I remember, towards the end of the last millennium, marveling with some friends about an article estimating the current size of all the data on the internet. IIRC, it was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred terabytes. Wouldn’t fit on your phone, but there’s plenty of data hoarder types who have that kinda storage on the server in their spare room.

And when that future comes, Apple will still manage to fill 50% of your space up with god-knows-what.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

According to Zionist logic, the West would be justified in annihilating them to the last man, civilian or otherwise.

Ah, this person is pointing out the irony of Israel defending a total war against an entire people, in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’. That’s certainly a reasonable point to–

From the river to the sea.

Oh wait they’re actually calling for genocide, they just disagree with the radical Israeli Right over who ought to be genocided…

Aww, why didn’t he stay the course? Things have been going so well!

They’ve given me too many headaches…

I.e. you did use them, but learned the hard way why you shouldn’t.

Very likely OP is a student, or entry-level programmer, and is avoiding them because they were told to, and just haven’t done enough refactoring & debugging or worked on large enough code bases to ‘get’ it yet.

Or mutable constants…

“No, wait, it’s not what you think! There’s a continuous integration system, a commit would’ve triggered a new build! It might have paged the oncall! Babe! The test suite has been flaky lately!”

So fewer downloads, which is a very different thing.

Trans is something we made up.

Gender non-conformity is a real thing and happens across all cultures. Our approach to understanding it is culturally specific, and kinda fucked up.

There’s a few different community browsers:

browse.fediverse.de

lemmyverse.net

It’s still got the problem of being repetitive.

Back when I was in high school (in public school), chess caught on in a big way. Chess. It was the weirdest thing. It was a public school in a small farming town, and pre-Nerd Renaissance, so picture a stereotypical 80s or 90s school where jocks were top of the food chain–and then picture those same jocks in their letter jackets rushing to the library on their free periods to take turns playing chess. They set up tournaments and kept track of win/loss ratios and talked about chess strategies in the hallways.

So obviously something had to be done…I guess? The school started making rules and posting them around the school: one game per student per day. One game at a time in the lounge. No chess in classrooms or in the library! The chess board must be returned to the lounge supervisor between games, then signed out by the next person wanting to play–not just passed willy-nilly from one student to another! No outside chess boards allowed!

That pretty much strangled the chess fad. The jocks went back to stuffing nerds in lockers and sneaking out to smoke behind the school, and the chess boards returned to the shelf by the lounge supervisor, where they collected dust.

Problem…solved? The whole thing was pretty surreal.

Then what’s your explanation for the huge rise in life expectancy and food availability–starting in capitalist Western countries, and then spreading to the rest of the world along with the market economy?

Capitalism is certainly imperfect at distribution of food and medicine. As the saying goes: it’s the worst system, aside from every other that has existed. And the margin isn’t particularly close.

You date the origin of capitalism to Columbus? Seems pretty arbitrary. Markets date back thousands of years, and recognizably capitalist forms of government emerged in the 18th and 19th century at the earliest. Columbus was sponsored by a king seeking new land, not capitalists seeking new markets.

Alternative systems such as…? I can think of several, but none I’d describe as ‘successful’.

It’s kind of a red flag (no pun intended) when your preferred system can be destabilized with some money stuffed in the right pockets, isn’t it? Most failed systems that were ‘undermined by capitalists’ mostly involved funding and support, not invasion or anything. Meanwhile, democracy and capitalism emerged in the midst of hostile aristocracy and royalty, and survived decades of attempts by the USSR (and now Russia) to undermine it.

My personal opinion is that those systems were doomed from conception, though I don’t deny that the US certainly engaged in speeding their demise.

Anyway, that’s all beside the point. Both populations and consumption increased under the Soviets, and any other system you care to name, proportionate to their effectiveness at keeping people fed and healthy.

This isn’t a property of capitalism, though. It’s a property of humanity, and really of life. What capitalism did was just to efficiently provide food and medicine to people, and the population graph turned into a hockey stick.

Is starvation and infant mortality preferable? Do you think if people had found some (as yet unknown) economic system that was as effective at supplying food and medicine, people wouldn’t have had kids? And if they did keep having kids, wouldn’t that have taxed the planet like capitalism has done?