Sometimes good products happen despite bad technical foundations.

In those periods, people work more on credits and debts, which shade directly into systems of social obligation and caste when extended over time.

(As you note) It's also very historically recent that 'making money' was seen as any kind of reasonable choice for someone with power. The political and merchant classes are typically quite separate (the exceptions prove the rule); the merchants are picking up an under-explored source of power that is mostly uninteresting to the the ruling class.

We humans have mostly frozen weights (neurons), or else we would constantly be having to avoid forgetting how to walk+talk. We have a period of greater plasticity (youth!), and use sleep and dreams to perform 'deeper' updates than occur when we're awake: We tend to suck a bit at picking up new skills from zero, but improve rapidly with practice over days.

Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why is a body necessary for the formation of desires and emotions? Why are desires and emotions necessary features for consciousness?

Or here's one: If I'm not experiencing any particular emotion in a given moment, am I concious?

I tend to think that emotions, at least, are mainly hormonal global triggers: they're more about physiology than actual consciousness. The whole thing, as a result, sounds like an effort to privilege biological intelligence, rather than a real foray into the issues.

Commutativity introduces a relation on pairs of 32 bit ints (a,b) ~ (b,a), which accounts for one bit of information. Thus, at most 50% of 64bit ints show up as products of 32 bit ints.

Gambling addiction has impacts beyond the person gambling, because we live in a society. They might gamble away their kid's college fund, lose their house, or resort to stealing money from family members. When they take out loans that they default on, it impacts the balls and raises costs for everyone else.

All of these are very similar to secondary and societal effects of hard drug addiction. It should at the very least be regulated. And most being is worthless from an information standpoint, so isn't providing any societal upside - a man doesn't hurt us. The world was strictly better before we had rampant gambling everywhere.

Ha, I don't think anyone who asks these questions expects that you'll respond in a fully unfiltered way... These kinds of questions are part and parcel of non-tech interview processes.

You can redirect with some subtlety "Well, my hardest ever day at work was..." to avoid talking about dead babies or whatever. Your interviewer doesn't get to look over your whole life history and determine whether your /truthfully/ chose the actual hardest ever day. So really it's a chance for you to say "Here's a [big] challenge I once faced, and here's how I survived/overcame it."