That leverage isn't a static fact. Economic policy can make that ratio drop rather quickly. Over the past decade, China did a lot to become more independent from the U.S. market, and many others are right now deciding that it's in their best interest to do the same.

I didn't interpret that comment as taking a stance, more as an observation. Trump's poll numbers are only really down with moderates, he's still polling quite well in Republican circles from what I've read. I'm also only observing from across the ocean, but am not getting the impression that a majority of U.S. citizens are unhappy about what the administration is doing.

Yeah, I think using subtitles in your native language probably isn't very helpful. Your brain will just stick to the language it finds easiest to follow the plot.

I really like watching with both audio and subtitles in the language I'm learning. It's a great stepping stone for when you already have decent reading comprehension, but natural speech is still often too fast and "blurred" to reliably decode the words.

The problem with that is, what default settings do you ship with? There often isn't a clear "plug in and go" baseline that works well across the board. Sound processing is probably one of the best examples because there's no setup that is decent for all of the most common viewing environments, content, and ways of watching. No matter which compromise you choose as a manufacturer, you'll have some people complain that the dynamic range is crappy, others complain that they can't understand the dialogues, etc.

Bleh, WhatsApp *never* allowed to export entire chat histories (past a certain size). Their FAQ cites e-mail size limitations when sending it to you, even though they've added options to export to cloud storage services years ago.

I agree with the commenter(s) saying that data on my phone should be my data. I doubt any of this is GDPR compliant. That being said, Google (and Apple?) are complicit in this. How is it that apps can back up user data to *my* Google Drive account but *I* am not allowed to download those files?

I think this is actually the case, because music isn't just about the movements your speaker membrane makes. When people talk about the lack of the "human element" in ML-generated music, I don't think it has to be about an audible difference. It's because people get excited about music when they relate to more than just the waveform.

After all, even really good human artists basically earn zero monies from streaming. They'll be fine if some people who just don't care reduce their share of the zero pie. Musicians make their money mostly from concerts, touring, physical sales (once more), merch, etc.

Nobody's going to pay $40 for a club night or $80 for a concert of generated music. People get excited about music, and willing to spend non-negligible amounts of money on it, because they relate to it personally, the people behind it and the stories they're telling. Generally, art is worthless without artistic intent.

AFAIK, Ukraine's Starlink access is paid for (by Poland mostly, I believe?).

"No one plans finances 3 years out for their work choices."

Is that seriously your experience? I don't think I know anyone who plans their financial outlook less far ahead than retirement age. So not just 3, but 20, 30, or 40 years ahead. Those are pension plans, which very much depend on every work choice a person makes until they reach retirement age.

I'm sure there are many people who really don't bother with long-term planning and just take life as it comes, but I don't think it's too common -- certainly not in Western European countries, and most definitely not among people raising families and having to consider how to put their children through school.

I absolutely see this as a major blind spot in this sort of study. Not granting participants a UBI indefinitely, they ignore what's maybe the most important factor in most people's decisions about career choices.

Poor people's retirement funds are in the stock market. Poor people are employed by companies in threat of bankruptcy.

Rich people can just vamoose to brighter shores. They'll never not have the free choice of which one of their summer houses they'll take the private jet to.

Do you know how much of the federal budget went to USAID?

It was 0.3% in 2024.

70% of that went directly to U.S. businesses ("tied aid").

All of which arguably was targetted at solving the migrant crisis at the source, before people see their only hope in fleeing to some place like the U.S.

Also, not everybody would agree that a rich country using some of its riches to try and save lives and lessen suffering is "wasteful bullshit".

That sounds horrible. Around here, you get maybe 2-3 minutes of ads, and then 3 movie trailers, maybe 4 tops. If you go in ~10 minutes after the scheduled time, you don't wait for long. Which I don't do because I personally like knowing what I could plan on seeing there next.

I really love going to the cinema, but if they did it to that extreme around here, that might still do the trick making me stop going.

I call conspiracy myth on that. Facial recognition systems are not cheap to maintain, and probably illegal for a private business in most places. And for what benefit to the theatre? I don't think they get more useful information than hard ticket sale numbers. The will know their repeat customers already, who will probably have some sort of membership anyway.

Besides that, I personally think viewing habits are something I'd actually *like* to have tracked. If studios knew what I like watching, maybe they'd produce more of that, and less superhero crap :D
People used to complain that they're not part of the Nielsen panel to influence programming. Finally, everybody can be heard, haha.

The audience depends on the theater and the movie. Maybe mainstream cinemas are like that. I don't understand why people pay the (apparently high) ticket prices for a movie they then don't want to appreciate. Then again, I also see a lot of people at concerts with $100 or $150 tickets who just spend two hours chatting with their friends, seemingly more upset about having to shout over the loud music than listening to a single song...

I go to the movies fairly regularly, but only small ones, which show more "artsy" movies (i.e. the only ones still worth watching anyway, IMHO) or reruns of classics. There, watching it with a room full of strangers is an upside again, or still. Because everybody there along with you is because of a shared interest, and everybody wants to be there and enjoy the film.

As for the sound systems, fair enough, but it has its limits. I find headphones uncomfortable, and they don't make sense when watching with someone. And limits on what I can do to my neighbours. One of my most recent cinema visit was for The Blues Brothers. Having that one's sound on a massive room-size system is such an important part of that movie. I couldn't have turned up the volume to a quarter of that in my apartment, because I actually like my neighbours and would like to stay there for a while longer.

Of course. Because all of those ethnically homogeneous countries without immigration, which prescribe people's beliefs and way of living under threat of punishment, are really happy, problem-free places. I hear North Korea is a real paradise.

For sure a very curious decision of the article author to mention this at all, let alone as the second feature. I've been glancing over the changelogs for years, and from what I understand, the under-the-hood changes from GIMP 2 to 3 are massive, in areas such as colour space conversion, layer handling, and non-destructive editing. Big changes very relevant to the tool's main purpose -- in other words, an *actual* major release, as opposed to today's "oh, it's been another month" major version number bumps.