The index of content available online, which they built and updated themselves. A policy of constantly tweaking the algorithm to make it understand what us monkeys want. No ads on the first search page. And then absolutely dominating the online ads market, which kept financing the continuous improvement to the service. Until they realised this was to their own detriment and made it ask Jeeves level competent again. They won the initial war but lost the peace.

Did your identical post in asklemmy get taken down or did you delete it?

Most of these countries have local news organisations offering news in English. I would also suggest next time you group some of these questions in separate posts. You’ll get more people reading a few shorter threads than one loooong one.

If the UK had proportional voting and not first past the post for parliament seats, they’d have a greater problem with far right politics. Burnham just started and is the first PM to point out very publicly that Brexit was a mistake. That won’t solve any of the most pressing problems the people are feeling right now because rejoining would, like leaving did, take bloody ages. But it would probably be a net plus for the UK economy. I have a suspicion that the guilty verdict of criminal financial shenanigans for Manchester City Football Club, the city where he used to be mayor, and the ensuing scandal will spill some shit on him as well. So there is every chance the revolving door at Downing Street will keep spinning. Too early to tell.

The AfD in Germany has already risen. They are the party with the second most seats in this Bundestag. In the state of Saxony-Anhalt we now may get the first AfD minister-president (governor). While his election isn’t guaranteed at this point, he’s a handful of votes short of a majority, the election, on whose result this state parliament will constitute itself, has already happened. The damage a single Trumpian minister-president can cause is significant but not irreversible. The other parties don’t have a clue how to stem the tide. However, there are still enough people who would stand up for German democracy right now so we aren’t quite back in Weimar yet. The situation is shit but not hopeless.

Granted, the word stereotype might be wrong. I just wanted to point out that the majority of Caucasian men may be able to grow thick beards but not all of them. As far as Asian men are concerned, most cannot but once again not all of them. That’s the generic genetic lottery part. (edited)

As far as testosterone is concerned:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beard

The beard develops in human males during puberty. Beard growth is linked to stimulation of hair follicles in the area by dihydrotestosterone, which continues to affect beard growth after puberty. Dihydrotestosterone also promotes balding. Dihydrotestosterone is produced from testosterone, the levels of which vary with season. Beard growth rate is also genetic.

So beard growth depends on the person’s genetic makeup. And on testosterone. This has nothing to do with American bro culture thinking. Female athletes who were given testosterone as doping post WW2 could start growing facial hair if their genes happened to be right. You need the genes and the hormones.

Edit 2: I have a feeling some of this disagreement we are having may be due to my repeat typo generic -> genetic. Written on my phone and didn’t notice the one letter difference.

You mean illegally?

You’re heavily dealing in stereotypes. I would like to throw in there are plenty of Caucasian guys who can’t grow a full beard. And there are those in Asia who can grow a thick one as well. The distribution is subject to the generic genetic lottery and the individual’s production of testosterone.

(Edited a typo)

I have a strong suspicion that language prescribed by an Iranian official will have no bearing on what people call that region in English.

“Middle East” is a reference point from the British Isles where there is a more significant chunk of geography directly east of it. When you move into Central Europe, the ME region is called “near East” when translated literally. Because we are already a bit further east and the reference points change. There isn’t an English-language equivalent in the West because there’s mostly water.

Having exported this language to beyond mostly water to the new world, the designation stuck although it makes no sense from a North American perspective. If we all spoke a truly international version of Esperanto, things might be different. But that’s not how it worked out.

I don’t think ME as a term has acquired the same problematic stench as “orient” and variants thereof in English. Cardinal directions are quite resistant to that. The Confederate States of America haven’t ruined “South” as a term. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea hasn’t made “North” go out of style.

I don’t buy into “wood” obviously meaning “sandalwood.” If you have lived with carpenters, they smell like fresh timber and sweat. So if that wasn’t an option, I don’t think the contestant was specific enough.

The problems with describing this like one parabola are two-fold for me. If we look at the long arm of history, we as a species have been far less interconnected so knowledge wasn’t shared to the same extent it often is today. One of the reasons why a hypothetical Covid-819 would’ve killed more people. At the same time, various regions have gone through their own periods of trouble, dark ages, decays of empires, and religious doom. You’d have to interpolate quite heavily in the bottom part of the parabola to get started. Bronze tools could take a century to spread. Strictly speaking, Gutenberg didn’t invent book printing; China beat him to it. But the repercussions of his movable type were arguably far more reaching. Or more recently, the industrial revolution started around 1750 but didn’t affect a majority on this planet until about 50 years later. There were uncontacted people it never reached that were washed away by the 2006 tsunami. Where to plot these things on an overarching exponential graph become choices. And thus a statistic you’re forging yourself.

And then exponential means at some point we’re going to reach a point where we near constantly innovate stuff. You’d have to do the work of two scientific Nobel prizes before you had your first piss in the morning just to keep up with the pace. This pace of development isn’t sustainable. There has to be an out.

That’s why I would favour a model based on quantum leaps that show localised growth in hockey stick curves. Change today may seem fundamental and omnipresent. But 🫲 six seven 🫱 probably never reached North Korea.

Can you back up the claim of exponential change? For my money we get occasional quantum leaps that end in hockey stick curves.

Technology isn’t everything.

Does your research consider recency bias as well? More or less every generation looks at the world changing in front of them. And every generation considers this the most dramatic change ever. I remember the fall of the USSR and we all thought this is the most significant change in history - it was not. The internet and social media was the next big transformation and the sky was falling - we’re still here. All things considered, the generation in the right age bracket for military service in the late 1930s probably has a better claim on the most dramatic change happening in front of them. So I’m just wondering if you consider these biases?

The people in the nebulously defined West didn’t get into Asian comics first and then gravitated towards the Japanese offerings. Japanese manga companies saw a market for expansion and took advantage of it. Manga is Japanese in the minds of consumers. Most people probably aren’t aware of the Chinese or Korean varieties. Interest in the language came after.

Japanese may be easier to pronounce for us atonal alphabetters. I would say Chinese beats Japanese by having simpler grammar. None of these linguistic reasons matter though. There are plenty of people who learn mandarin today but they didn’t get into it through comics. Most Japanese learners don’t do it for business reasons. The stereotypes are different.

They give pronunciation guides. Or they’re effing around. It’s the internet.

What have rogue models effed with so far? A government website in Australia, derelict chat forums, and another AI company? I’m willing to believe that two things are happening at the same time. That sandboxing these agents will improve with these so-called breaches. And that companies like Amazon or Cloudflare are improving their security continuously with threat models. And if they don’t have rogue agents on their radar, that stack deserves to fall.

Who specifically would you say banned it from the internet?

Because citizenship, employment, and torrenting are not the same thing. Torrenting by itself isn’t the same as pirating either because there are a handful of non arrrr uses for the protocol in real life. This question has the same quality of: why can’t I eat an apple, a bicycle, and the categorical imperative? Are you that obtuse or a bot?

I did! Thanks, I edited it.

I have only briefly lived in France and it’s a way back also. I never got the impression they were inflexible about eating times.

Do those people take a different month off?

Yes. It may be time for time and not a whole month at a time. Also keep in mind that those workers aren’t full-timers. ContRacts tend to be time-limited in that field, i.e. people get hired for a season with no guarantee for work after that. So people plan their own vacation time.

Edited typo

Just as an example that this sort of localisation also happens the other way around: Paw Patrol features Ryder as the human in charge of the crack hero dog outfit. He turned into the rather Japanese ケント or Kento over here. Ryder when turned into katakana is a little too close to “懶惰, 嬾惰 [らんだ, らいだ]: indolence, laziness, sloth, idleness.” And he is a dull smartass but to be fair to the lad he isn’t lazy.

Unless it’s an air gapped machine run for a specific reason, nobody should run Win7 in 2026. If it’s connected to the internet, you are doing that at your own peril. Obligatory switch to Linux.

“Censorship” is probably not quite the right word here, is it? You’re thinking more along the lines of privacy. Censorship is what a government does. And that would affect the content of the internet more than anything else you come in contact with. And that is roughly the same whether you run your browser on a Win7 or Win11 machine (save maybe some more modern features the outdated browsers cannot do).

If you’re worried about the spectre of age verification, I would suggest switching to Linux and investing into a VPN.