I think the democratic and developed countries need to change their game plan pretty soon. The countries that are willing to join the club should be offered actual help to develop. By actual help I mean trade treaties that are designed to benefit those countries, not developed countries. Includes IP vaiwers, duties that protect local industries etc.

The countries that do not want to join, (including China and Orban's Hungary) then again, should be punished in all ways possible. Massive duties to commodities and other products imported from those countries, as a starter.

Open democracies do not need to be nice guys if they are threatened. Must not be, to be more precise. See Popper and paradox of tolerance.

I have written a bunch of more or less complicated SQL during my career. And I am pretty sure that if I need to write a SQL statement that's anything but select * from table, my output won't work 75% of time.

I may be special case, but typically if I work on a hard problem, it is not a single hard problem but a sh*tload of connected simple problems. If I can get someone to solve the simple problems 75% of the time correctly so that I can spend my time figuring out how those simple problems are to be connected, I'm ore than happy. And that's exactly how I use chatgpt. I have learned not to ask too complex questions from it. But the simple ones, it mostly aces and when it does not , they are easy to spot, as it is not that I could not have solved them myself, I just did not want to spend time for that. Now, if only the chatgpt was not almost as lazy as me to produce long simple stuff, that would be awesome.

I mean, I know the argument that gravity inverse square law becomes inverse cube law in 4d, but what I do not understand is that what/why enforces that. Why in a hypothetical 4d world there just can not be a gravity-like force that is inverse square? Would that cause some kind of contradiction?

Utilities are things that should be designed with the current typical paradigm of simplicity and discoverability to extreme. I should not need to read user manual for my toaster or microwave.

Tools then, should be pretty much the opposite. It should be fine and expected to invest some time to learn the efficient and safe usage of the tool. There is no reason to have a intuitive interface on your tool, as long as it is efficient after you did your training. Vim is way better editor than notepad, but I don't think anyone praises it for the intuitively easy to use.

And the peeve here is of course that way, way too often these are confused.

(This is an educated guess, not knowledge, so take with a grain of salt.)