I think it's a combination of two things. Historically, credit card companies agreements with retailers disallowed them from passing on fees to customers, so effectively anyone paying with cash or debit was subsidizing the fees of credit card customers. Those agreements were made illegal in 2022, but retailers seem to be reluctant to actually start charging credit card users so far.
Then, credit card companies take some of their profits and give them back to customers in the form of reward programs.
So we all end up paying more for nothing, but the incentives make it a difficult collective action problem. I don't know why retailers don't take advantage of their right to pass fees through to customers. That would solve the problem. I guess it would make some stupid people angry. And maybe there is some other pressure the credit card companies are using.
Accurate to what though, and for what? We decide what the standard is, and it seems like it would be a lot easier to have accurate time if we aren’t adding or subtracting seconds here or there. Does it really matter if the sun crests the horizon a second earlier than it did ten years ago? If it does, isn’t it much easier to just adjust your sun-cresting time?
I think the reason the negative luminance is potentially important for secrecy is that it means the average of the signal you’re transmitting is zero, making it indistinguishable from noise.
No I'm not. I asked if anyone likes Windows. These people presumably have no opinion, it's just a means to an end. The closest thing I think you'll get is "I liked Windows 7" or something like that.
Those replies corroborate my point, if you think about it. They would have had an opinion if they had seen the alternatives. They would at least wish that Microsoft stopped doing these annoying modifications. I would know, because I have a rather large circle of friends who use only Linux or BSD.
One compelling theory for why we have not encountered intelligent life is that any sufficiently advanced civilization will eventually stop exploring the universe and immerse themselves entirely in virtual reality, to the point that they harness the total output of their star for computation, and disappear.
Relativity means that the Star Trek vision of a galaxy spanning society is probably an incoherent fantasy. Why pursue expensive, dangerous, and disappointing adventures in the real world when you can conjure any conceivable reality with perfect verisimilitude?
Working on my own kind of metaverse I've grappled with this issue, and that is why I hope to use it to improve physical space endeavors as opposed to replacing them. This really started for me in two places: the newer one was when I pitched to the department of education for a grant program a software I called Meta-Education Environment for Simulation and Gaming (MEESG), aimed particularly at assisting in training of high-risk vocations (such as high voltage-systems repair)... but after I thought about it, I realized that the earlier inspiration was the VBS simulation I trained in the military and how I noticed the benefits directly (later leading to many hours of Arma2/Arma3 playtime, the civilian version of VBS).
So the main fight I see in the future is those who think (similar to the article) all this immersion effort is vapid and superficial. I don't think it is, and for more than just training, but also for rapid iteration in a simulated physical space that doesn't waste actual physical resources until a better product is developed. Ergo, I feel there is hidden value in the virtual space yet untapped in the wider market for combining fun and relaxation with teaching valuable things about the real world.
Just for example, I have been adding my local flora/fauna and edibility properties and medicial properties to one of my gameworlds recently, which could help me accelerate my learning of that particular real world thing but also make the gameworld more fun and interactive.
An even darker take, if some renegade member of an advanced alien race does decide to spend a lot of resources on exploring the universe, and gains the means to do so, the other members of their species may very well plug them into a simulation while they are sleeping and make them think they are exploring the cosmos.
Unless a species is completely post scarcity, there is a strong ethical argument to be made that this is the correct thing to do, versus spending a lot of resources on "mere exploration",
Or they could have just hired a competent architect who would quit as soon as the owner make them design something like this, but then you’d still end up with this
That’s a good place to start building intuition, but it can also distract you actual understanding.
What that visualization really is is a bunch of arbitrarily bounded Fourier transforms of little windowed slices of a piece of music. The true Fourier transform of a time bounded piece of music is a single unbounded function over an infinite frequency spectrum.
Here's a little function that I use pretty often when I want to install a package but I'm not sure what the exact package name is. Give it a keyword and it searches apt-cache and dumps the results into fzf.
function finstall {
PACKAGE_NAME=$(apt-cache search $1 | fzf | cut --delimiter=" " --fields=1)
if [ "$PACKAGE_NAME" ]; then
echo "Installing $PACKAGE_NAME"
sudo apt install $PACKAGE_NAME
fi
}
I have a similar one for Homebrew, with the ability to preview package info and install multiple targets:
# ~/.config/fish/functions/fbi.fish
function fbi -a query -d 'Install Brew package via FZF'
set -f PREVIEW 'HOMEBREW_COLOR=1 brew info {}'
set -f PKGS (brew formulae) (brew casks |sed 's|^|homebrew/cask/|')
set -f INSTALL_PKGS (echo $PKGS \
|sed 's/ /\n/g' \
|fzf --multi --preview=$PREVIEW --query=$query --nth=-1 --with-nth=-2.. --delimiter=/)
if test ! -z "$INSTALL_PKGS"
brew install $INSTALL_PKGS
else
echo "Nothing to install…"
end
end
But all of that labour could have gone into building actually productive assets or infrastructure that meet some of the many real needs that exist in the world. This is a terrible allocation of resources, barely better than him paying them to go into the desert and dig a giant hole and then fill it in again.
I don't the Jeff Bezos personally is the problem, but he and his peers are symptoms of an economic system with very messed up incentives.
Then, credit card companies take some of their profits and give them back to customers in the form of reward programs.
So we all end up paying more for nothing, but the incentives make it a difficult collective action problem. I don't know why retailers don't take advantage of their right to pass fees through to customers. That would solve the problem. I guess it would make some stupid people angry. And maybe there is some other pressure the credit card companies are using.