I agree, I didn’t want to change the premise too much in my original comment, but ideally you’d do some complicated math to determine the optimal height for your location, building materials, and population density.

I don’t know what that calculation would look like in China because I don’t live there (I’m sure the Chinese engineers are well aware of those calculations though) but in my country it would definitely be a lot closer to the 10 story range, maybe even lower.

Either way, something us in the West absolutely NEED to get used to is prefab buildings that all look the same. A bunch of prefab skyscrapers like China has is still worlds ahead of the logistical nightmare of demanding every single building be custom designed like is so common here. You call it boring, I call it efficient. Having a few reusable designs (usually different heights) to choose from and copy paste building housing, like what China does, is what we need first, IMO, and then we can talk about the optimal heights for those prefab buildings.

Always interesting when the subjects the meme is clowning on make themselves known when they absolutely didn’t have to.

We discussed those green skyscrapers in university environment class, and as far as I know they didn’t work that well. It was hard to keep the plants alive and when they did grow, they became a breeding ground for pest insects that got into the units where people were living. It’s very much prioritizing looking green over being green.

IMO it’s better to just have efficient but visually boring skyscrapers, and then have dedicated green space around clusters of density (which is what China is mostly doing nowadays). Separating housing and green space make both more effective, easier to manage, and more resiliant.

Also, in case you’re wondering, most Western environment profs are very impressed by what China has done, at least in the university I went to.

Get yourself to a safe place they can’t access and from there call security to remove them from the hospital?

No, I complain about Google and Apple being proprietary. That alone is a deal breaker for me so I really don’t give a shit about them not having file management or whatever other old school feature. And if a sufficiently rigorous security model must take away old school file management in favour of a more restrictive system, so be it, as long as it’s open source and publicly auditable.

If you’re relying on a proprietary operating system, literally none of that matters because your root of trust is inherently untrustworthy. The operating system itself can (and have been shown again and again and again to do) include malware that can never be removed and you can never be sure it doesn’t.

As if they haven’t been killing US citizens

Updates alone have no way to happen solely on the local machine.

No, but it wouldn’t need to cost the original vendor that much backend resources either if they’re willing to relinquish control of it. There’s a reason most Linux distros would rather you use the torrent than their hosted images, and package managers allow you to add any mirror you want and for anyone to spin up a mirror. Something like IPFS (or BitTorrent) would be a great fit for software updates, because it doesn’t matter where the file comes from, as long as it’s the same file.

Updates are expensive for the vendor because they insist on their servers being the only place you can get them from.

Image/video/audio processing that requires more compute than you can reasonably except from average consumer hardware.

I’d be more accepting of this if it wasn’t for the fact that they increasingly don’t even let you try to run it on your own hardware. Taking an hour or even overnight to process a video might not be ideal, but there are still countless use cases where that’s acceptable and worth the security of not sending your data to the cloud.

Antivirus and other forms of security which require near real-time fingerprinting and/or new definitions.

Antivirus is an antipattern and the need for it is usually a symptom of the OS architecture/permission control model being hopelessly vulnrable. An ideal system would be zero trust and some random piece of code wouldn’t be able to do anything truly harmful to begin with. You can still social engineer the user into giving a malicious program trust, but you can social engineer them into whitelisting it in their antivirus too.

Licensing/certificate servers

Certificates don’t need that much backend resources and can be decentralized in the same way as updates, taking load off the original vendor.

Licensing is a circular argument. I’m paying for you to maintain the system that determines if I paid or not?

Servers which receive and process telemetry data

Yeah that’s not a “feature” most people appreciate. At best they accept it as inevetable because they can’t turn it off.

Also, if a company tries using that as justification for their subscription model, they can go fuck themselves.

Resources for submitting/processing/securing legal/government forms/documents

If it has to do with the legal system or government, then it should be covered by the ultimate subscription model: taxes. I shouldn’t have to cover a company’s costs of filing things with the government when I already pay the government.

Some services, like social media, require backend resources and there’s no way around it.

Others, dare I say most, are backend by the company’s choice and usually to the detriment of the user.

Some require backend resources purely for DRM and so that they can pull the plug on it whenever they please and screw over everyone who paid for it. Like most single player games these days. Or as a means of holding your in game items hostage to get more money out of you (Pokemon Home comes to mind).

Oh no, your cloud account got banned because you commented killing Palestinian children is bad on a social media platform they also own. Now all your data is gone.

Oh no, your cloud account got banned because that hello world binary you just shared with your friend got flagged as a virus. Now all your data is gone.

Oh no, your cloud account got banned because you were using adblock on their paid streaming service. Now all your data is gone.

Oh no, your cloud account got banned because you were sharing your password with your friend so they can use your paid streaming account. Now all your data is gone.

Oh no, you uploaded media files that you bought but they got replaced with DRM versions.

Oh no, they’re suddenly not letting you log in until you upload your ID and a 3D scan of your head. Now all your data is held hostage.

Oh no, they accidentally deleted the production database and the recent data you absolutely can’t afford to lose wasn’t in the backup.

Oh no, you got phished and they changed your password from under you. Now all your data is theirs.

Oh no, they suffered a data breach. Now all your data is on the dark web.

Oh no, they’re developing the next generation AI. Now all your data is being used to help companies replace workers and the right prompt might just give some rando fragments of your personal information.

If you think “not invading other countries for oil” or “not doing ethnic cleansing of immigrants” are purity tests I don’t know what to tell you.

Statistical fallacy #420: Assuming the value of a random arbitrary element will necessarily be close to the mean or median of all elements.

He’d lose the mandate of heaven so many times the dragons would come and smite the citizens for not overthrowing him already.

If there is a pattern of malice, it is stupidity to attribute it to stupidity.

What about the IP issues? Not even talking about the “ethics” of “ip theft via AI” or anything, you just know a company like Microsoft or Apple will eventually try suing an open source project over AI code that’s “too similar” to their proprietary code. Doesn’t matter if they’re doing the same to a much greater degree, all that matters is they have the resources to sue open source projects and not the other way around. If a tech company can get rid of the competition by abusing the legal system, you just know they will, especially if they can also play the "they’re knowingly letting their users use pirated media that we own with their software” card on top of it.

Judgement is an essential nutrient for cats

Potato potahto

A smartphone is a handheld computer. Why should it be restricted to what software the company arbitrarily decides should be allowed to run on it?

Also suggests she’s a technically minded person who likes to know how things work and is not satisfied with a black box. Jailbreaking uncovers the complex machine a smartphone truly is, something that Apple tries very hard to hide behind its patronizingly simple interface.

If Sasquatch are real animals they’re almost certainly extinct now.