Since randomizing the list increases entropy, it could theoretically make your cpu cooler just before it destroys the universe.

You still have to check that it’s sorted, which is O(n).

We’ll also assume that destroying the universe takes constant time.

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It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’ll probably do the job. Depends on what you want to do with it. There’s fewer people choosing this path, which means that when things go wrong, you’ll have fewer sources of information to help.

Some old Dell office PC with a good amount of RAM and an SSD would be just as well.

But only one of those people gets a book deal.

Would you say that the conversion of TV from broadcast/cable to streaming has resulted in a lot more nudity? If so, why hasn’t Internet porn reduced it?

Here’s the point I’ve been circling around: the availability of Internet porn does not adequately explain why depictions of sex and nudity in movies have gone down. It’s the first idea that pops into peoples head, but it doesn’t quite fit. What does is the rating system. Somewhat with the introduction of PG-13, and more dramatically so with NC-17. “This Movie Is Not Yet Rated” goes into this in more detail, but I’ll lay out what it’s getting at.

If you go back to the 1970s and '80s, you have PG movies with nudity. “Airplane”, released 1980, had a quick flash of boobs along with an extended blowjob joke. “Superman”, released 1978, had Superman as a kid climbing naked out of that pod. Expressly non-sexual, but nudity none the less. Today, Airplane would go straight to an R rating for that flash of boobs unless it’s from a director like James Cameron, who gets to pull strings and do whatever they want. I don’t think you could do the Superman bit at all.

You also have some R rated movies at the time showing extended closeups of the faces of women in sexual pleasure. This has almost entirely disappeared from all mainstream movies. Liv Taylor’s character in “Jersey Girl” (PG-13) talks about masturbating, and that was scandalous.

Then PG-13 shows up in 1984 in response to movies like “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” pushing PG too far. When that happens, PG becomes the older kids movie rating, and PG-13 is supposedly for teenagers. Except, now you can’t really do scenes like Temple of Doom did and still be PG-13, either. Too much blood. Plus, you can’t have nudity except maybe the odd butt (usually male), again with the exception of being James Cameron.

Also, you get one F-bomb in PG-13 movies. It has to be stated in anger (“fuck you”) and not in reference to sex (“Should we go home and fuck each others brains out”). This isn’t an official rule anywhere, but even people outside the industry have picked up on it.

So now you can have James Bond shooting up tons of baddies as long as you don’t show any blood. The same movie will also go to great lengths to carefully conceal the lead actresses’ nipples at all times.

This gets much worse when NC-17 comes along. This was an attempt to rebrand the X rating, which tended to be associated with outright porn. “XXX” was never an MPAA rating; the porn industry adopted that for itself, but the association got stuck. So hey, surrender that idea to porn, change X to NC-17, and now we can make “serious” movies with lots of sex.

Showgirls then completely bombs.

What happens next is that NC-17 is used as a bludgeon by the ratings board. Do what we say, or else we’ll rate you NC-17 and most of the theaters won’t even show your movie. There’s a bit of psychology going on here where the ratings board wants to feel like they have a say in the movie itself. This has sometimes resulted in directors deliberately putting in stuff they know will never pass, then it gets flagged by the ratings board, they drop it, and the ratings board gives it the OK.

You can’t always do that, though. Directors won’t bother shooting a scene at all when they think the ratings board will nix it. Nudity has become nearly absent from R rated movies altogether because of this, and it’s a very brief flash if it’s there at all. One exception being Wolf of Wallstreet. Directed by Martin Scorsese–another director who has enough pull to get whatever they want. Anybody less than an S-tier director doesn’t get to do that. That movie is now 11 years old, and I’d challenge you to find another R rated movie with that much nudity and sex that’s been produced since.

Violence in R rated movies hasn’t gone the same way, because the ratings board members don’t care as much. They’re largely Americans (as far as we know; they were when “This Movie Is Not Yet Rated” was produced), and American culture is stuck in a mindset that violence is less bad than nudity. Also, Showgirls was known for sex, not violence, and that’s the sack of bricks hanging over every R rated movie director.

So in a perverse way, the opening of PG-13 and NC-17 ratings have actually reduced artistic expression, not opened it up.

Streaming evolved in a totally different way, and isn’t subject to the same incentives.

Uh, the graph in OP says otherwise. I guess it depends on your definition of “gratuitous”.

Is James Bond shooting his way through badies–without a drop of blood being shown–gratuitous? How does that compare to a flash of boobs on screen in another movie?

If it’s not as desirable, then why would it be so prevalent in movies?

You can get gratuitous violence on the internet, too. Far more than the most violent slasher film. Availability isn’t the reason.

Not sure that’s right on all phones. Browsing on my Pixel 6 shows noticeably fewer ads when I’m at home compared to anywhere else.

It’s not like we have great options here. Safari isn’t supported on Windows or Linux. Opera has its own issues (like predatory loan apps) even if you’re willing to pay for it. Crossing my fingers that Ladybird will work out, but it has a long way to go (though it did better than I thought it would when I tried it a few months back). Everything else is some variant of Chrome.

If you need to be on the web at all, Firefox still seems like the best of the shit pile.

Highly recommend setting up a PiHole. It may not be quite as comprehensive as uBlock, but it cuts the ads way down, and it’s not something that browsers can easily bypass. You do have to make sure to shut of DNS over HTTPS, or setup a separate solution for that to tunnel into PiHole.

For most people, yes.

For my best friend, no. The reason is that he and his wife really wanted a kid, and they got everything together and had one. He is the happiest new father I’ve ever seen.

My wife and I don’t want kids, and have taken permanent action to make sure we don’t. In part, this is because we understand the responsibility that would be carried for years. We have other things we want to do with our lives. So for someone else to have full knowledge of that responsibility and embrace it gets respect from me.

Here’s some solid numbers:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Launch-Cost-Per-Kilogram-to-Low-Earth-Orbit-LEO-US-Thousands_fig1_361415873

The Shuttle was so expensive that it might have been better to keep using the Saturn V. It accomplished a lot, but was ultimately a failure at its original goal of a reusable rocket with a fast turnaround. Some of the old hopes for it were to launch 100 Shuttle missions per year. As problems were found, it was clear it would never be close to that.

Falcon 9 was already an order of magnitude drop from what came before. Being able to grab the Starship booster by the chopstick method means it can quite possibly do the quick turnaround the Shuttle promised. That could mean another order of magnitude drop. Possibly even two orders of magnitude.

That’s transformative. It’s not just cheaper. It let’s things be done that weren’t possible before.

One subtle thing that’s already come out of this is related to Starlink. Now, this has a whole lot of problems that I won’t get into here, but it does have one fascinating effect. A rocket coming back down generates plasma that blocks radio signals to the ground. This means there’s a blackout time where everyone in mission control stands by nervously while waiting to hear if it blew up or not.

What Starlink does is provide a high bandwidth link above the rocket, letting them relay data back to the ground. This means that not only do we have full communication during reentry, but even a live video feed of the exterior. This was not possible until fairly recently.

It should also be noted that we SpaceX didn’t do this on their own. They benefited from decades of NASA R&D, launch facilities, and funding. Their biggest success comes from working around the pork barrel politics that hangs around NASA’s neck.

I don’t think there’s a way to commit identity theft in this hypothetical that would work. Being immortal would mean it had to work in the long run, or at least a few decades until you can do it again. Someone will notice eventually. You can call it “people being stupid about it”, but a mistake will happen if you wait long enough.

See, that’s the kind of “America is a shithole” argument I can support.

Calling the US a “shit hole” because it’s hard to commit identity theft is odd.

FWIW, scientists who study supercentarians think Jeanne Calment was legit. She answered some extremely detailed historical questions about her village. She was either a walking Wikipedia about the area she grew up, or her claims were real.

That said, most supercentarian claims probably are bogus. They often come from areas that had bad recordkeeping a century ago, had their records offices bombed out during a war, or are generally well known for pension fraud. They’re often very poor areas that tend to have a low life expectancy, and it’s very strange that a real supercentarian would pop up there.

Lemmy keeps it real.

I believe so, yes. Every 802.11 frame is effectively ACK’d. Makes a mockery of OSI layering, but so does everything else.