“Create a python script to count the number of r characters are present in the string strawberry.”
The number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry' is: 2
“That all life beyond this planet never existed, no matter how irrationally improbable that may be.”
If tech giants such as Google cannot be broken up, then their services should be required to be compatible and all data exportable to competitors. See the EFFʼs “Competitive Compatibility” concept. Buy a movie off Google's YouTube but Google misbehaves? It must be exportable to a market competitor that you do support. Don't like how Google handles your email? You should be able to switch your email address to a competitor just like you can change phone companies without losing your phone number.
Basically, if the US Federal government cannot discipline monopolies by breaking them up directly, they should break up the moats and walled gardens the monopolies built to keep customers locked in to maintain their monopolies. See Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.
Based on my cheatsheet, GNU Coreutils, sed, awk, ImageMagick, exiftool, jdupes, rsync, jq, par2, parallel, tar and xz utils are examples of commands that I frequently use but whose developers I don't believe receive any significant cashflow despite the huge benefit they provide to software developers. The last one was basically taken over in by a nation-state hacking team until the subtle backdoor for OpenSSH was found in 2024-03 by some Microsoft guy not doing his assigned job.
Drive out enough librarians and eventually youʼll find yourself needing to drive 4 hours to get a tool pulled or a melanoma whacked off since good dentists and doctors usually want decent schools with libraries for their kids.
Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd's 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).
Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.
I can't pinpoint exactly when the fall started.
In my opinion, it was when anti-trust laws did not trigger upon Google acquiring YouTube because Google Video couldn't compete. That meant it was open season on start-ups that otherwise might have grown to kill Google or other big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.
God, I wish I could have read Terry Pratchett's Discworld-themed take on LLMs and how they're an elf plot to use L-Space to zombify techbros and their money-making schemes.
Shin Sekai Yori is an light novel / anime about what happens when these thoughts have power and how a society might develop to control the destructive consequences of said thoughts.
Excluding communities simply because you feel like theyʼre unclean is so... boring. Like, we as a species have done the whole / “racial purity” / “religious monoculture” thing for thousands of years now. Excluding people for non-violent reasons doesnʼt give you an advantage; you just get left behind as people with new ideas get poached by inclusive tolerant cultures that are intolerant of your intolerance. You can try to raise the switching cost by building walls and making emigration illegal, but sooner or later you get invaded; at best you get ignored and stagnate, dying an early death from silly things like tooth decay because you chased out all the dentists.
Sometimes I think I might have spent too much for my FLOSS System76 Launch keyboard but seeing this kind of monopoly moat-building chicanery makes me feel better.
PLATO: An automobile is craft with an internal combustion engine, crankshaft, and wheels.
DIOGENES wheels in a HONDA GX630 PRESSURE WASHER
DIOGENES: Behold! An automobile!