Why do you post half your rant with your username attached and the other half anonymously? You do this regularly, and it's always obvious when you do it. Why don't you just post the whole thing at once, or post it all with your username attached? Are you trying to expose half the rant to people who have you marked as a "foe" to hide your comments and the other half to people who hide anonymous comments?

Why do you put quotes around "rich Western countries" in that context?

I used quotation marks because it's a verbatim quote from your comment.

Unlimited growth in unsustainable.

Yes, this should be obvious. Yet capitalism in its current form is predicated on perpetual growth. This leads to the awkward realisation that capitalism as we know it is unsustainable.

Consumption and disposal are sustainable. The question is at what point does consumption and disposal become unsustainable or too harmful to warrant it.

There are a lot of signs that we're on the wrong side of the threshold already.

Your implied argument is fallacious: there's no reason e-waste must necessarily be thrown into a heap and burned and the runoff leached into the water table

If you factored in the cost of dealing with e-waste responsibly, things would become a lot more expensive. But people will ignore externalities until they have a gun pointed at their head.

You're being disingenuous. What you're referring to as "rich Western countries" outsource manufacturing to places like China, and deal with masses of waste by dumping it wherever they can get away with it. Then you want to blame the countries manufacturing the goods for the emissions/waste from manufacturing (rather than the actual users of the goods), and blame the countries where the waste is dumped (rather than the source of the waste). If you cut the consumption, you'd no longer have the waste.

The problem is excess consumption. People in the third world don't consume anywhere near as much, and hence have less impact overall than a far smaller number of people in rich countries. Removing every Indian wouldn't solve the problem, because they aren't the ones creating the waste.

I doubt reducing competition will benefit consumers.

Those mountains of e-waste are coming from the "rich Western countries". Consumer culture is unsustainable.

Sadly it's heading in the opposite direction. The EU has banned credit card surcharges. Australia currently permits credit card surcharges, but they're moving to banning them and instead lowering the cap on what the credit card issuers can charge. I still think allowing the merchant to pass on the cost to the customer is fairer.

Reference to the old IRC client BitchX?

You have it backwards. Chuck E Cheese was founded by Nolan Bushnell in 1977.

Robert Brock, a major Holiday Inn franchise operator, signed a deal to open 280 Chuck E Cheese franchises in 1979, but got cold feet when he saw other companies like CEI were producing more advanced animatronics and voided the deal. He founded ShowBiz Pizza around the end of 1979.

Chuck E Cheese declared bankruptcy in 1984, and was acquired by ShowBiz' parent company Brock Hotels in 1985, but both chains continued to operate separately.

ShowBiz had a falling out with animatronics supplier CEI at some point, but I'm not sure about the details. In 1989, after listing on the stock market, they severed ties with CEI and unified branding under the Chuck E Cheese name.

That's what the GP is referring to. They're saying ShowBiz was better when they still used CEI animatronics, before they rebranded as Chuck E Cheese.

So how does this make the developer honestly tag the commit as being LLM-assisted? A dishonest developer could still use an LLM and say they didn't.

Your UID is post-2001, so you might not have been here in the late '90s, either.

This has been a problem forever. Blade Runner is an obvious example with the happy "unicorn" ending hacked in. There's also the Hong Kong film Vietnamese Lady (1992) where they added an ending where Melvin Wong's character survives. Then there's stuff like Dark City where they decided audiences are too dumb for the film and got Kiefer Sutherland to record the opening narration including spoilers. Generative AI is just going to make it easier for studios to do this without even needing the actors to cooperate.

It depends on a lot of things. More experienced distance walkers tend to take shorter steps. My sister is shorter than me and typically doesn't walk as fast as me, but takes longer steps. Checking stats, I went about 21.5km in about 27,000 steps today. But the number of steps for that distance varies for me - sometimes I go that far in about 24,000 steps.

He's referring to reports like this: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.transparency.org%2Fe...

But they were supposedly improving the situation until last year: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnewsukraine.rbc.ua%2Fnew...

And now it looks like they're heading back in the opposite direction: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fartic...

Russia talks about "liberating" the Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine. The OP is joking about the possibility of England "liberating" the English-speakers in the USA.

We actually have studies on this. Air conditioning in Tokyo raises the temperature by 1 or 2 degrees Celsius: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjournals.ametsoc.org%2Fv...

Apparently 3% of heat-related deaths are caused by extra heating caused by air conditioning: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2F...

You must have had bad tape backup systems. I've seen multiple successful restores from backup tapes.