Algol 68 actually isn't too bad of a language to work with, and there's a modern interpreter easily available. Unfortunately it lacks all support for reading and manipulating binary data so I think a Minecraft server would be nearly impossible.
You can make your own cards with online services now. I've used Greetings Island many, many times to make custom cards. They have many perfectly good templates you can use for free. You can just print them out on a color laser printer after saving as PDF.
Store-bought cards offer some things now that you can't (easily) get with a laser-printed "card", though, such as 3D shapes (such as pieces that unfold when you open the card) and music-playing modules.
It would have been completely different: geography has been an enormous factor in human history and culture. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" book makes the case that the main reason for Europe's historical success as a seat of civilization over other places is mainly due to geography: stable, warm-enough (but not too warm) climate with a very large amount of arable land for farming.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is not well-received by actual historians.
It cherry-picks and manipulates facts to make its Euro/Anglo-centric perspective work, and even attempts some Anglo-exceptionalism. It completely disregards the vast majority of human civilisation where Europe was—for lack of a better word—a decayed backwater.
Europe saw several civilisational collapses, including as recently as ~1500 years ago with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Six hundred years ago Europe was still reeling from the effects of the Black Death, and it took another five hundred for hygiene to be taken seriously by Europeans, which they had forgotten all about since the Romans.
By sheer population numbers, the various river systems South, Southeast, and East of the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau have been the most successful and productive human civilisations. Nearly half of humanity lives in and around these river valleys. (And it can be argued from a biological perspective that population quantity is the only factor contributing to 'success'). These civilisations have endured for significantly longer than the European.
It's an alright book to read with a fairly critical lens, but its claims should not be taken as gospel. There's something to be said about a slippery slope leading from the claims in that book to outright Übermensch/Untermensch racism.
Completely different, but probably still full of the same basic wars, bigotry, tribalism, brutality and all the other shining facets of our basic human nature.
Maybe, maybe not. Human history has been drastically shaped by geography, causing humans to leave wherever they first evolved and travel across the world, becoming by far the dominant species.
Perhaps with different geography, humans would have gone extinct long before figuring out how to make fire or the wheel.
I was wondering how difficult it might be to modify Earth's geography to ensure humans went extinct, while still having them evolve in the first place.
I think the answer is barely, if at all. Using the power of known population bottlenecks (e g. [0]) and chaotic dynamics we can say that any trivial change might lead to a brief existence for humanity. Specifically I'm thinking of something like Lotka-Volterra leading to Gambler's Ruin.
>In my city folks complain about having to live next to "the poors"
That's exactly what the real issue is almost everywhere in America where there's resistance to changing zoning code. All the other stuff is just strawman arguments so these people don't have to openly admit that they don't want to live next to "those people".
I assume by "powerdown", the OP means reducing energy usage, especially of polluting energy sources, mainly fossil fuels.
This doesn't really require a lower population, it just means people need to stop expecting to live in huge McMansions with A/C blasting all the time and driving around in 3-ton SUVs. Living in dense, walkable/bikable city environments in energy-efficient dwellings, people could live quite well with a tiny fraction of the polluting energy usage.
That would be really easy (though it probably wouldn't be perceptible by humans, but you'd certainly see it if you look at actual CPU and memory usage): just look at some simple webpage that's only static HTML. uBO uses resources, so of course it's going to perform worse not having it there at all. And going through tens of thousands of filter rules isn't exactly a trivial task.
However, at some point, the resources saved (by blocking ads running JS) will outweigh the resources used by the ad-blocker. In typical modern web pages, that bar is probably pretty low, because there's SO much BS advertising and tracking.
What about for any non-trivial example? Ultimately the user has a choice, if ublock's performance is a concern the user can disable it for a page or simply not use the extension. Alternatively chrome could work on implementing a good resource monitor for extensions etc. Maybe it's already possible to benchmark with dev tools. In any case, completely breaking it never makes sense.
You don't have to ditch YouTube to avoid annoying commercial breaks. Any decent ad-blocker will skip the ads in YouTube videos, or you can even use an alternative viewer like SmartTube.
Unfortunately paying for these services to avoid ads will never work. It was first promised by cable TV when they first scaled out coaxial around the country. You paid for TV in part to not have ads. That worked great until the advertisers increased their bid. It was tried when VHS kicked off but eventually even tapes rented from Blockbuster had ads once the advertisers increased their bid. And now it is happening to streaming services. For over a decade I paid Netflix specifically to avoid the ads but as more people do that it decreases the supply of passive attention, which prompts advertisers to increase their bid again, and now it's almost impossible to continue paying to avoid ads. Now I have to pay a fee and watch ads. I would gladly pay YouTube to avoid watching ads but it just won't work. They will start taking my money each month and then they will also push ads at me after I pay them consistently for a long time. We're well beyond "fool me twice" territory.
I've been using Google premium to not see ads for years now. It's great and apparently the video makers earn more too. I don't love Google's domination and some of their practices but this is pretty reasonable.
Agreed, but the subscription is generally month to month, so I take advantage until that happens and then cancel, like I did with the other crummy streaming services that have done this (Netflix, Prime, etc).
That said, while I find those services pretty scummy for what they've done, I've fled back to spending a lot more time with books. There's plenty of them to read before I die and it's unlikely they'll be similarly molested.
One of the nice things about TV/movies that you don't get with books is a "shared experience": you can't read a book with your girlfriend or your family, but sitting on the couch with your girlfriend and watching a movie is totally normal and enjoyable.
Or don't pay for it and you get even a better treatment with hiding ads (SponsorBlock). the free solution is way better than the paid one if we are talking about Youtube.
>Or pay for it and support the people who's content you're watching and the company who's infrastructure is providing it.
This, it's well worth the price for 'free' youtube and music. I'm not a fan of ads or paying for much either, but it's really surprising how many people here are so against paying for the things they use.
There are still plenty of advertisements placed by the channels themselves. Almost all the big ones I follow do so unfortunately. It's a bit of a shame.
Sincerely,
An otherwise happy youtube premium family customer
I hate bait and switch done on me when they were giving free stuff out. I was there when creators were purely about having fun, trying stuff out and sharing it with the world.
But for kids these days it mostly is fair game - you want to watch funny cat videos, pay up or watch ads.
You can always have fun with friends from over the world and send each other videos no one is forcing you to post it on YT.
Because the videos in YouTube premium still have ads. But because the ads are built-in to the videos by the "content creators" themselves, they call them "sponsor segments". YouTube Premium doesn't include SponsorBlock.
It does in a limited capacity now [1]. No, it doesn't auto-skip for you and it's not nearly as quickly updated as SponsorBlock itself is, but it works fine enough on the iOS app.
