I have a bizarre love for the heat death theory, partially because it goes so well with Lovecraft's "And with strange aeons even death may die" in my mind.
Although just like the things you list, I can think of a plethora of ways with which advertising can literally, indirectly change my life by convincing me to purchase a product or service.
Yesterday I promised myself to not buy cigarettes anymore nor ask anyone to do it on my behalf. This first step only requires tremendous willpower when visiting a store, as the dispensers are placed at checkouts so I must stand right next to them when I'm in the queue.
I was intrigued by this a while back. I think of training a NN as generating a function, an equation, from a training set which, given a specific input, outputs a prediction. If you can come up with an equation-input pair that, when executed, a) accurately enough approximates some data, and b) requires less space than the original file, you have achieved (most likely lossy) compression.
I would guess one of the reasons to be the fact that there are a myriad of (money-free) hosting providers out there offering plain drag&drop file uploading with PHP support (often paired with a mysql database access). This makes PHP software extremely easy to install.
Not that it would be even possible to run non-PHP server side scripts with majority of said providers...
That reminds me of solipsism* : the idea that your own mind is the only thing surely existing and might contain everything else; the universe, other minds within.
The article correctly quotes 10-20 jobs per 1k units, but the mayor of Salo has apparently said[0] that there's probably an extra zero there, so reality could be closer to one or two per 1k.
Perhaps the thing we call empathy is just a strange side effect of the negative subconscious feedback a member of group-oriented species gets when their friend is, or is going to be harmed, physically or otherwise.
The choice between gaining/saving an ally or gaining a treat can certainly be a selfish one, and in my opinion most likely is.
What is up with the popup ads, by the way? I've been seeing them a lot lately when I enable JS, even on my bank's site.
They were, in the past, tried with failure and all major browsers got a built-in blocker.
The way I see it, dummy cameras and real ones have exactly the same pre-crime effect: they both create a sense of security and add to the observed risk associated with committing a crime.
With dummies you get really low cost (practically no maintenance) but lose the benefits if and when a crime actually happens. Still net positive, I think.
Like common locks, cameras only really prevent opportunistic crime. And for prevention, dummy is as good as the real deal as long as it's not widely known which is which.
I fantasise that in a parallel universe US, kilometer is considered a singular base unit whereas kilometre is thousand metres. This allows one to write "kph" instead of "kmph" when they want to be consistent with "mph", without getting odd looks from others.