Which might be true, though the second thing sounds promising as well...

'prepone' is an example of why I sometimes agree. Most indian guys I know also up the baudrate of english so much that they get twice the information flow compared to british english. With the disadvantage that both sides of the conversation need to speak indian english or you'll get protocol errors :-D

My stance used to be that the invention of the filter bubble combined with targeted advertising is the most dangerous invention for human society of the last 100 years.

AI turns that up to 11

But AIs need such ridiculously complicated infrastructure with all the datacenters and GPUs and memory fabs etc etc an AI that actually destabilizes the economy will wipe itself out.

And then there's a slight possibility of 'terminator skynet' style trouble, Where the AI starts to make the decisions to benefit itself. But I guess the chances of an AI screwing up their own supply chain would be near 100% so I'm not too afraid of that.

It's not like one-way communication is a hard problem. Just post that stuff on a website ffs!

One day I got a message that my account was closed because of a violation of the TOS. No explanation what it was that I violated. No chance for appeal. No chance to communicate with a human about it. It was explicitly stated that it was impossible to reinstate the account. To this day I have no clue what it was in the 20 or so timelapse movies taken from a small sailing boat that offended Google.

It was a good lesson to never trust Google.

There are lots of tuning systems. Equal temperament is just 12 (logarithmic) equal steps. But other tuning systems use different priorities.

The basis is physical, though. It's always about trying to get the frequency ratios as simple as possible (or as close as possible to a simple ratio). Based on the fact that natural overtones are always (more or less) integer multiples of the base frequency so that's what sounds pleasing to us. Using only integer ratios is impossible though, so we have to deviate from those. And on top of that we want to deviate because people get bored ;-)

We don't live (hopefully) in a complete lawless anarchy where it's just 'might makes right'. And we should certainly not strive to end up that way.

> waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.

Which is a bit of an exaggeration. When someone breaks the law it doesn't take 2-3 years to get fined/punished. At least not in a functioning society.

I often do 'print to A5 pdf => copy pdf to e-reader'. Would be nice to do that in one step from any program that can print.

Used to be that printing a text file was just `cat myfile.txt > /dev/lp0` .

It has been a while since I printed a plain text file, but I guess there's still a similar command available with some research.

If you create something you should have some protection of other people just blatantly ripping you off.

Copyright terms are in dire need of a reset to a sane length, though. Disney (among others) has spent way to much money extending the term each time their cartoons threatened to expire.

Patents on the other hand should never have been used for software. Patents have their function in preventing inventors from keeping their designs secret, but the whole system is set up to give people to invest in building large brick halls filled with steam engines and it does not match software's pace of development at all.

I really like classical arabic music. But when I tried to play the half tones in a tune I studied hard on the syrian guy I was playing with told me to please not attempt those because I was horribly out of tune :-P . Not because I played a half tone, of course. He did play them. But because my half tone was subtly slightly off the right half tone.

There is of course a lot of physics involved. But there is at least as much convention at play. So imho this is a very one sided way of looking at it.

There is a physical reason the 12 notes are those 12 notes (though the exact frequencies assigned are influenced by culture as well), but lots of different cultures use less notes, or more, or extra notes inbetween.

So 'Because that is the convention.' is imho at least a good an explanation as the physics one.