Yes, even for them, the information they can get through a phone is lifesaving. They can learn how to build water supply and sanitation systems and shelter. They can learn how to farm and forage for food. They can find the best way to cross international borders and become a refugee. And so on, they can improve every aspect of their lives. Information is power, and with a smartphone they have access to the entire world, rather than just word of mouth knowledge in their local community.

Obviously, places without any form of electricity are screwed, but satellite internet is rapidly becoming cheaper and more accessible so soon they won’t even need cell coverage.

2. Those in extreme poverty need access to more important things than access to these gadgets.

We’re going down a sidetrack here but this is just false. A smartphone these days is a ticket to many things required to live. Applying for jobs, applying for government services, buying essential items cheaply, cheap/free education.

Isn’t it best practice to park in 1st? So that if the handbrake fails the engine brake slows the car a bit rather than it being a free falling projectile.

Electric motors have so much torque even at low revs that a gearbox is unnecessary for most people. If you can get enough torque for a fast start in 5th, there’s no reason for the gearbox, you might as well save the extra complexity and keep the car permanently in 5th.

Combustion cars have gearboxes because they only work well at a narrow range of revs. Bicycles have more gears than cars because humans have an even narrower range of revs where they work best at.

I think it’s useful terminology, but only very generally and in hindsight. Web 1 is a pretty clear era in the 90s and early 2000s, characterized by simple static blogs and personal websites, and email. Everyone knew this would be big, but nobody figured out how, that was the dotcom bubble. Web 2 began with the rise of big tech companies like Google and Facebook in the late 2000s, it has been characterized by social media apps, centralized platforms hosting user created content, funded by targeted advertising and data mining. Web apps became possible and smartphones took over. Every product became a subscription service.

I think we’re at the start of web 3, but it’s hard to say what that is yet. The big tech companies are crumbling and there’s increasing unrest at the old system of web 2. Fed up users are turning to platforms like this. There’s a lot of demand for crypto nonsense like NFTs. AI is changing the way we do everything.

I hope that web 3 is the age of decentralization because that would be awesome, but it’s impossible to predict the future.

Are you interested in proving me wrong, or figuring out the right answer? If you actually read that article instead of just the title, you would have noticed at the end it says

This leads us to say a few words about the widely held opinion that, because complex numbers are fundamental to quantum mechanics, it is desirable to “complexify” every bit of physics, including spacetime itself. It will be apparent that we disagree with this view, and hope earnestly that it is quite wrong, and that complex numbers (as mystical uninterpreted scalars) will prove to be unnecessary even in quantum mechanics

They literally say that “complex numbers are fundamental to quantum mechanics”. In other fields of physics complex numbers are just a convenient tool, but in quantum mechanics they are(as far as we know) fundamental, even if the author hopes that to be proved wrong at some point.

You seem like you know a bit about alternatives to complex numbers in other areas of physics, so it would be interesting to have a further conversation, as long as you stop being so defensive.

Complex numbers seem to be used either as 2d vectors or as representation of waves/circles in exponentials, is there an alternative that combines both of those uses?

Nope, you’re just wrong. Quantum mechanics without complex numbers(real quantum theory) is less predictive than complex(regular) quantum theory. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-physics-falls-apart-without-imaginary-numbers/

Quantum mechanics, as far as we know, requires imaginary numbers.

One person posting the same thing to multiple communities is bad etiquette, whether the stated purpose of those communities is the same or not. Anyone who does this should be shamed, blocked and banned. Find the biggest and most relevant community and post it there, don’t spam.

I focus on comments rather than posts, but if you care about finding new links then I agree that duplicate communities is a problem. But it’s not the biggest problem on the platform, and obviously while instances are independent there’s no way to force a solution. Communities have merged, but it’s usually small communities on small instances dying as their users move to a large community on a large instances. This is a disaster for decentralization, everything needs to be as spread out as possible across instances.

The multiple communities doesn’t bother me, I just join both and usually don’t notice the difference. It’s a better problem than all the communities being on lemmy.world which defeats the point of federation.

Each instance is it’s own server, then it has many communities which are created by users. Ideally we spread the communities across instances, but unfortunately most of the big communities are clustered on the big instances, because finding communities on small instances is hard.

Also r/piracy stayed shut for a while with a direct and easy link to this community. That’s how I found it.

Just make it like multireddits on Reddit. It allows you to collate multiple communities into one feed.

Why would a fat person be unable to recline?

Its uploading every keystroke to their servers. It’s literally a keylogger.

Recline yourself. It’s literally the only solution. Once one person reclines, everyone has to.

Recline yourself. It’s literally the only solution. Once one person reclines, everyone has to.

Why are you surprised that Americans are arrogant?

The trouble is, they get away with it. No other country would be arrogant enough to assume that they are more important than the entire world, so the rest of us have got used to if the country isn’t specified, its 'Murica.

Usenet doesn’t need a VPN because it’s a direct download, it’s encrypted with TLS.

For torrents, you will have to put your torrent client behind a VPN, but it’s recommended to leave everything else(e.g. *arrs) not behind a VPN so it doesn’t misbehave. If you’re using docker, you can use a container with a built-in VPN like https://haugene.github.io/docker-transmission-openvpn/config-options/

I will as well, unless it’s necessary for work/school, or to participate with the government, or not using it will isolate me from friends and family.

Google has close to absolute control of the internet, which is now an essential tool to participate in society. The amount of power they have is insane, it rivals governments.