There's a more general formulation, which is that every value but one must appear even numbers of times, and the one must appear some odd number of times.

How about every value appears 0 mod n times except one which appears 1 mod n times? :)

Solution: xor is just addition mod 2. Write the numbers in base n and do digit-wise addition mod n (ie without carry). Very intuitive way to see the xor trick.

Windows in particular supports at the API level paths tens of thousands of characters long, much longer than Linux. The problem is applications need to explicitly support such paths using the long path syntax, otherwise they're limited to 255 characters.

Yeah I thought there was some way of doing it, but weirdly it was explorer.exe that was behaving in odd ways.

Games are time-sensitive events. Most people who care don't want to watch the game once it's finished, they want to watch it live.

The reason people will tell you that is because paying for car insurance is rarely something you can just opt not to do, at least not without consequences. The consequence for not paying for a $10/month service is having to perform a minimally inconvenient chore once a week.

Indeed. Where I live, civil liability insurance is mandatory and if you own a car, you have to pay it, even if you don't intend to actively drive. It's not an optional cost.

Yeah, for a fucking airplane. In most of the world, that's way up there with yachts as a rich people toy rather than a everyday necessity. The real question though is, upon having discovered this, why allow them to keep doing that?

> Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month. To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction.

Uh... Huh? How is EUR 20 * 20 approximately EUR 100?

If you do the maths correctly it’s in that range, roughly.

(100*12 months) = 1200 euros/year

1200/60 = 20

so 20x difference between the most expensive IPTV and the cheapest legal option. You can go with the 20 EUR IPTV vs the 200 EUR legal option and it would be 120x difference but probably the quality would be the same so let’s stick with the 20x.

Oh, per year. Duh. My bad. I just be tired, it's the second time in a few minutes that I've completely misread something.

No worries :) I shouldn't have been mixing months and years type subscriptions in first place.

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Fair enough, I take it back.

What "to the contrary"? The statements "some people will not pay no matter what" and "DRM increases sales" are mutually compatible.

> There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.

The point is DRM can get people to pay who would have otherwise not paid.

Yes, and those people are not part of the group who will not pay no matter what.

Jumping in with one persons anecdotal evidence but I loved when I can pay $10 a month for Netflix when it had everything or almost everything I could watch and I quit pirating. When the content from other networks got pulled and the prices starting getting jacked up I went back to the seven seas. A good service with good quality at a decent price is awesome but 10 different services all trying to gouge me for $15-$20 a month with no guarantee the content I like won’t be removed in a few months is ludicrous and led me right back to not paying anything.

I'm almost in the same boat, except I never stopped pirating. By the time I decided to consider Netflix to see if the added convenience was worth it, the enshittification had already begun, so I just continued as I was. I'm definitely not in the "won't pay no matter what" camp, but I am pretty price-sensitive and I have a fairly high bar of satisfaction, which Steam and GOG meet but music and video streaming do not. I definitely think Gaben is mistaken, and that for most people it's both service and price. Steam would not have been as successful in reducing piracy in the PC market without all the discounts, all else being equal.

That's relatively easy to work around. Right-clicking on the back button lets you go back several steps at once. I don't know about Chrome, but it does work on Firefox.

AFAICT just holding left-click for half a second has the same effect. That's been my go to since the little triangle dropdown vanished from the back button (checks watch).. uh, some time in the nineties mebe?

Firefox had it in 2010. I don't remember when IE ditched it.

I've yet to see any evidence of Musk's workaholism or technical know-how.

I base my claims on this review of the 2015 Musk biography by Ashlee Vance:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk

>yes, it does feel like the idpol witch hunts have died down a bit since.

You don't seriously believe that was because of the Twitter purchase and not due to a coinciding social shift, do you?

I think the causation is multivariate, but at least partially because of it, yes.

After the Musk acquisition, the identity politics ultras quickly moved to mastodon and bluesky. Regular people were slower to move if at all because of switching friction.

Social media is an amplifier: most of the users are passive consumers or retweeters, and only a smaller minority drive the conversation.

Traditional media also loves to get stories from social media in order to "get the pulse" of society and because journalists are lazy and desperate for narratives. A relatively small social movement can therefore use social media to catapult its message onto traditional media and thus onto society at large.

By isolating themselves from the amplifier, the identity politics ultras were no longer able to push their political message (and witch hunts) to such a large audience, the message stayed confined in spaces that were basically invisible to the average person, and the message faded away.

Yes it wasn't just because of the Musk purchase, but it was definitely a factor.