Earlier in late 90s "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." sounded cool. Now it has taken a sinister turn.

From being able to quickly find information and gain knowledge for the people, it is becoming - using information to manipulate and control the people.

It is a quite popular reverse bribe in India. All parties offer something like this, but to particular demographics.

However Trump's promises mean nothing nowadays.

One key distinction is the permanancy of Trumpism. The fact that existing controls in the US government cannot stop the extreme Trump actions, and in fact for many cases are explicitly supporting, gave a clear message to other governments that the risk is real, permanent and needs de-risking.

Overall Trump is a stress test on the world and found many defects that is slowly getting fixes.

I have seen in Switzerland that people leave their shoes at the entrance and switch to house shoes. Or they use a shoe cover when they enter house with shoes. Probably because houses are mostly wooden floored.

So shoes on is not universal in the West.

Most of the west outside of the US takes shoes off or swaps 'em for indoor shoes.

Between "Most of the west" and "Asian countries" it seems like it's the vast majority of industrialized countries that take off or swap their shoes inside. There's just an odd blip of over-represented online people who don't.

I'd like to see a citation for "most of the west".

Just not for emergency services!

Amazingly compatible with Lenovo. How did they achieve that!?

> At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company.

Are you complaining no one cleaned it up, including you? Or are you complaining that the company didn't get cleaning services?

I'm saying the presence of the boot marks make me less likely to clean up any mess I make in there.

Good premise for a scifi novel.

Knowledge of every member of a species is better than few samples? LLM became better due to its huge dataset instead of just few samples.

You hit diminishing returns pretty quickly. And LLM training only bothers with a single copy of each book; they don't even need to destroy the documents. (Eg they didn't destroy the American declaration of independence to train on it.)

Can they keep backup of the digital copy?

It's a good question.

This site, https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai..., states "It is important to note that this exception for backup copies only applies to computer programs and not to other copyrighted works, such as digital movies, music, or photographs or ebooks." But it seems unbelievable to me that they would have spent millions copying all these books and not have backups.

It probably is slow-boiling. Many things have been slow-boiled for so long that majority of us were caught sleeping at the wheels.

The day probably would come where Google does open sourcing just for namesake that too for insignificant piece of software. And other companies will follow suite. There would be time where everything thing will locked up and monitored.

I am so thankful that the PC revolution happened way before app stores and there was a period of open source culture and open formats etc.