Eeeeh, more debatable since someone would actually need to write the capability for the bot to talk to the platform. It’s still a much lower threshold, but it’s not a free ride.

They don’t actually hate Wikipedia. They hold that it’s not a primary source for things that require citation, and that it’s not a great textbook.

Reading the Wikipedia page for optics is a bad way to learn optics.
It’s also difficult to cite as a source because you can’t actually specify who you’re citing, which is why Wikipedia, for research purposes, is a great way to get a quality overview and the terms you need, and then jump to its sources for more context and primary sources as you need them.

Encyclopedias in general are overviews or summaries of what they reference. Teachers would typically like you to reference something that isn’t a summary or overview when writing one, sincenthat what most of those reports are.

Information without context can create a different narrative than that same information with context.

You see this in racially biased crime reporting. Without context, you see that one demographic is disproportionately prone to being arrested and convicted of crimes. The conclusion being aimed for is the expected racist one.
With context, you see that criminality is roughly equally distributed, but that certain classes of crime are enforced with prison more often, that different demographics get disproportionately more attention from law enforcement, and that due to socioeconomic factors different demographics are more likely to inhabit income brackets where the likely types of crime are more likely to be harshly enforced.

Information without context can be misleading. If someone seems to care about the conclusion you take away more than some bit of context that makes that conclusion less forgone, thats a sign they might be pushing a narrative.

There is, unfortunately, a contrasting rhetorical trick where someone provides such an overwhelming amount of context that you cannot possibly handle all of it in a reasonable amount of time.

Exactly where the line is is unfortunately not something I think there’s a simple answer for determining. I try to determine if it seems like the person is using the information to support their point, or if they’re using it to drown out opposition.

You need to think about what a backdoor looks like for different devices, and different functions of that device. “Backdoor” generally means a way to bypass security measures, but that entails can vary wildly in different contexts. For some things you can know because you can check to see if the hardware is doing what’s expected because the only meaningful backdoor would be local to the hardware.
For example, hardware based encryption systems can have their outputs compared against a trusted implementation of the same algorithm.

For cases where there isn’t an objective source of truth for “proper functioning”, or where complex inputs are accepted and either produce a simple answer (access granted/denied), or a complex behavior (logging login attempts and network calls are always expected) it can be harder to the point of impossibility to know that what’s being done is correct.
This is also the case for bugs, so it can actually be unclear if something is a backdoor or an error.
“Any sufficiently hair brained programming error is indistinguishable from an attack by a nation state threat actor”. (the goto fail bug is a great example of this. extremely dumb error every programmer has made, or a very well executed and sophisticated attack.

Ultimately, any system can be compromised by a sufficiently determined attacker. Security cannot be perfect, because at some point you need to trust someone.
The key is to decide how much you trust each system to handle whatever you need it to handle.
I trust my phone’s manufacturer as much or more than I trust the network provider. If I’m doing something naughty the person I’m communicating with getting snagged leads to me via the network and their device without needing to compromise my hardware. I choose to focus on the weak link: the people I talk with who might be unable to properly conduct a criminal conspiracy, and getting them up to speed.

Additionally, most media is read in a contiguous scan. Streaming media is very much not random access.

Your typical access pattern is going to be seeking to a chunk, reading a few megabytes of data in a row for the streaming application to buffer, and then moving on. The ~10ms of access time at the start are next to irrelevant. Particularly when you consider that the OS has likely observed that you have unutilized RAM and loads the entire file into the memory cache to bypass the hard drive entirely.

Definitely not for either of those. Can get way better density from magnetic tape.

They say they got the increased capacity by increasing storage density, so the head shouldn’t have to move much further to read data.

You’ll get further putting a cache drive in front of your HDD regardless, so it’s vaguely moot.

Yes. You’ll have to learn some new things regardless, but you don’t need to know how to program.

What are you hoping to make happen?

That’s legit. Some of it tastes pretty good, and it can make you feel kinda pleasant, silly and chatty. The biggest perks of it can be had, in my opinion, with citrus juice, simple syrup, soda water and basil. You also need a friend and a pot of coffee to really get it right though.

Group bargaining works, it’s just that people heard “we’re going to use our position to lower consumer costs”, but what they said was “we’re going to use our position to lower costs”. They have no motivation to pass those savings on, considering you probably get a plan partially subsidized by your employer so it’s cheaper than what you can get alone, and you’re legally obligated to buy insurance.

Look at what the government can essentially dictate as the procedure costs because they’re big enough that their “accept our terms or don’t see our patients” is a compelling threat, particularly when backed by the tax ramifications of saying no. They’ve got leverage and no particular profit motive, so they can tell a hospital “a surgery suite costs you $250 an hour, the surgeon $150, staff another $500, and material $100, with recovery costing another $250. We’ll pay 80% and you can bill the patient the remaining $250. If they have gap insurance they’ll pay and they can’t dispute because we payed”. And the hospitals invariably just accept it, rather than lose tax status and ~60% of their patients.

only profit when human beings suffer. how many other industries get to do that?!

Defense contractors, daytime talk shows, and reality TV. 😛

The estate has a duty to maximize the value of the liquidation, and pay back creditors as best it can. Specifically to settle the debts.

While a creditor can’t dictate the value of the estate, they can offer to forgive debt, which is the same for the purposes of the estate.

If the cancelled debt would have been worth more than the cash, then the creditors would be rightfully furious if the state instead sold the asset for less cash and paid them that way.

If you owe me $50k, and I tell you your watch is worth $5k to me, and instead you sell it for $250 and give me that while declaring bankruptcy so I don’t get anything else, that’s a terrible outcome for me, and great for you if you sold the watch to your friend who then gave it back to you in exchange for $250 later.

No, that’s actually still the market deciding. It’s a perfectly standard type of auction that discourages low-ball bids. Bidding is secret, you only get one bid, and you don’t know who or if anyone else is bidding.
If you want it, you make your best offer for what you’re willing to pay for it, and if someone else bid more they get it. If you would have been willing to pay more with more rounds of bidding, you should have bid that from the start.

Open-bid auctions get better prices for sellers when there are a lot of bidders, and better prices for buyers when there are few. Given there were two bidders, it’s fair to seek the most either party will bid, rather than seeking $1 more than the maximum the loosing party will pay.

That’s essentially what they did. They chose an auction type where each party offers as much as they’re willing to pay and the highest offer wins. The Sandy Hook families included a chunk of their debt in the offer which was part of the value.

No idea, and not entirely sure why it matters. If your goal is to sell an asset and maximize proceeds, it’s a known and unsurprising strategy, particularly since it gives higher returns when there are few bidders.

So it’s unfortunately not actually a sale until the judge approves it, it’s just an accepted bid.
Sorta like when buying a car. The salesman tells you the price for the vehicle, overpriced perks, and how much your trade in is worth, and you accept the final price. Then the salesman has to get the floor manager to agree, which they always do, because they’re the ones with authority to approve the sale. Then you can sign the paperwork and exchange money and you’ve actually processed the sale. Until then either party can walk away for any reason.

In this case, it’s like the floor manager rejected the sale because the cash part of the sale price was less than MSRP, and they didn’t think the trade in value mattered.
It’s not common for the sale to get rejected, and it’s even weirder for them to reject “not cash” instead of paying attention to value.

The judge saying the estate can’t accept debt forgiveness in lieu of cash is just odd, since it reduces the debt more than the cash would.

Sealed buds are usually better for that.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sealed-bid-auction.asp

Each party is incentivised to make the highest offer they’re willing to pay from the beginning, as opposed to negotiating the best price they can get.

Additionally, the families forgiving a significant amount of money as part of the bid should factor in, since the responsibility of the estate is to get the best deal, not the most cash.

A first price sealed bid auction is a perfectly common type of auction.
It’s functionally equivalent to an auction where you know the value of a thing (like we do a business being liquidated because the owner is in extremely deep unrelated legal debt), and the auctioneer starts by asking for the face value and then progressively lowers the ask until the first person accepts the price.
Instead of trying to get the lowest price possible, people are incentivised to start with their best offer for what they actually think the thing is valued. Allowing follow-up bids encourages people to low-ball and work their way up, which can reduce the price the seller gets for the item.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sealed-bid-auction.asp

They’re not similar situations at all. For one, it’s an absurd difference in scale. Whatever your opinions of Amazon delivery driver working conditions and pay, it’s in no way comparable to “an invading army murdered their family”.

Second, whether or not I should push a button to give someone $5 with no obligation on their part is a different situation from getting a bandaid for a murdered family on the whim of the responsible party.

If you could push a button and a random person somewhere in the world gets $1 million, would you push the button?

… What? That’s such a non-sequitor that I’m honestly not sure if you replied to the wrong thing or something.

I can’t say that I would say the same thing in an entirely different situation with nothing to do with the other.

You’re not paying, you’re clicking a button to have Amazon give $5 of their money to the driver.
They could have just given a bunch of drivers $5, but then they wouldn’t make a bunch of customers think Amazon isn’t too bad.

So you should push the button, but also pointedly continue to think badly of Amazon.

But it doesn’t cost you anything. Worst case scenario is the same as not doing it.