Awesome monetization of half-baked opinions and less-well-baked Domino's pizza. JFC, how low the bar is set theses days.

If the goal of Reddit is the suicide of its residents, then yes, by all means, cripple Reddit with AI.

I would counter that a news site that allows comments on their posts is also social media under the guidelines that comments ipso facto makes it social media.

That's not a counter because it's arguing against a position that no-one is arguing for. I joined this thread to point out that the first post in it wasn't arguing for it. The distinction is staff content vs user content, not the existence of comments.

On Youtube OTOH, I seldom go to the comments other than a few woodworkers I follow and interact with personally.

My emphasis. And you don't consider that "social"? That's the pattern of use which defines social media.

Social media isn't about poltical trolling - although I don't doubt that for some people that makes up the majority of their experience with it. And a site/app doesn't cease to be social media because you personally choose not to interact with likes, comments, etc: it's about the pattern of use that it's designed to support.

If you can show me that what I wrote is off topic...

The only thing I said was that the "relaxed definition" you were objecting to was absent from and in contradiction with the post you replied to. Questions around what regulations websites should be subjected to are a completely separate issue to questions of how they should be categorised.

Damn I! Do you know how long and how much planning was involved!?!?!?!?

That is Your definition of social media. A person posting a video about how he fixed his car - how is that social media? People comment, usually thanking him, sometimes offering criticism, a better way, or even tell him he did it wrong. But the guy doesn't flag their comments, he either ignores them to thanks them.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that you're trying to follow Gricean maxims of discourse (and I feel that I'm being very generous there, because most of your comment appears to be about a completely different topic): your definition of social media involves people flagging comments on their posts?

I won't dispute that.

The trouble is, there are still folks who think that, "the observer" means consciousness. The term "observer" itself is a problem. The double-slit experiment demonstrates that quantum effects are more than just interaction because arguably the slit assembly as a filter is an interaction, but the "observer" seems to be a slightly more involved interaction.

Of course, the word, "Theory" was also a bit of a poor choice because those who wish to dismiss science will use, "it's just a theory!" as if decades of research and experimentation to come up with the most plausible explanation to-date can be dismissed as easily as the rambling ill-conceived conclusions of someone with no background or education.

yes, I'm aware I'm arguing about semantics now, but unfortunately so are a lot of other people.

The orbit of Mercury would disagree that Newton was, strictly speaking, right.

Isaac Newton was one of the smartest human beings to ever live, but even he acknowledged, "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

He knew how he got where he did scientifically and he knew that others would come after him that would improve upon the knowledge that he himself had improved upon. There's no shame in having created the best, most rational explanation for something, and explanation that stood for hundreds of years as best, before an even better explanation could be devised.

While a lot of complaints are made, and justifiably, that some more modern Theories and hypotheses aren't testable, there are a lot of aspects of Quantum Physics from the turn of the twentieth century that are likewise untestable. Youtube channel Kurzgesagt just posted a video on the Many Worlds interpretation that frankly left me annoyed, because it itself demonstrated confirmation bias while claiming that it was proof of the Theory. Normally I really like their videos, but this one left me doubting that they had done as much research on the topic as they claim to do.

The problem is that they can do a whole bunch of very useful mathematics that can lead to results, but that doesn't mean that the intermediate steps in the math are as ultimately true as the final result appears to be. Remember, at one point humanity thought Newton was right, but subsequent math from Einstein demonstrated a better mathematical model to match observations. The mathematics in some aspects of Quantum Physics might well match observations well, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't better mathematical explanations for what we see that that humanity hasn't managed to devise.

When aspects of Quantum Physics can be experimentally demonstrated, like quantum tunneling, then it's fairly safe to conclude that those aspects are largely settled, but for things like Many World, the concept of the collapse of the wave function, even the definition of the term "observer", it becomes harder to take some claims especially seriously.

In Houston the water table is also high and the ground in some areas is just fine sediment. Not very conducive to tunnels and a big reason why basements are uncommon. Some kind of aboveground line along the Hardy toll road probably makes the most sense, but as you say most Houston airport travelers don't go downtown.

That a person can use the comment section of a YouTube page, sure. But anything that allows replies and comments is social media by that relaxed definition.

No, you've skipped past the part

"You" post videos

The point of YouTube is that all of the content is posted by users, not by an editorial staff. That's what makes it "social media". If YouTube isn't social media, neither are Tik-tok, Instagram, etc.

In the Northeastern US, we get snow storms. Snow can build up on trees, etc and take them down. Some trees are near powerlines too.

In 20 years, I've lost count of the number of times power was out more than 2 days. There is usually a power outage once a year. I remember one that lasted a week and a coworker with an hour commute had no power for 3 weeks. One time, the neighbor's tree across the street fell on the power line. The power company had things back in 24hrs, but it may have been 36hrs.

However, yes, we don't worry about powering up computers. They're on a UPS that shuts everything down after 5 minutes and I don't have to worry about a crash. I also have a generator to power heating, the fridge and a few appliances. Before I had the generator, I would worry about if there's enough heat or do I need to go to family in another area that has power.

I'm assuming they have some physical backups somewhere, yes. But they'll probably be at least several days out of date.

The *daily* backups were almost certainly the 10TB of backups that were found and destroyed by the attackers. Which makes sense: you want your most frequent backups to be fully 100% automated so they're as up to date as possible whenever a hard drive dies (which, for most organizations, happens considerably more often than this kind of successful malicious attack). So your continuous and daily backups go onto media that are online 24/7. So when something like this happens, you're going to have to go back to the last time a secondary backup was made, and that's less automated (among other things, someone has to physically swap the media in and out, and if we're talking about 10TB of data, that's probably going to have to happen multiple times, over the course of a couple of days, to complete the backup), so it generally happens less frequently. Since this was a munitions factory, we can charitably assume they would have known they were a potential target for this sort of thing, and so probably would have at least done a secondary backup weekly? Probably. Most organizations don't have their sysadmins practice restoring from secondary backups on anything resembling a regular basis, so they won't really know what they're doing and will run into all sorts of minor-but-annoying setbacks and delays. Software that's needed won't be installed, and there won't be a complete list of it anywhere, so they'll have to fool around by trial and error figuring out why blah-blah-blah won't run, oh, we forgot to install foolib on the design department's database server, have to do that, ok, now why does it still not run, oh, it also wants the foolib extensions for Postgres, install that, rinse, repeat. Some data that are stored in oddball locations (typically, configuration stuff) will have been missed, and will have to be recreated. And so on.

It's hard to predict exactly how long that stuff will take, but my first guess would be more than a week.

Granted, that's a far cry short of the timeframe if the factory had been, say, bombed into craterdom. But this may have been cheaper, and in any case it also gives Ukraine a significant amount of information about the factory's operation, which could be valuable in other ways.

...when Microsoft pushed dotnet and mono and C# and a few projects embraced while everyone else went, "ew."?

If you're paying workers 125 USD per hour then you're overpaying them by a factor of 4 in the US, according to a quick Google search, and by more in other countries. A benefits/salary ratio of 1/5 is probably too low, but even so I think you've overestimated the bill by a factor of two.

Exactly. Records are not the same as opinion pieces in most cases. Records can still be damaging as hell, but they don't usually carry the sort of personal information that can be incredibly provocative as stated opinions or descriptions of behaviors.