themoonisacheese

The reason tobacco plants produce nicotine is to kill bugs munching on them. It's possible a very low dose could be enjoyable to a bug but nowhere near the doses associated with smoking.

Very cool societal ideas. Please do not have children.

I don't think you understand. Would it be nice if society was less dependant on phones for everything social? Sure. It is your kid's responsibility to evangelize to their peers that they have to? Absolutely not.

This isn't a societal question. This is about affording a kid a social life at all. If a kid doesn't have a phone when all their peers have one, there's no "oh well simply only go to events that are shared on something else than phones", because there are no such events. There's no "oh well only socialize with people who will make the effort to only have conversations in person", because there will be at best one kid in the entire school that also doesn't have a phone (hint: they'll be the "weird" kid).

This is equivalent to your parents saying "you may only talk to people at school, you aren't allowed to talk to anyone once you leave school." Surely you understand that this is a surefire way to completely ostracize and socially stunt your kid, and for what benefit? The only thing you gain is that you get to not parent your kid about safe internet use, a thing you really should be doing anyway because they're going to get internet access at some point.

If you wanted to socially stunt them maybe. Please never do this.

Presumably the mountains are generatable offline. The steam friend thing is easily bypassed by the infamous Spacewar loophole

Womp womp, bad game runs bad

The people playing Roblox slop are children without credit cards btw. We can't have a discussion around piracy if we don't take into account the fact that a significant part of players are minors who will literally never be able to buy the game legally (in the timeframe it's relevant)

Good for them; unfortunately I can't understand a thing they're saying.

Not if it has anything to do with religion, the only entities we worship in this house is ourselves

I don't know my lore I stole this from bluesky

Yes, exactly. This is information that's encoded by tone, and it is accounted for in the 7 bits per syllable (or lack of syllable, for periods for example). It was more of an example to show how if what you're conveying is assumed to always be speech, the encoding you can use can be much more efficient.

On that note, a thing if forgot to mention is that speech assumes that what will be said is pretty much always valid. For example, sure, ascii has a lot more information density at 8 bits per character as you point out, but in reality it's capable of encoding things like "hsuuia75hs". If you tried communicating this to someone over speech, you'd find that the average speed you can do this drops dramatically from the normal 7 bits/syllable, where the ascii used in my comment's text has been constant-speed. That's one of the trade-offs.

You've stumbled upon the dark arts of information theory.

Sure, conveying "sandwich" in ascii or utf-8 takes 64 bits of information, but that's in an encoding that is by default inefficient.

For starters, ascii has a lot of unprintables that we normally don't really use to write words. Even if we never use these characters, they take up bits in our encoding because every time we don't use them, we specify that we're using other characters.

Second, writing and speaking are 2 different things. If you think about it, asking a question isn't actually a separate ("?") character. In speech, asking a question is just a modification of tone, and order of words, on a sentence. While, as literate people, we might think of sentence as written, the truth is that speech doesn't have such a thing as question marks. The same is true of all punctuation marks. Therefore, a normal English sentence also encodes information about the tone of the sentence, including tones we don't really know how to specify in text, and all of that is information.

This is the linguistic equivalent of kolmogorov complexity which explores the absolute lowest amount of data required to represent something, which in effect requires devising the most efficient possible data encoding scheme.