Thanks for the response. It clarifies some of my confusion. However I do think I can guess about the last part. The anticipated benefit on one side is money. Yes, there is some element of "love" involved, but I think it's mostly on the side of the people who are expected to pay the money. And I can't really argue against the success of marketing based on the fans' love.

Now that you mention it, I'm unable to think of any recent Chinese that I've seen in vertical layout. I do tend to see a lot of old stuff, so I'm easily confused. (Mostly tends to come up when I'm trying to figure out a Chinese source for some Japanese text, and those imports are often from old Chinese books.)

However, when you describe the timing that way, it sounds like a Communist thing, not unlike the Russian spelling reform after Lenin took over. Sounds like the kind of thing Mao would have decreed.

(Now to see if any Funny comment have appeared since my last check...)

Mod parent Funny, but I think the stats are the funniest part of the joke. Anyone know what percentage of the "usage" is just clicks from people who have no idea what Instagram is? Or how low the conversion rate is, where conversion in this context means non-registered users who click and Instagram link and then register on Instagram. (Oh so foolishly register.)

My FTFY contribution? When I notice a business I'm doing business with (usually a restaurant) is "relying" on Instagram I try to make it a point of telling the manager that I won't use that link. Many businesses notice comments from paying customers in hand even if Instagram promises that there are 100 possible wannabe customers somewhere out in the bushes of the Internet.

I think your comments may be more applicable to Japanese than Chinese. But even in Japanese most books and newspapers are generally printed with vertical text. The main exception that comes to mind are computer books...

However webpages and magazines are mostly horizontal in the pattern of English. One of many weird effects is that magazines are read like English books, whereas most Japanese books are read from the back if you consider how we hold an English book. (The situation for newspapers is actually much messier.) Then there are cases where books with vertical print include special explanations or footnotes printed horizontally...)

Closer to the topic of the story is how Japanese deals with degrees of dislike. In English we have a simple series with similar grammar. "I don't mind" to "I don't care" to "I don't give a darn" to "I don't give a FF." Near as I can tell, there is no simple way to translate such sentiments from English to Japanese, which means that Japanese NLP software has to go about things in a much more complicated way... (Or perhaps you've heard of the nebulous Japanese answers that seem to express understanding or shared concern, but which really translate to "No" or even "Hell no".)

Seems to me you are arguing with some sort of troll or idiot. The vacuous Subject may have been a hint? Actually sounds like a lot of the AC stuff, so maybe he usually posts as AC, seeking attention but recently noticed how ignorable AC is so he used a name this time?

However as regards your reply, I think you should also consider opportunity costs. Perhaps the main thing I learned in (computer and software) sales was that you can't sell merchandise you don't have. In the case of cars, there is some slack because a lot of major purchases are kind of sluggish, but it still comes down to getting the customer to sign the contract. Much harder to close a deal with a fuzzy promise of "We'll deliver the car at some date in the future" rather than with the simple statement "And you can drive it home today if your bank says okay." For cars, it's often something like "We'll send your special instructions to the factory and your personalized car will be delivered on this date," and the sooner the date the easier it becomes to make the sale.

Sorry, but I seem to be missing the point here?

However my theory is that video in general makes humans even more stupid than we naturally are. Especially HD video, if my theory is correct.

Short summary of a long and complicated theory: Human identity, consciousness, philosophy, and a bunch of other traits are a side effect of language, later enhanced by the video compression of books. The underlying hardware mechanisms are not that different in the brains of animals and human beings, though we humans do have relatively more of certain kinds of neuronal processing units.

A simple metaphor is based on a cat. The cat can see and understand the complicated world, and even learn complicated behavior patterns to deal with the world. For example, it can learn how to recognize and hunt for rodents and birds. But it has no language so it cannot construct stories about what it did and learned. In those stories it would become a "self" and that self could then use language to teach hunting techniques to other cats.

Human beings do have language and all the higher level functions built on top of language. Many forms of language exist, but spoken languages represented a crucial breakthrough in higher intelligence. But this breakthrough was based on subverting other hardware for new purposes. Our mouths and lungs evolved to eat and breath, but we learned to use them for language. It gets complicated around here, but my theory is that the advantages of language led to a kind of runaway reaction where the humans with better linguistic capabilities took over. It was an evolutionary takeover, but sure appears to have been a rapid one.

Then there was another subversion with reading. Again being quite brief, but my theory is our thinking (and applied intelligence) was greatly enhanced when written language subverted our visual hardware and language was then able to subvert the huge storage capabilities of the visual cortex. Not what the visual cortex was evolved for, but it worked, though so far there hasn't been enough time for much evolutionary reaction. (If anything, we seem to be devolving just now...)

But now we (especially the youth) are saturating our visual channels with cute cat videos, not books. The images of a book are actually quite simple and highly compressible if they are reduced to llinguistic tokens. Not so with the images of a 4K video of a cute cat. (Now I wonder how many kids are watching TikTok on high-res displays...)

Mod parent more Funny. Best of 3 currently modded Funny, but my feelings are mixed.

On the one hand I think the story is a rich target for dark humor. (Even though your joke wasn't so bleak.)

On the other hand, I just wrote "A Farewell to Voting" about why I gave up. Short summary is that Franklin's republic didn't die with a flash-bang of orange BS. Rather it was with whimpers (from Democrats begging for more donations), cowardice (of the fake Republicans), and burps (from the super-greedy who still desperately "need" more imaginary money).

No, he was from <cue the eerie music> Spaaaaace Fooooorce.

s/weight/weigh/

But I tried the same joke and still no Funny around here.

Sock puppet's Subject was propagated about 80% of the way down a fairly active discussion--but still no Funny.

But don't be rude and ask the new astronauts how much they weigh.

However if you have to feed the sock puppet, do you also have to propagate the troll's irrelevant Subject?

Wrong and rather vacuous. Perhaps you are projecting?

But still not deserving of the censorship moderation, hence the quote of your content.

My new theory is that mod points are only given to AI-driven sock puppets. Part of how Slashdot is keeping up with the times. Though the website lacks the resources to resolve any of the major (and ancient) problems, they have managed to implement a behavior-based anti-CAPTCHA test. So now the mod points are only given to accounts that have proven that they are not human beings.

(I keep hoping that I'll grow a sense of humor one of these years. And I even dare to hope the story has a funny comment or two. Such a rich target.)

From context and common (but increasingly rare) sense I think you meant the defense attorney, not the prosecutor.

And you sound like a typical puppet dancing to your strings. Don't you ever wonder who is jerking you around?

But it definitely doesn't seem like we have anything to discuss here.

Are you sure that you actually cancelled your Prime account? How long until you are sure that you really did it?

I think this is a sort of joke, but my guess is that you only got far enough to convince yourself that you could cancel it, but somewhere along the way you changed your mind and decided not to. Sort of like "I can quit gambling/drinking/gaming whenever I feel like it, so I'm not addicted." If you had gotten too close to actually cancelling your membership, then they would have pulled out the big psycho-weapons until you backed down.

In general I think psychology and psychiatry are full of BS, but the applied psychologists have gotten too good at pulling people's strings for the sake of selling deodorant, laundry soap, and politicians who really stink to high heaven notwithstanding any amount of deodorant and soap. The applied psychologists have an enormous advantage. They are basically behaviorists and they don't worry about the value of the human soul, the nature of evil, or collateral damage. None of that trivial stuff matters when you have widgets and snake oil to sell.

Disclaimer needed: I haven't had any direct contact with Amazon in decades. My second and final Amazon purchase was that long ago. I evaluated what Amazon was doing with my personal information and decided that I wanted no part of it. Nothing that I have seen in the years since has improved my opinion of the cancer.

Even though you're apparently feeding a troll, I think there is a more substantive answer involving a solution approach that would involve 'light AI' technology. It's actually a topic I've been researching for some years, even though the doctors have never really convinced me I need to worry about my blood pressure.

So the fundamental problem is that most direct (external) measurements of blood pressure involve comparing the blood pressure to air pressure, so they take a substantial amount of power to pressurize some kind of balloon. Major problem for small battery devices like watches.

An alternative approach would involve timing, based on the variation in pulse timing, though maybe the approach flopped. Key term is HRV (Heart Rate Variability), which allows you to track and time individual pulses as they reach different parts of the body. Last research I read was a couple of years ago and I still don't haven't seen any products on the market. However the basic idea would be to take timing data from different locations and use it to calculate the blood pressure. You would need a couple of separate pulse detectors with stable locations, but the real problem is that the arteries are not uniform, either over distance or time. That means that you would need to train a fairly sophisticated model to figure out what blood pressures really correspond to what timing differences. Probably need to train it for each person, too.