orangeoxidation

> I think we should see this as simply silly behavior by a government.[...] This is an administration that seems to be keeping track of who its friends are and aren't, and likes to be the center of every story. They also seem to like extracting concessions and reciprocal favors.

"Silly" is a silly word for corruption.

> Google's existence has spawned a horde of SEO spam sites that dilute and push down real content on the internet

They don't push real content "down the internet" they push it down the google rankings.

And while Google search is not as great as it was, it remains a strong contender for the best way to find stuff on the internet.

I don't think the internet would be better off without it.

You can however make good arguments for Google News, "Instant Answers" in Search, and other products, taking (impressions) from the internet.(And Chrome, Chrome worries me.)

> The question is, does it fulfill a cookie-using website's requirements under GDPR without additional UI

It cannot. That's the whole point of the GDPR. It forbids tracking without informed, explicit user consent. Users cannot be informed or agree with the header setting.

Sites can, of course, not track users, or not track users who set do not track. They don't want to, that's why they try to annoy and/or mislead anyone into agreeing with their horrible banners.

(Using Cookies for site settings or even logins can be done without explicit consent and without banners)

> I was surprised to see "sprawl" called out in the op because that is directly opposed to the flattening of building restrictions and the deregulation that is being pursued by both the state and housing activists

Strange. I understand sprawl (especially suburban sprawl) to be the direct result of housing regulations. The "natural" ("unregulated") trend seems for cities to become denser and for buildings to become higher (e.g. single family homes getting replaced by multi apartment buildings). Density being the opposite of sprawl.

More housing in an already populated area leads to denser populations leads to less sprawl.

> That's not a data protection problem, however. No data protection law forbids digitization of government services. It's a common excuse, though.

It's a super weird one as well. There's no extra special data protection rules for digital data vs. data on paper.

Are they admitting they violate privacy laws already? Or do they want to change the information flow while going paperless? If so, why, and why is it necessary to go digital at all?

There's video de- and encoding as well.

> Money, it turns out, wasn’t the point after all.

Not the only point. Asking them if they wanted to do the sales team job without compensation would get you the obvious answer. They wouldn't. Money is the point, it's just not the sole point and it cannot be stretched arbitrarily. "Money for rent", "money for retirement", "money for vacation" and "money for a second home" are not the same.

Interesting. So it only shows images that were transformed / mixed to get the output, but does not show images used to learn how to transform / select them?

Sounds very much like a human would do it.

If I 'know' how to recognize saurik and I know how anime is supposed to look like, I can check my digital photo library for a picture of saurik and than use that picture as a template to draw an anime version of saurik. If someone later asked me what pictures I used the photo is the only one I'd present. Not the thousands of anime pictures I have seen teaching me what anime looks like, nor the picture my eyes took meeting saurik.

> I write a lot of C and still find it tricky when I have to go look at some random C codebase

Absolutely. C Code is not necessarily easy to understand. Not at all.

But the C parts itself are? In C you seldom wonder what C does, you wonder what the C code does.

If you work like OP likes, single person projects, small enough to keep almost completely in your head, I can see how C is especially charming. You never wrangle with C, only with your own code.