain because I'm so much worse than the bot... because they had to burn some brain calories...

We are doomed. So few people can grasp what is going on and it's hard for the experts to spot it I don't feel that enough of the population will before we have a few generations of angry morons. Look at the USA's morons and it's decline... it's coming for YOU if you don't learn from this fat canary going down.

Long term, there won't be many working on leading edge who deal with the USA government...

Have you seen Trumps plan to destroy research in the USA yet?

https://arstechnica.com/scienc...

That is really going to perform badly, especially if you ever update your computer. Will MS actually improve for a change due to the RAM crisis going on??? Maybe Edge will improve on RAM use over google trying to replace the OS with Chrome?

I have an M1 with only 8GB of RAM and it works surprisingly well within that limitation. I don't do serious work with it but my casual use is beyond a typical office worker; plus I have two accounts that are often active each with a browser open. I might wear out the SSD early with swap usage; guess I'll find out.

Look around. I think i've seen stuff that does Time Machine out there. I don't know how much longer apple supports network Time Machine servers... they are dropping Intel emulation soon so all your old apps die. Unless you have a windows version of the app and an emulator. No, you don't need to upgrade old software, not everything needs internet or exchanges complex data files with the outside world.

usually an American. We have our version of "Americans" within America, they live in Florida.

There is no reason to pay attention to wireless ID names or t-shirts... where are the rational adults? Simply because somebody makes a joke the brains all turn 100% off and they act like robots... except by the time robots are running things, it's likely the chatbot will not be so stupid as to over react like this.

Even a small child knows to lie about sneaking a cookie they do not openly eat the thing when they are not supposed to have it. Unless they their parents are trying to raise an orange monster who flagrantly ignores the rules.

I swear America only has an average IQ because a few of us are raising so high it makes up for 60% being dumb as shit (oh, and many high IQ people are immigrants.)

I won't say it's provably random or very strongly random especially with recent news about a new random generator claiming to be fully and completely random... I'm being vague. It's random enough that you won't have enough of a pattern in the noise to detect the user's web app because of access patterns that are so consistent that they can be detected. Are you thinking of access patterns that are not merely detecting the contention of your process's access of the device?

That is what I'm thinking about. You think contention timing is not impacted by seek times? Rust discs don't store files in the same physical location all the time, they are not always fully defragmented, the databases powering operations may append and update not just overwrite the same location.... but other tasks are also not using the same data in the same location. Fragmentation has serious noticeable performance costs because of the TIME required while SSD has almost consistent random access (not perfectly but practically close enough.) You don't know how it's going to seek on every device. The underlying FS and OS implementation are more abstracted and different for a browser than an app that runs on 1 OS with likely just 1 common FS being used. Sure back in the day when you only had 32 tracks you could maybe even hear the difference ... certainly you could between a 1 track shift verses a 30 track shift! The small amount of data on your floppy and for some programs really could end up using the same locations... and there were so few available anyway and allocation patterns were likely linear...but then heavy fragmentation could make it really slow over heavy usage too. Still could be predictable since people did only 1 thing per floppy. 1 program at a time as well... I certainly could detect patterns in the sounds...a few programs had cool hacks to make sounds with the floppy drive... but direct access was not uncommon. Here we are talking about many layers of separation and it still working because of the lack of noise in those layers. I'm just saying that I think the old storage and FS add too much variation.

I doubt this is beyond human statistical analysis; it's just not been worth exploring labor wise?? Or maybe it is because people DID try and never published a failure paper since there was nothing interesting to publish about them not finding a detectable pattern due to the noise. I would guess it didn't work with the underlying noise. I can't see why nobody thought of trying since timing side channel attacks are old and anything you can measure time on has risk. Storage is way slower than other attack vectors previously demonstrated so it should be an easy target.

The worst bugs are contextual misunderstandings. Technical help can't avoid this. It's in the same world of legal contracts and laws; tons of problems without technology, it's a human problem. Specifications issues, communication issues, understanding, lack of predictability, foresight, experience etc. add in technical issues and it gets worse but removing all tech issues the rest still remain. The more complex the tasks you need to automate makes for more problems; you can force multiply but then you free up harder problems to address in what seems to be unlimited number of problems. The risk is that we run out of problems we want to solve because we're good enough and who's motivated to figure out harder things without enough benefit. Outside of nerds who like Star Trek, continue to work when there is no longer a need to do anything.