I can't stand comments like this that obviously miss the overall point being made and tbh it is entirely done disingenuously.
The terms of service are not in anyway enforced consistently or fairly. The way the terms and service is written is that they can basically boot you for any reason. It is well known that the "tiddie streamers" regularly get away with ToS violations, where some dude wearing a red hat will get a ban (and I mean a red hat, because that exactly what happened to one guy, he didn't even have a MAGA hat).
"Behaviour off platform" can mean anything and will be like the current Terms of Service be not be enforced in any manner that is consistent or fair.
Twitch is a monopoly in this space and it is abusing its position. This combined with the fact that the mobile phone platforms can remove an App for any reason it wants means that there is no open market where a competitor that has a different ToS can reasonably become competitive.
> Sales tax is a joke to the very rich and powerful. A guy with million dollars does not have to spend 1000x more on products and services than a regular guy with 1000 dollars. He uses that big money in different ways that do not get taxed by the sales tax.
They literally do spend a lot more of products and services than a regular Joe on the street, a sales tax would be taken at the point of purchase. Flash cars, fancy furnishings etc don't just come out of thin air.
> On the other hand, inflation taxes every positive-valued bank account roughly the same.
Inflation wrecks (the typically meagre) savings of regular people. It does not affect the wealthy who will have diversified investments and that will include things that are a hedge against inflation such as (but not limited to) precious metals, overseas investments etc. etc.
I don't wish to be rude but you haven't thought this through.
People see all of the simplicity through rose tinted spectacles.
Copy and pasting bits of HTML around was a chore and was prone to error.
No decent source control (the source control at the time was garbage and tbh was a relatively new concept in web dev) meant that you had no idea what you had done previously or why. I remember have lots of zip files with dates and README.txt in there.
No package managers meant that I had to keep track manually of scripts and CSS in folders.
Nah I don't think I will be going back to that madness thanks.
If you print money, you will typically create inflation. Which pushes prices up. Yes you can mitigate the effects for quite a while by exporting inflation and other tricks but all you are doing is kicking the can down the road.
If you want a "fair" tax. You would have a sales tax. Richer people and larger companies will typically spend more money than smaller businesses or poorer people and therefore will will pay a large proportion of tax and it will be taken at the point of purchase.
Everyone always talks about London, but misses out some of the other cities/large towns.
Manchester maybe a better option than London. Manchester is cheaper and has almost all the things you want from London without a lot of the negatives. Pay isn't nearly as good but the costs of living in Manchester are about 1/2 to 1/3rd of what London is.
If you want better weather the south-coast has Bournemouth (lots of smaller to mid-sized companies that do web development and insurance).
I was out of work during lock-down (I was a consultant) and being out of work for 8 months almost crushed me when I came back to work because I had to remind myself how to do some relatively simple things (e.g. how do I write a mock?).
Being out of the industry for 10 years is basically starting from scratch (almost).
Unfortunately people have to get an important idea in their head. The police are not there to help you for the most part.
In the UK we call the Police the filth for good reason. Law enforcement's job is to incriminate you. They are not there to "protect and serve" that is just marketing. That isn't true of every police officer and isn't true of every police force, but it is safest to assume that it is the truth.
If law enforcement are "wanting to chat" that means they are trying to push something on you. You don't tell them anything, you ask for legal representation and the answer to every question should be "no comment". Anything you tell them will be used against you in the court room.
It shouldn't be that way. But unfortunately that is the truth.
> There is nothing that you can do about it, so people are just apathetic.
Just to expand on this. It is just recognising the state of current situation. A lot of people in the UK support the state in some form or another and if the state tells you encryption is for terrorists or criminals then as far as they are concerned it it is for terrorists and criminals. Almost everyone in IT *might* grumble about it but that is as far as it goes.
People outside of that view point are seen as eccentric, crazy or "conspiracy theorists" even after you point to real abuses of the current snooping from GCGQ (e.g. people spying on their former spouses) that has rock solid evidence.
There is no political will in any mainstream party, even the non-mainstream ones don't care. The citizenry is apathetic, the professionals in the industry that work here are apathetic. In fact the very opposite exists, people seem to love it when the politicians do tyrannical things. There is also no real difference in the mainstream parties. I haven't voted in years because there is nobody to vote for who is worth a damn.
I am so fed up of fellow citizens. I am moving once the COVID situation is resolved as mentioned in another comment.
If health care was properly private (not pseudo private) it would be really cheap. I had private health care in Spain / Gibraltar and it was relatively quite cheap.
The NHS is a massive money sink that always requires more money to keep on operating. I've heard the chant of "Save the NHS" since I was a child. As someone who parents are Labour voters (my ancestors used to work in the mines) even they are starting to think it might not be worth it.
Getting people to move from something like Whatsapp to Signal is almost impossible. I have no intention of even living in the UK in the next few years to probably one of the overseas territories again (they are starting to tax the hell out of the things I make a living on).
I don't want to be "blackpilled" about it. But there is literally nothing that can be done about it. None of the politicians in the UK seem to care about freedom of speech, right to privacy or anything else that is classically liberal. Everyone in the UK either supports it or is resigned to it. Also almost nobody in the IT industry seems to care about it either (I've worked at quite a few places as a consultant).
Someone always pulls out a C64 demo. This is using a bunch of tricks to do it and it is massively compressed.
It generally isn't doable. My Amiga 600 without the Vampire or a Prisma Megamix cannot play MP3s of decent quality and the Amiga was far more capable than C64.
> Expertise/intelligence/whatever you call it is the ability to handle more complex tasks because you can place the less complex tasks as background tasks.
No it isn't. I have seen otherwise quite smart people completely fail to do the most basic tasks especially when it comes to repair.
You can work it out (I for example can do many home DIY projects now). But just because you can do a complex task in one domain it does not mean you can do a relative simple task in another domain. You can see this in this industry. The number of C# programmers that cannot do simple CSS.
The fact the you can't give it a proper name means that you cannot quantify it properly.
> This follows whether it is due to better education, better training, better tools, or better nutrition.
No it doesn't. Better training for doing X just means you will be better at doing X. It does not say anything about how well you may perform in other taks.
> Are programmers "smarter" than they were 50 years ago? They can certainly create much more complex programs that do MUCH more than we could 50 years ago.
More complex doesn't mean it is better. In fact if you are a good engineer you will know that unnecessarily complexity is a sign of a poor design. So this does not follow what-so-ever.
Also most of the literature written 50 years or more ago from the pioneers of the field are constantly being re-discovered.
So no.
> Are chess players "smarter" than they were 100 years ago? ELO ratings sure suggest they are.
No. No. No. Just because a number goes up, doesn't mean that everyone is getting better. It could be because weaker players may not bother at all with such matches where they are rated, while better players are more likely to participate in any ranked or scoring system. So you cannot draw that conclusion.
> Would those people of 100 years ago been able to do the tasks we can now given our current society? Maybe. But that indicates that "intelligence" is also a function of "current environment". And, if the current environment is better, then the humans are "smarter", to
No I am sorry that conclusion is incorrect. There are many here that would struggle doing some very basic things in other fields especially if it involved their hands (carpentry, joining, brick laying) because they have no expertise in it and those fields have been around a very long time. So you cannot come to that conclusion at all.
> This flies in the fact of lots of evidence to the contrary
Your examples are not evidence of higher IQ. They are examples of human progress.
> 1) High-school students now understand mathematics that only advanced degrees would have understood in 1919.
Being the first to do something and following in their footsteps is two very different things.
Sure but that is just because it is better understood now. All this this means is that the idea / technique is better understood and understood by more people.
> 2) High-school musicians now regularly play pieces that were considered meant only for "virtuousos" in 1919.
Again this is just evidence that more people understand how to play the pieces.
Doing something novel and unique is much more difficult than understanding something that is already understood. That is why scientists sometimes say they are standing on the shoulders of giants
> The fact that IQ tests (whatever they measure) have shown an aggregate increase is also evidence against your hypothesis.
You are oversimplying the findings, I made the same mistake when I first heard of the flynn effect. What you are referring to is the Flynn effect. This is where the average IQ increases each generation. While there is an increase of ~3 points every decade, it is on the low end of the distribution
> Some studies have found the gains of the Flynn effect to be particularly concentrated at the lower end of the distribution. Teasdale and Owen (1989), for example, found the effect primarily reduced the number of low-end scores, resulting in an increased number of moderately high scores, with no increase in very high scores. In another study, two large samples of Spanish children were assessed with a 30-year gap. Comparison of the IQ distributions indicated that the mean IQ scores on the test had increased by 9.7 points (the Flynn effect), the gains were concentrated in the lower half of the distribution and negligible in the top half, and the gains gradually decreased as the IQ of the individuals increased. Some studies have found a reverse Flynn effect with declining scores for those with high IQ.
In other words the people with the lowest IQ scores are increasing more greatly and pushing the average up. The whole distribution itself is not moving with it though.
I dislike the whole idea though of IQ as a test of intelligence (which is a nebulous concept in itself). I've seen people with high IQs believe in very ridiculous things and engage in behaviour which most would consider to be stupid.
As someone that did 2 proper IQ tests back in the 90s because my school thought I mentally handicapped (I am dyspraxic so technically I am). The tests are good at identifying whether you are good at abstract reasoning. There are other forms of thinking that I am very bad at even though I am on the higher end of the IQ scale (I was graded at 142 at the time).
The capacity isn't the problem. It is the direct write access. If it is USB it tends not to have direct hardware access and it won't work no PC format disk e.g. the ADF Amiga format.
If I use a real floppy disk controller + Linux can write to those disks in the correct format. It works. I am not an expert in how any of this works though. What I have at the moment is sufficient.
I am sure people have had luck with USB drives. I have not.
USB floppy disk drives are only any good at reading and writing 1.44mb disks. If you need a 720k disk for something like an Amiga/Atari ST they don't work IME (some people have claimed otherwise but I've never had any luck).
I keep an old Core Quad machine with a real floppy disk controller on it just for this reason. Windows XP / XP 64 and Linux are the only things that write to these drives properly (IIRC Windows versions after Vista don't control the floppy controller directly). I do have better options now for transferring files to these old machines.
The terms of service are not in anyway enforced consistently or fairly. The way the terms and service is written is that they can basically boot you for any reason. It is well known that the "tiddie streamers" regularly get away with ToS violations, where some dude wearing a red hat will get a ban (and I mean a red hat, because that exactly what happened to one guy, he didn't even have a MAGA hat).
"Behaviour off platform" can mean anything and will be like the current Terms of Service be not be enforced in any manner that is consistent or fair.
Twitch is a monopoly in this space and it is abusing its position. This combined with the fact that the mobile phone platforms can remove an App for any reason it wants means that there is no open market where a competitor that has a different ToS can reasonably become competitive.