Isn't there an API for lazy loading? What's wrong with that? Developers not using it? They should be very careful of trying to outsmart dumb web "developers", the Web is messy enough as it is.

But you've got to do both. Doubting oneself is "critical thinking". Doubting other sources of authority is "independent thinking".

The thing is, nobody has enough expertise to be an independent thinker in every area. So you essentially MUST delegate your ideas in some areas (variable between people) to external authorities. At which point what you "believe" depends on which authorities you choose.

A related question is "how firm is that belief?". This also tends to vary wildly with little apparent (to me) reason behind it. This is one feature that *can* be related to IQ, but isn't always.

You'd think with the successes of the original 16-bit Apple machines, then the Mac platform, full of third party software of every kind imaginable, it should have been self-evident that third party apps would be natural and beneficial. But people like Jobs just can't help themselves: their instinct is to control their platform and exclude everyone else. So they indulge the Reality Distortion Field hard enough to convince themselves that such a scheme is viable, all evidence of history to the contrary, and capture all the money.

The jail breakers are the real heros. They're the ones that pierced the Field and corrected this dysfunction, where no amount of explaining had any impact. They left Apple with two choices: go to war with jail breakers and become a pariah, or correct the bad thinking that prevailed to that point. Fortunately they chose the latter.

Or maybe unfortunately. The residual tyranny that did survive is more than I've ever considered tolerating. Maybe it would have been better if Apple had self-immolated the iPhone with Jobs' vision.

There is nothing about such a mission that mandates obsolete, 2x order of magnitude money torching. Please stop it with your commie shilling.

It doesn't really matter in the long run. Sooner or later the US with elect another (D) president and the teacher's union and/or some other pressure group will once again cut NASA's space program and take the money. After than, NASA or whomever will be forced to adopt cost effective solutions.

It's not just widespread, it's universal. What varies from person to person is the domain that they apply thinking to, and how they validate the authority they choose to trust.

Nobody is an "independent thinker" on every topic. Wherever one is an expert, one tends to be an "independent thinker" in that domain. Where you don't feel knowledgeable, you tend to accept an authoritative source...possibly after doing some amount of checking to see whether others think it reliable.

I don't think it's directly related to IQ. I also don't think it's restricted to chatbots. A lot of people are willing to accept the opinion of any authoritative source that they've accepted. Think religion or political party. Once they accept it, they stop questioning it's proclamations.

Note that this also applied to those who accept the proclamations of scientists or compilers. Once you accept an authoritative source, you pretty much stop questioning it. It's been multiple decades since I really argued with a compiler...unless it was a known bug from a source I trusted. I generally just assumed that I misunderstood what the language meant by that construct. (Of course, the few times I really didn't accept it, I eventually turned out to be wrong. Oh.)

Yeah, it was cool watching those four $146,000,000/each RS-25 engines return to the landing pad. Stupid capitalists.

This will help push FOSS gaming and community driven self-hosting of gameservers back towards mainstream. And that's a good thing.

I was into climbing and moutaineering in my teens. I clearly remember when climbing an 8k mountain actually meant something and doing it proved you were an experienced hardcore expedition climber. Everest today is such a joke and farce that I'd be embarrassed to brag of even attempt a summit. They should just install a Via Ferratta, stairs and bridges all the way to the summit and be done with it. That would actually make sense, given the state of things we've reached. They have actual traffic effing jams at the summit and the rainbow flank is littered with the dead bodies of dimwitts taken out by Darwin. It's called "rainbow flank" because of all the colored jackets of the dead.

Just build a staircase, ask an obscene fee to pay for it and void all insurance for anyone who goes above 5500 meters. Problem solved.

I'm part of that 5%+. The thing about gaming on Linux is that I have no time or mood for fussing around with compatibility issues. Steams Proton layer handles quite a few games without trouble. I used to be a GoG only person but since their requirements for Linux versions are very specific and cause trouble on newer versions of Linux I finally installed Steam on Linux a few weeks back. Sure it's quite a performance hog and it keeps you in the dark about wether it's taking so long to launch because it's running some background update thingie and you have to use top to see what's going on, but other than that, the games listed as playable on protondb launch with a simple click. Which is good.

Guess I'm a steam customer now. After, what, 25 years? I remember when Half-Life 2 came out and they tied it to steam to push the first big digital game distribution platform. Guess that was/is a huge success. Provide good value, get my money. I don't mind.

For all I care they deserve it. If they can't or won't run the servers anymore they should at least release the server as freeware and allow for hobbyists to continue hosting the game. This used to be common practice with multiplayer games and we should enforce this practice by law, especially with people paid solid money for their game copies.

This, however, is far from that point. ... But I *do* prefer LibreOffice. However my use case is different.

Not necessarily impossible...but almost always inadvisable. They can be sure that all their actual competitors already have copies before they get the takedown issued.

In this case I don't think a takedown will even limit the damage...it might well exacerbate it.

Well, he did say "for some imaging tasks". That's probably a reasonable goal...but you've got to be *very* selective.