The names and handles of the movie reflect this - Cereal Killer, Plague, Joey, Razor - all handles of local New York people. Phreak in a sense too. Some of the kids went to Stuyvesant high school, where scenes were filmed. The kid getting raided in his shower happened locally. The plant worker almost getting shot by a flare gun held by people trashing happened locally. As did other things.

Some other national things made it in, like the Hacker's manifesto written by an LoD member.

Some things were invented for the movie. There was no attractive 19 year old Angelina Jolie type hacking along with the boys as shown in the movie. These guys were not rollerblading through Manhattan together. There was no Cyberdelia nightclub everyone hung out at, although some of the guys might have gone together once in a while to the nightclubs popular at the time (The Tunnel /Limelight / Palladium / Club USA / Webster Hall).

During the Vietnamese resistance war, Vietnamese moving down the Ho Chi Minh rail were contracting malaria in the jungle. The Chinese were asked for aid, and Tu Youyou was tasked with assembling a team to help.

One thing Tu Youyou did was consult "traditional Chinese medicine" with how to aid victims of malaria. Most of what she found did not work, but wormwood did produce results. Tu Youyou again consulted traditional Chinese medicinal texts and they said wormwood should be used with cold water. The team extracted artemisinin from the wormwood in cold water, and a new (and old) way of fighting malaria was born.

I don't really understand what this means - you obviously know at the smallest level things happen by random probability - because you mention the quantum world - but then you say the universe is deterministic.

Hunter gatherer bands. There's no evidence of any tribes 20,000 years ago.

> Unless you are arguing semantics, yes there were. Tribes and tribal violence.

There is no evidence of any tribes existing 47,000 years ago. Insofar as tribes, and tribal violence, the OP mentioned them, which is wrong in that time frame, semantics or not.

I didn't say humans didn't exist 20,000 years ago, I said there was no tribal violence. There's no evidence the Jaburara were organized as a tribe 40,000 years ago, although later on that may have happened.

In 1940, over 50% met via friends or family. About 36% met at school.

In 2021, about 20% met via friends or family. About 10% met at school. Over 50% met online. So the majority of US couples are now meeting via profit-maximizing corporations. He has a 2019 paper on this (and it has only increased since that paper).

Is there any evidence of any tribes whatsoever existing over 20,000 years ago? All the evidence points against it.

There was no tribal violence 47,000 years ago because there were no tribes!

Then of course, some people get cancer and some do not. With a normal age distribution of 18 year olds and up, it isn't surprising to me that very little is spent on the 18 to 30 year old men, and that one of the 65 and over got cancer and a lot of spending went toward that.

He is smart but not a genius. He kind of knows what is going on though, he "gets it". Probably even more motivated than smart, but not insanely motivated. Motivated enough to learn how to get features done at a brisk pace, take ownership of his team's work, and to study for interviews. Didn't go to a top tier CS program, didn't come out of FAANG or FAANG adjacent, and probably took a detour working for us, but three years later his TC is over $300k. He also had the luck to jump ship before the FAANG layoffs of late 2022.

So then the question is, is this the best way to learn in general? You can read studies of education including John Dewey's from over a century ago to see that it is not. The purpose of the education system is not to educate, but to do this thing described in the first paragraph. Nowadays the public schools are contending with charter schools, vouchers and the like, so there's a more injection of profit, religious fundamentalism and the like in the educational taxes people pay than there was a few decades ago.

Some countries, like in the Baltics, are seeing population decline, but human population is still growing fairly quickly.

In 1927 world population was 2 billion - now, less than a century later it is 8 billion. In the 1960s world population grew by 2.1%. For most of history until about 1700 or so that rate was about 0.04%.

The world population growth rate right now is much higher than it was in 1900 (and 1900 was higher than 1899, which was higher than 1898 etc.)

There's not really that much to population doomerism if you look at the historical trends. The only thing to it is that the growth rate in the 1960s was probably the highest in recorded history, and we are not still at that peak - but the world population is still growing faster than it has from 4000 BCE to 1940.

The other thing is it varies from place to place. Uganda's population is growing faster than the world rate, whereas Latvia's population is currently shrinking.

(Of course these things are all estimated, no one knows exactly when human population hits exactly 8 billion people etc.)

Yes, now that it is number one in these categories it is "mature" and its growth rate as not as fast as it was as it was climbing to these numbers. I don't see how being #1 in the world for app downloads and sales means it is "in decline".

The company with the largest market cap in the world, Apple. Steve Jobs believed in recruiting great people, and he entrusted in them and expected of them to create sustainably disruptive products. From Steve Wozniak all the way to Jony Ive. I don't know if I'd say Jobs was caring for all people working at Apple in my conception of things, but he did not look at the people working on an important Apple project as disposable cogs, and he didn't look at the products they were making as junk commodities to raise next quarter's revenue.

Whatever it boils down to, and whether it can continue creating things like the M2, there is a reason the company with the largest market cap in the world is Apple.