Online communities will need to evolve natural protective features and either become porcupines that are visible but not worth the trouble of botting, or small hidden communities that spread via offline or secondary means, rather than attracting traffic from the web at large. I'm not sure what those communities will look like and it will probably be a pretty rapidly evolving landscape for at least the rest of my natural life.

OR we'll get our act together and pass some laws or treaties or other broad compacts that make the public internet a usable shared resource. It could happen, but I admit I don't see the internet's current trajectory intersecting that possibility for the foreseeable future.

I do sometimes have a hard time identifying buses...

I don't know, the whole thing about Santa keeping a list of good children and bad children (who get toys and coal, respectively) seems to be a primary component of the myth still. I actually think it evolved as a gauge of critical reasoning: there's an age by which children are expected to stop believing in Santa, because the story makes no sense and won't hold up to critical scrutiny. The reward for making this breakthrough is getting to be in on the conspiracy with the adults: secretly helping with the ruse while continuing to reinforce the myth with younger children. It's a coming of age ritual. It's also kind of a culture-wide prank that all adults continuously play on all children, like the tooth fairy who I think exists for similar reasons.

Unlike the tooth fairy though, who's just there to help kids let go of their baby teeth, Santa's largess is explicitly contingent on good behavior, which is where the manipulation comes in. Gifts that come with strings attached to behavior aren't charity, they're a transaction. Children are taught that goodness is rewarded with treats and badness is punished with coal and no treats. I guess calling it a bribe is a little harsh, but it's certainly transactional. Santa also has the benefit of being all-seeing, so he can monitor your behavior even when the grownups aren't watching, which is a pretty convenient way for grownups to control behavior in kids when they're unsupervised. Sort of a spiritual panopticon. The whole idea is to trick children into behaving by making them believe they're being constantly surveilled by a spirit judge, who will reward them or punish them according to his determination of whether they are good or bad.

Exactly. Being a migrant isn't exactly a picnic. I think it's reasonable to assume most people would like to live near their families and homes if that's a viable option. I still think people should be able to go anywhere in the world if they want to, but they shouldn't have to. A lot of the "problems" of immigration are just the point at which other people's problems become inconvenient for me. If we can make the whole world a nice place to live, we'll be well on our way to making borders not matter so much.

First, how do you figure borders intrinsic to humanity? Second, we should hope that you're wrong, because if we keep trying to exterminate each other with more and more advanced weapons, we're going to find a solution to the Fermi Paradox real quick.

Seems like there could be a crowdsourced version of Consumer Reports. A standardized battery of tests for each product category, and different youtubers could test products according to the test and produce (ideally reproducible) reports for each product. Not sure how the standardized tests would be created or maintained, or how the whole thing would be funded. But it would be cool to have some common, non-commercialized benchmarks that do what Consumer Reports does, but with better transparency and less opportunity to fudge.

I guess I don't understand what you mean then, especially the first sentence. I think there's a pretty broad agreement that we have a very limited understanding of how brains work, and that our current benchmarks of sophistication (tool use being one) aren't the last word on brain capabilities, they're just (relatively) easily defined behaviors that we can use to categorize what abilities different animals have at their disposal to survive. You also can't really demonstrate that an animal (or a species) can't use a tool, you can only know if an animal can use tools by observing tool use, which we have now done with at least one cow. Which is pretty cool.

I think the ability to amass, retain, and augment information learned by our ancestors is our killer feature. Storytelling is an important part of it, using rhythm and rhyme to help us remember and pass on those stories, being able to encode those stories as art and writing, they're all ways to make it easier for the next generation to get up to speed quickly and then push the boundaries of understanding even further, instead of every generation having to relearn all the basics the hard way. It's not perfect and it's still incredibly lossy, but I think that's why we broke out and became, I think it's fair to say, the dominant lifeform on the planet. Is that the bar for sentience? I don't think so, but I don't really have a better one.

Also we invented santa claus to teach kids that every authority figure in your life will willingly engage in a conspiracy to gaslight and bribe you in order to make you behave the way they want you to.

I'm not sure why it being a newly recorded observation would diminish it in any way. It's new evidence that cows are capable of what we (humans broadly) previously thought them incapable of. It's important because it's a concrete indicator that there's more going on in cow brains than humans have generally assumed. How much more is an open question. Are other cows capable of tool use? Probably. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there are dairy farmers in the world who've seen cows use similar scratching tools and just never bothered to record it, if they even noticed it at all. I've only had limited contact with cows but they aren't stupid, IME they are generally just content as long as they're warm, dry, and have food. In the US the vast majority of cows are restricted to the point where they wouldn't even have access to implements they could use as tools, much less the freedom to learn how to use them. That doesn't mean they're stupid.

It depends a lot on what you want to do and a little on what you're used to. It's some configuration overhead so it may not be worth the extra hassle if you're only running a few services (and they don't have dependency conflicts). IME once you pass a certain complexity level it becomes easier to run new services in containers, but if you're not sure how they'd benefit your setup, you're probably fine to not worry about it until it becomes a clear need.

It's fun in a way that defies comparison.

As someone who was recently laid off if anyone wants to front the cash I'm currently available for cheap.