Nibodhika

I can only tell you about my experiences in the past, but I don't think you have the job yet, you might have passed some initial round of interviews and be heading for the next one. From my experience there are usually 3 rounds of interviews:

The first round is HR, this serves to filter people who should not have applied for the job, although sometimes it filters good candidates and let's bad ones get through in general it's necessary in large companies that get hundreds of applicants. Sometimes in this round you'll get multiple choice test or some technical questions that should be answerable by anyone applying for the job, things like difference between list and set, or what's a pointer.

The second round is technical, you might get a take home and an interview asking you about it, or a meeting where you talk through the architecture for a system, or even just sitting in a room talking brain teasers or similar. This round is to check your technical knowledge, sometimes people are very good with the basic questions that HR asks, but fall apart the moment you ask them something that's not in a "questions asked in interviews" list.

The third round is a culture fit, essentially you go to the office and talk to people about random stuff, have lunch with them, etc. Sometimes there might be some coding or some technical discussion but it's more chill. Essentially they're trying to see how it's like working with you, if you get to this interview it means you're essentially hired baring you being a complete asshole or similar. This interview is to prevent from hiring people who are very good technically but are a pain in the ass to work with and would drive the productivity down because no one would like being around them.

Now, that's my experience with interviews, it doesn't mean wherever you're applying follows these, but I've seen lots of companies have similar stances, although some put at least 2 of those in a single day. The company I'm currently with had a 4th round, but that was a special case, it essentially was a "we want to make you an offer, but have several positions available, so talk to the managers of each of the teams you would be working and see which work interests you the most and we'll make you an offer for that position".

First of all this is not a paradox, unless you're not explaining something, there are two yous past and future, if past self turns off the machine before seeing the numbers nothing happened, if he turns it off afterwards the information has already been transferred so nothing happens either.

I have a feeling you might have recently watched Primer and are thinking of a similar working tome machine, where the machine needs to be powered on from past until future. But if this situation happened in Primer it wouldn't be a problem either because you're not in the box after you leave it. It's a bit weird, but if you imagine time as horizontal lines, the box allows you to travel diagonally, so you only exist inside the box in that timeline at the moment of exiting, before that you were in a different timeline, so if you exit the box, wait a while and turn it off you're only preventing yourself from using the box again. In fact that's one of the big reveals of the movie, except it's said in passing by mentioning that the boxes are multi-use.

It's round, mandarins are slightly squashed, it's not a big difference if you're not used to, but I love mandarins so I learnt to distinguish them at a glance to not buy the wrong thing just because it's in the wrong section.

That reminds me of a few years back when Google removed it's "Don't be evil" slogan, someone commented that it was like the disturbed kid in class having a sign saying "Don't kill everyone" quietly putting it away.

The joke even has another level, because that's a picture of an Orange, not a Mandarin.

Your answer is intuitively correct, but unfortunately has a couple of flaws

Supercomputers once required large power plants to operate

They didn't, not that much anyways, a Cray-1 used 115kW to produce 160 MFLOPS of calculations. And while 150kW is a LOT, it's not in the "needs its own power plant to operate" category, since even a small coal power plant (the least efficient electricity generation method) would produce a couple of orders of magnitude more than that.

and now we carry around computing devices in out pockets that are more powerful than those supercomputers.

Indeed, our phones are in the Teraflops range for just a couple of watts.

There’s plenty of room to further shrink the computers,

Unfortunately there isn't, we've reached the end of Moore's law, processors can't get any smaller because they require to block electrons from passing on given conditions, and if we built transistors smaller than the current ones electrons would be able to quantum leap across them making them useless.

There might be a revolution in computing by using light instead of electricity (which would completely and utterly revolutionize computers as we know them), but until that happens computers are as small as they're going to get, or more specifically they're as space efficient as they're going to get, i.e. to have more processing power you will need more space.

Not exactly only in my country, but I was talking to some people a while back and realized something, there's a TV show that absolutely everyone in Spanish speaking countries (and Brazil) knows of, and has watched over and over again, it's so ubiquitous to us that the closest comparison in terms of how known it is that I can think of would be The Simpsons. However the show never broke the language barrier (except, like I mentioned, to Brazil where it was translated to Portuguese). So imagine going somewhere and realizing you can't make Simpsons references because these people have never heard of the Simpsons. By this point I think every Spanish speaking person knows what show I'm talking about, but for non-spanish speaking people the name of the show is El Chavo del 8 (which translates to "The boy from the 8th" as in the boy that lives on number 8, the implicit joke is that he's so poor he doesn't even have a name, which sort of got ruined by translation because in Brazil he's named Chaves)

Expanding on that, and explaining why this is not Digital hoarding, I have a HUGE catalog of games, lots of which came from bundles and such, if I was able to sell back games to steam, even if for a few cents, I would delete a big chunk of that. But as is I have no reason to do it, I can put them in a "never played" category and forget about them until I randomly find a game in the store that mildly interests me and notice it's already in my library.

Tell me you're from the US without telling me you're from the US.

Let's have a hypothetical scenario, imagine there was a machine that could be used to murder people easily, even if that wasn't their main purpose anyone could use it in a fit of rage to kill someone, in fact anyone could kill someone by accident with this machine. You would want this machine to be regulated, have people evaluated psychologically, and have them take classes and perform an exam to ensure they won't kill anyone by accident.

Did you think guns? I meant cars. And asking if no one or only cops should have guns is like asking if no one or only bus drivers should be able to drive. There's a midterm that most of the world has already reached, where we require people to go through some process to prove they can operate the death machine safely.

I never said they were good, and you didn't complain about them being bad, you complained about killing the franchise, and whether a franchise is dead or alive IS measured by popularity.

Ok, I think I can provide some insight into this that I think it's missed on other replies.

I switched to Arch back when Arch had an installer, yup, that's right, Arch used to have an installer, then they removed it and you had to do most of the process manually (yes, I know pacstrap is technically an installer, but I'm talking about the original ncurses installer here).

After Arch removed its installer it began to attract more purists, and with that the meme was born, people online would be discussing stuff and someone would explain something simple and the other would reply with "I use arch BTW", which meant you didn't need to explain trivial stuff because the person had a good idea on how their system works.

Then Arch started to suffer from being too good of a distro, see those of us that were using it consistently saw posts with people complaining about issues on their distros that never affected us, so a sort of "it doesn't happen on my distro" effect started to grow, putting that together with the excellent wiki that people were linking left and right (even for non Arch users) and lots of people became interested.

This new wave of users was relatively new to Linux, they thought that by following a tutorial and running a couple of command lines when installing arch they had become complete experts in Linux, and they saw the "I use Arch btw" replies and thought they meant "I know more than you because I use Arch", so they started to repeat that. And it became common to see posts with people being L337 H4ck3r5 with no clue whatsoever using "I use Arch btw".

That's when the sort of cult mentality formed, you had experienced people who liked Arch because it was a good distro that didn't break on its own with good documentation to help when you screw up, these people suffered a bit from this and told newbies that they should use Arch. Together with that you had the other group who thought because they installed Arch they were hackers telling people Arch was waaaay too hard, and that only true Linux experts should use it. From the outside this must have felt that we were hiding something, you had several people telling you to come to our side or they couldn't help you, or pointing at documentation that looked specific for their distro, and others saying you weren't cool enough for it probably felt like a cult recruiting.

At the end of the day Arch is a very cool distro, I've tried lots of them but prefer Arch because it's a breeze to maintain in the long run. And the installation process is not something you want to throw at a person who just wants to install Linux to check it out, but it's also not complicated at all. There are experts using Ubuntu or other "noob" distros because at the end of the day it's all the same under the hood, using Arch will not make you better at Linux, it will just force you to learn basic concepts to finish the installation that if you had been using Linux for a while you probably already know them (e.g. fstab or locale).

As for Ubuntu, part of it stems from the same "I use Arch btw" guys dumping on Ubuntu for being "noob", other part is because Canonical has a history of not adoption community stuff and instead try to develop their own thing, also they sent your search queries to Amazon at some point which obviously went very badly for their image in the community.

Oh yeah, they absolutely killed Fallout, the first game released by Bethesda (Fallout 3) was such a franchise killer that only sold 20 times more than the original game, and their latest game fiasco only doubled that. And let's not talk about that fiasco of a TV show, that couldn't even make it to most watched on Amazon, had to settle for the 2nd most watched show on Amazon, with only 4 times more viewers than Fallout 4 sold copies... In short, yeah, the new direction is such a fiasco that only managed to bring 165 new customers for every 1 that the original had.

Sources:

https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout

https://wccftech.com/the-fallout-tv-show-has-registered-100-million-viewers-to-date/