Yeah, same, I found it a bit surprising they have fewer than Germany

Oh I wish it was. Eg. here in Finland sharing movies etc. among friends or downloading them off the internet used to be legal as long as you weren’t doing it for profit or distributing stuff to a huge audience, but that changed in 2006 because the new EU Copyright Directive required it, and that directive was hugely influenced by the likes of WIPO.

Governments rarely realize anything related to IP that the copyright mafia doesn’t spoon-feed them, unfortunately.

Urr, I don’t think that’s it, I don’t think stereo sound for vinyls has ever worked so that something like this would be necessary and it wouldn’t really make sense – why would they have to put vocals on one channel and instruments on the other?

A stereo vinyl player just has the needle moving up and down in addition to left and right, so that the left-right axis is the sum of the waveforms of both channels and the up-down axis is the difference – which means that a regular mono player can play stereo vinyls

Yeah I doubt those particular comments have anything to do with “AI”. It just seems fashionable to blame AI for absolutely everything nowadays

That’s known as a ligature and they’re pretty common in many programming-oriented fonts, which usually have stylistic sets with different ligatures for different programming languages that you can optionally enable in your editor’s configuration. For example, here’s the stylistic sets the Monaspace font offers:

Personally I’m not too fond of ligatures so I never enable any, but many folks do like them.

Edit: and just as a side note, ligatures are super common in many fonts, you just might not notice them. Here’s some classic examples from the DejaVu Serif font, with and without a ligature:

"A".reverse() == "∀"

Where is your god now?!

More of a tragicomedy, really

Where’s your sense of adventure?!

Calling reverse() on a function should return its inverse

Use a dynamically typed language and you won’t have to: just override the default reverse() method on strings like a Real Programmer!

Unintended consequences you say? Nonsense! What could possibly go wrong?

"E".reverse() == "∃"

I dint know many OO languages that don’t have a useless toString on string types.

Well, that’s just going to be one of those “it is what it is” things in an OO language if your base class has a toString()-equivalent. Sure, it’s probably useless for a string, but if everything’s an object and inherits from some top-level Object class with a toString() method, then you’re going to get a toString() method in strings too. You’re going to get a toString() in everything; in JS even functions have a toString() (the output of which depends on the implementation):

In a dynamically typed language, if you know that everything can be turned into a string with toString() (or the like), then you can just call that method on any value you have and not have to worry about whether it’ll hurl at runtime because eg. Strings don’t have a toString because it’d technically be useless.

How does any of this shit even matter when we will all die or have our lives ruined by climate change in our lifetimes?

This is pretty much how I see things:

I think we’re fucked for a variety of reasons, and it’s looking uncomfortably probable that billions are going to die and if things really go pear-shaped it’ll possibly happen in my lifetime, but realistically I can do fuck-all about any of it (I was more of an activist for years but now I’m middle-aged and tired) and in the past maybe year or so I’ve found myself more and more just refusing to stress about any of this. I’m going to try and live my life the best I can, do good by the people in my life, and just… I don’t know, “stop caring” would maybe be too strong because I do care, but I guess I sort of accept what the situation is.

Doesn’t mean I’m a nihilist or that I’m now clubbing baby seals and heating my apartment with a burning barrel of crude, but more like I’ve started to accept how much power – ie. how little power – I have over any of this and just want to live the latter half of my life in as much peace as is going to be possible.