I would say that from the outside, it's really very clear that America has become more narcissistic over the last 35-40 years, but I think there's also evidence of a reckoning -- of a younger culture beginning to mix more self-effacement in with their self-expression.
I'd place the UK slightly lower on the scale of worsening narcissism, but I am sure other countries would observe it in us. Gen Z would seem to be getting tired of the whining over here, too.
We don't really have any way to know that. Considering that there may be as many stars in the sky as grains of sand on Earth, there are many many unknowns.
For another example we don't know for sure if our universe is the only one and it's entirely possible that everything that could ever happen plays out in real time across and infinite number of universes. We don't have any way to physically measure that possibility yet. We only have mathematical theories.
Similar to how Copernicus proposed the heliocentric model, maybe our universe is not even the center of existence?
Astrophysicists tell us that star formation will continue for 100 trillion years.
We are indeed among the first simply because of the sheer amount of time left ahead of us vs. behind us. It's basic math. We are at 0.014% of the expected duration of this universe.
All those stars you see in the night sky? That’s an astronomical waste of energy. No technological energy limited civilization would let that waste continue, entirely unhindered.
The fact that we don’t see the light of stars, or whole galaxies replaced by dim infrared waste heat emissions means either (1) new physics will point to free energy solutions that circumvent thermodynamic laws [unlikely], or (2) we are the first.
We may not have the capability to build a Dyson cloud around our own star (yet), but we do already have the technology. You could do so with 21st century tech, and the ROI would be positive.
The really advanced civilizations developed their technology just enough so they could build a really safe and reliable Matrix to live out their lives in.
They would still consume their local stars to extract and store the energy so their matrix can survive for trillions of years, rather than a few million or billion.
1. disassembling the stars to make them live a thousand times longer
2. it only takes one expansionist civilisation seeking interstellar exponential growth — even if 99.9% of civilisations are quiet, that's just 3 digits of the 22-digit number of stars in the observable universe.
> disassembling the stars to make them live a thousand times longer
Why would they do that when there are insane amounts of start with billions of years of life ahead of them. What purpose would that serve at this point in time?
Already today, having passed peak-child a few years ago, we can see that there are futures possible where humanity doesn't grow. I.e. humanity might be fine advancing with a fixed amount of power.
In that case, the stars are not 'waste'.
Historically, this idea of growth as method for advance is only a few centuries old. It's not hard to see its end as efficiency keeps increasing.
Or just maybe civilizations advanced enough for Kardyshev level 2 engineering feel no need for exponential expansion. Fermi paradox is essentially Malthusianism extended to outer space.
If nothing else, eventually civilizations are confronted by questions (in math, say) that can only be solved by extremely large amounts of computation. We know there must ultimately be succinctly stateable problems that cannot be solved easily; this follows from the undecidability of math.
It could well be that harnessing the energy of one star is sufficient for most of that. This is very hard to detect for an observer.
Going K3 to 100 billion stars of the galaxy "only" gives you a 10^11 constant factor speedup at enormous expense and with Amdahl's penalty at galactic scales.
It depends on a lot of factors, such as your body weight and tolerance. In university a 10mg edible would put me on a nice high for hours. Nowadays I'd need to consume at least 40mg to even feel it. To answer your question though 40mg is a large dose, especially for someone who hasn't used cannabis with frequency. I recommend most people start out with 5-10mg.
What I find really fascinating is that the route of administration can affect your tolerance even if the potency theoretically should be the same. If you consume edibles often (eg for health reasons) you'll find you increasingly need larger and larger doses until it plateaus somewhere. If you "switch it up" and consume the same quantity via, say, a concentrate you vaporize, it'll hit you a lot harder. Even if you don't change the route of administration but the circumstances (like a new location) there's a similar effect.
I bought a chocolate treat once, and it was small so I ate the whole thing. It didn't occur to me at the time that there was a cross imprinted on it for a reason - it was meant to be divided into 4.
So it was 40mg. I was super high on the bus on my way home, I cannot deny. Thankfully I could still handle and enjoy it. I think if it was 50mg, it would have been a whole different experience.
In my comment above, I meant to say 2 10mg doses, since we were talking about adding up to 20mg. It's the kind of mistake that's fine as a typo, but quite a different thing irl.
Also depends on other factors. If you're partying and have been drinking, you'll probably find it a whole lot less of an impact than if you ate it with your morning McMuffin on your way to work.
With python I'd decompose that one-liner into several variables for readability. That probably ends up using more memory than it would otherwise but I generally don't work on systems where that matters much.
Scala was really nice for this syntax when I used it for Spark.
Map and filter don't actually consume anything until they're used later, they produce iterables. So if you pulled them into their own lines they wouldn't consume (much) extra memory. Taking the original:
Legally, that pile of paperwork gives the Apple corporation some rights of a person. Obviously it is not a living, breathing person in the biological sense. But it is treated as one from a legal perspective.
Should it be? That's a different question. Changing that would probably upend contract law.
I'll second this too. As a former manager told me, figure out how to scale yourself. Making the end to end development lifestyle easy for peers and partner teams is one way to do that. It could just as easily be called platform or systems engineering with a touch of DevOps.
It's like UX for data people. How to make a cohesive experience among the various tools, scripts, services that people use day-to-day so they can use and maintain datasets efficiently.
You are confusing "service fees" with taxes. There are various tax regimes. Very few of them are proportional to the services you use.