I'm using Ground News for skimming through the news, their ads are everywhere, but it is a somewhat good product. I pay for the most basic plan and it is pretty cheap. If I want a deeper dive in some story I look the links to the original posts their provide
To be fair, it is only natural: Portuguese itself only came to be because the Roman Empire conquered the Lusitan land [1], a lot of English comes from Norman French from the Norman conquest [2], the Americas didn't speak European languages until 500 years ago or so, etc.
If you give enough time, all languages will change, and some of them because of major political changes/conquests
I'm not saying that is good nor that is bad, looking through the anthropology lens there's no value judgement.
Besides, differently from your shocking examples, cultures and languages don't "die" as you seem to imply, they evolve, and that part is natural and not bad or good. Portuguese (and English) will change we liking it or not
It is pretty small when considering content output. It is only 11 million people, and only a fraction of them will be writing something that could be used on training datasests. If you look at the countries by scientific contribution, for example [1], Portugal is on the 28th position, while Brazil is in 14th by more than double the number of contributions.
Don't get me wrong, it is definitely impressive given Portugal's actual size, but I believe there's a hard limit for population and size that will be difficult to cross
We had TED, but it was not instant, nor was it free. It only worked on working hours and took a maximum of 1h, still better than American banks, though. QR Codes is also a big deal.
The deployment of PIX was also really well executed, if it took too much I'm 100% sure that Visa and Master would've made it worse. Being quick was a wise decision
> We had TED, but it was not instant, nor was it free.
Not instant, but pretty close for the time. It might not have been free but most basic bank packages had a bunch of TED transfers included. For everything else, there was still DOC which would happen overnight and was either free or cheaper than TED.
I'm not dissing Pix in any way. Pix is probably the most advanced transfers and payments system in the world, and I'm 100% with you on how well it was (and still is) executed.
I was mostly responding to:
> how difficult it was to transfer money before Pix, even between local banks.
It was certainly not.
I remember being in the UK a couple years after I was on that bank, and being shocked at how primitive everything related to banking was. Transfers would take days or even weeks and would be incredibly awkward to make. Cheques were the quickest way to transfer money between people - other than cash, obviously, but that was not always desired.
A few years later I visited the US and it was even more retrograde than what I had seen in the UK all those years before.
Several backs had a good amount of TED limit. Although everything changed when Nubank launched, giving unlimited TEDs to everyone. Most banks followed at the time, so basically around 2015~ several big banks had unlimited TEDs.
The problem with TED it's just how hard it was to send money.
You had to insert, if I recall right:
- Person full name
- Social security number
- Select the Bank Name
- The type of account (savings or checking account)
- Agency and account number
This basically means that TED was used as a serious payment thing, like money you receive from your company, etc.
I guess things are going into that direction naturally, but not officially. eBPF is helping with getting deep kernel aspects into userspace. And there's some ressurgence of out-of-tree graphics drivers, specially for gaming.
I believe userspace drivers are much more powerful and easy to build than 10 years ago, but it is not from a requirement from the kernel.
Who knows, maybe we will get a smaller (instead of bigger) kernel in 10-20 years
Luckily I'm not a kernel maintainer, but it seems like they don't have 10-20 years to make hard practical decisions. It's easy to get rid of old unmaintained drivers, but they have to solidify interfaces much more as it is getting exponentially easier to find and use bugs or any unspecified part of the kernel for attacking it.
There was a very interesting point when people who were creating Rust interfaces were asking hard questions about ownerships and lifetimes in driver interfaces from the C linux maintainers and they didn't really care to answer (just wanted to wish Rust away).
Now with AI these questions are getting practical. Fortunately big companies have big stake in keeping linux secure, so I'm not worried about it being addressed at least.
I usually don't care enough about the games that only run on Windows. Most of the games I play are 100% playable on Linux, even the online competitive ones. Never liked League, PUBG or GTA Online anyway
Hm, I'm not convinced this is contamination from human waste. The quantity of caffeine and painkillers a human consume should be too small. Also, the body does break caffeine and painkillers, the amount in waste shouldn't be meaningful
If diluted in the oceans I would say that it would be undectable. Cocaine is even harder, because it is not commonly consumed, it is for a group of people, but not enough for the statistics
Not sure what is the biome of the land, but you can look for the work of Ernst Götsch[1] and Syntropic Farming [1].
The main idea is introducing biomass in layers and heavy pruning, start planting a lot of short-life plants (like grass) while also planting some medium-life plants (like bushes or small trees). Prune the grass on every seasonal cycle keeping the cut leafs on the ground. Repeat the cycle while also introducing long-life plants (like bigger trees, preferably fruit-bearing trees). Another idea is having plants that seek for water deep underground, those eventually bring streams and creaks back to life.
When you understand it, the plan sounds simple, you are just speeding up the natural cycles of the location, using grass to fix carbon and generate biomass while other trees grow in the vegetation. It is pretty impressive
Edit: added a better link explaining Synthropic Farming
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