gordaco

"But security!" has been the "won't somebody please think of the children" of the technology world for a long time. The end goal, intentional or not, is the same: restricting freedoms (or, on a shorter term, ignore valid criticism).

Unfortunately, at least in the tech world it seems to be a great success. We now have walled gardens and unskippable updates. The next step, "trusted computing" (which is ultimately using a whitelist to forbid the usage of certain software), is already halfway here.

Yes, for a few years we had what was popularly called "Sun tax" in order to disincentivise people from installing solar panels in their homes. It was removed in 2018, though.

Although corruption was probably present, I would say that this kind of politics is precisely what we would expect from pro-business parties (in this case, the People's Party). They do have a long history of eschewing environmental policies as soon as any big company has money to lose because of them.

In most of Spain they sound exactly the same. I have met a total of one single person who pronounced them differently. Maybe it depends on the region.

I'm from Málaga, by the way.

This is something I really like about Finnish. Being a native Spanish speaker, I am accustomed to knowing how a word is spelled just by hearing it, although there are some cases where there might be doubt (like the homophones b and v, or the always silent h). But the letters are not always pronounced the same. For example, c and g are pronounced differently, depending on what the following vowel is. Even worse, u is silent after a q, or when between a g and an e or i. I mean, I don't have any problem with all of this, since I've been dealing with it for all my life :) . But I can understand how annoying it can be for a foreign learner, even if it's not as infuriating as English.

Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular. Each letter is pronounced always the same, no matter the context or the letters surrounding it (there aren't even consonant groups like ch). The grammar might be more complex, and the vocabulary might be difficult because it lacks the indo-european roots from all the other languages I know. But phonetics? Yeah, it's one of the simplest languages out there, in this sense. I love Finnish because of that, and I actually listen to a lot of Finnish music (despite not understanding almost anything), just because I love the way it sounds.

Still, I with I had fewer issues with a and ä... I can pronounce both separately, but when I hear someone speaking, I still have trouble when I need to differentiate between these two.

> I fully support anyone doing whatever they like with their body, but we should be able to at least acknowledge that any alcohol in any amount is self destructive.

Yes. There is a related issue, which is that a lot of people just can't accept that something they like is actually detrimental. Since I've never drank, I never experienced this specific kind of cognitive dissonance (if you can even call it that), but I've seen in so many people, it's depressing. There are some things that I love despite knowing that they are bad for your health (like certain unhealhty foods), but I would hate to deceive myself about it (knowing that they are bad allows me to manage the risks, like being aware that I should reduce consumption if I'm indulging too much). But a lot of people have the exact opposite attitude. Which is curious, because the damages are some times very obvious.

Induction is also a very good way to prove these formulas. In fact, these are just perfect textbook exercises for someone learning induction: try to find formulas for the sum of the first k-th powers (for some not so big integer k), then prove the formulas using induction. As someone else mentions, the formulas themselves are related to the Bernoulli numbers and have some surprising properties, like how formulas for odd values of k can be expressed in terms of k·(k+1)/2.

The thing about RSS is that big tech companies are not very fond of it because it gives too much control to the user and it's not so easy to flood you with ads when you use it. So, many of those companies either don't offer RSS, or they have it but they don't advertise it much and maybe they just do the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, since social media has replaced blogs as the go-to place for discussions and user-generated content in general, this means that a lot of the platforms that people use most frequently don't have an RSS feed, or have it but it's not very useful for whatever reason.

However: many, many other webpages out there do offer RSS, and I'm guessing that plenty of people use it, at least on technical circles. I use it mostly for comics and, to a lesser extent, for a few personal blogs and even news. A lot of people use it for podcasts. It has also been used to automatically download new episodes of TV shows in torrent downloaders (I'm guessing that you could mark this particular application as controversial; I won't comment on that. But it is useful at the very least). Also, if used properly, it allows for a lot of user control. You could, for example, pipe a youtube RSS into yt-dlp so that videos from a particular creator are automatically downloaded into a folder in your computer, or use any alert of new content to trigger whatever you want to do (like custom alerts when someone comments in a blog of yours, or whatever). RSS has a lot of potential, and because of that I don't think it's going away soon.

Now, you are also worried about the problem of content discovery. There is a problem here, because whenever we as users want a source of curated content, advertisers are going to do whatever they can in order to squeeze their shit into our pipes. So I personally prefer a "dumb" protocol like RSS where I just say "give me new updates from just THIS site", and leave discovery to more organic, less automated (therefore less gameable by advertisers) means. The closest I can think of to solve your problem is the usage of blog rings/networks (they used to exist, ten years ago... I don't know the state of the art right now), but this still means that there is someone doing the aggregation.

I'm not sure that twenty times the yearly price would look like a reasonable price, but if it's software I actually want, I might agree. I would weigh that price against the functionality of the software, ignoring whether there is a subscription model. As I said, I'm not beyond paying a three-digit sum for software I like (and Mathematica is the first example that came to mind, but not the only one).

I'm a very, very firm believer on not paying for "subscription" to software. New content, I can understand (I spend about 40€ monthly on several Patreons, mostly comic artists; and I have a couple news subscriptions as well), although I still hate music/tv subscriptions and I don't want Netflix, Spotify or whatever. But for software, no matter how useful it is, I just refuse to choose between an unbounded price and the possibility of losing it because I don't want to keep paying. For the record, I don't have any problems paying, say, 400€ for Mathematica and things like that (in fact, I haven't pirated anything in a very long time). But I paid once and I can use the software as much as I want without paying again.

For me, it's not about the amount of money, but the peace of mind (no additional bills, no additional shit to renew when I my debit card expires, and most important, I don't need to engage in any bullshit cancellation process). In the rare cases where both a subscription and a single payment is offered, I've done the math and from time to time I actually estimate that I'll spend less money on the subscription (although normally it's the other way around, of course), but even in these cases, I prefer paying upfront. I hate that this is becoming less and less available.

As a simple example, one can look at f(x)=1/x in R+. The derivative is f'(x)=-1/x^2 and the second derivative is f''(x)=2/x^3. In general, every function of the form f(x)=1/x^n with odd n will have this behaviour, and if n is even the behaviour is the opposite. And yes, many more examples can be found.

More generally, this is why I'm wary of indirect indicators. They never tell the whole story, and because of that they're used disingenuously in order to muddy the waters. You see this a lot in big scale PR campaings, such as climate change denialism, and pro-sugar and pro-alcohol disinformation (we had a lot of pro-tobacco as well, but it has subsided in the last two decades or so, at least in the West).

I'm using 102.0.1 and I couldn't reproduce it either.

I miss GWT. Glad to see I'm not the only one. Then again I don't like web programming at all and I'd rather write a desktop UI, which explains it, I guess.

I miss the times when UI didn't necessarily mean web. I guess I'm obsolete.