How many trillions of neuron firings and chemical reactions are taking place for my machine to produce an output? Where are these taking place and how do these regions interact? What are the rules for storing and reshaping memory in response to stimulus? How many bytes of information would it take to describe and simulate all of these systems together? The human brain alone has the capacity for about 2.5PB of data. Our sensory systems feed data at a rate of about 10^9^ bits/s. The entire English language, compressed, is about 30MB. I can download and run an LLM with just a few GB. Even the largest context windows are still well under 1GB of data. Just because two things both find and reproduce patterns does not mean they are equivalent. Saying language and biological organisms both use "bytes" is just about as useful as saying the entire universe is "bytes"; it doesn't really mean anything.

reminds me of the time when something with Amazon was Indian employees

I share your frustration. I went nuts about this the other day. It was in the context of searching on a discord server, rather than Google, but it was so aggravating because of the how the "I know better than you" is everywhere nowadays in tech. The discord server was a reading group, and I was searching for discussion regarding a recent book they'd studied, by someone named "Copi". At first, I didn't use quotation marks, and I found my results were swamped with messages that included the word "copy". At this point I was fairly chill and just added quotation marks to my query to emphasise that it definitely was "Copi" I wanted. I still was swamped with messages with "copy", and it drove me mad because there is literally no way to say "fucking use the terms I give you and not the ones you think I want". The software example you give is a great example of when it would be real great to be able to have this ability. TL;DR: Solidarity in rage

Tokyo banned diesel motors in the late 90s. As far as I know that didn't kill Toyota. At the same time European car makers started to lobby for particle filters that were supposed to solve everything. The politics who where naive enough to believe them do share responsibility, but not as much as the european auto industry that created this whole situation. Also, you implies that laws are made by politicians without any intervention of the industries whatsoever. I think you know that it is not how it works.

The genre itself has become neutered, too. A lot of anime series have the usual "anime elements" and a couple custom ideas. And similar style, too glossy for my taste. OK, what I think is old and boring libertarian stuff, I'll still spell it out. The reason people are having such problems is because groups and businesses are de facto legally enshrined in their fields, it's almost like feudal Europe's system of privileges and treaties. At some point I thought this is good, I hope no evil god decided to fulfill my wish. There's no movement, and a faction (like Disney with Star Wars) that buys a place (a brand) can make any garbage, and people will still try to find the depth in it and justify it (that complaint has been made about Star Wars prequels, but no, they are full of garbage AND have consistent arcs, goals and ideas, which is why they revitalized the Expanded Universe for almost a decade, despite Lucas-<companies> having sort of an internal social collapse in year 2005 right after Revenge of the Sith being premiered ; I love the prequels, despite all the pretense and cringe, but their verbal parts are almost fillers, their cinematographic language and matching music are flawless, the dialogue just disrupts it all while not adding much, - I think Lucas should have been more decisive, a bit like Tartakovsky with the Clone Wars cartoon, just more serious, because non-verbal doesn't equal stupid). OK, my thought wandered away. Why were the legal means they use to keep such positions created? To make the economy nicer to the majority, to writers, to actors, to producers. Do they still fulfill that role? When keeping monopolies, even producing garbage or, lately, AI slop, - no. Do we know a solution? Not yet, because pressing for deregulation means the opponent doing a judo movement and using that energy for deregulating the way everything becomes worse. Is that solution in minimizing and rebuilding the system? I believe still yes, nothing is perfect, so everything should be easy to quickly replace, because errors and mistakes plaguing future generations will inevitably continue to be made. The laws of the 60s were simple enough for that in most countries. The current laws are not. So the general direction to be taken is still libertarian. Is this text useful? Of course not. I just think that in the feudal Europe metaphor I'd want to be a Hussite or a Cossack or at worst a Venetian trader.

It’s infuriating that Safari/Apple only allows me to choose from five different search engines. I self-host my own SearXNG instance and have to use a third-party extension to redirect my queries.