This is in fact one of the primary points of TFA and the book it recommends: that the degradation of literacy, public discourse, and general intelligence that started with the television (and was well-described in Amusing Ourselves to Death, referenced in TFA, and which the title pays homage to) has only continued and, if anything, accelerated with the introduction of the smartphone and modern social media.

Perhaps I missed the full name somewhere in the thread, but what is TFA?

Sibling comment got the definition, but “TFA” comes from “RTFA”: “read the fucking article”, in response to “yeah, but what about ($THING that was discussed at length in the first paragraph)?”

Origins: “RTFM”. “What’s the switch for ls that prints time stamps?”

“Read the fucking manual.”

The fucking article. Or you could imagine a more polite alternative.

The average children's cartoon from the early 2000s has several orders of magnitude more value than the average tiktok feed.

The existence of slop in the 90s doesn't prove that slop is not more prominent in the 2020s.

To add to this, because I think it is important context for Americans who may not be aware, football is seen very officially by many European nations and national governments as a cultural counterpart to many international treaties within Europe that were born out of the desire to bring our respective cultures closer together after the second world war.

It is so important, that many countries make it illegal to hide international football matches behind paywalls, specifically.

It is so important, that there are articles written about its importance on EU institutes websites. For example, this one reflects on Footballs importance in relation to the First, Second and Cold wars. https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/alerts/european-footb...

To see Trump so flagrantly manipulate it sends a cultural signal that is hard for those outside of Europe to see, and that by some can be seen as the cultural equivalent of the political threats Trump has made against NATO.

At this point, your average European Trump supporter/right wing populist needs only reminding of Trumps interference to get a complete positional change - that's how bad it is.

> It is so important, that many countries make it illegal to hide international football matches behind paywalls, specifically.

Sports is peak diversion from real issues, Whether Europe, US or India and so on. The countries can go to hell, people can drown in endless real problems. But if people can be smothered with sport entertainment so they ignore real things whats better than that.

In India whole country can become absolute crap. Worst on any social, economic indicator but as long free cricket broadcast is on TV and mobile, life is good.

You know this is just making fun of the poor working class? It's offensive.

Don't forget another stuck in the past minimal semantic css based web framework that's almost unusable on anything more complex than its own demo. Complaints about react too, because its new (its 13 years old).

I feel like this is a pretty important thing for the technically minded to get their heads around.

Doesn't the fact that you can't imagine a single reason why youd want multiple fonts on a spreadsheet alarm you?

Excel is for spreadsheets, 9+ fonts is not really a common use case for a spreadsheet. It sounds like OP is trying to do graphic design in Excel, but we'll probably never find out.

>Men in black always want popcount (it's been added to various architectures over the years at their request)

I've heard this a few times, do you have anything that explains this?

It is said that NSA has requested the addition of POPCNT to the Control Data Corporation CDC 6600 (1964), as a condition for procurement.

The condition has remained in force later, so all its successors, like CDC 7600 (1969) or Cray-1 (1976), have included POPCNT.

POPCNT has been added to the x86 ISA by AMD, in "Barcelona", in 2007, presumably because some customer for AMD Opteron has requested it. This happened during the period when the AMD server CPUs were much better than the Intel Xeons, so any wise customer was buying Opterons, not Xeons. Intel has followed AMD and it has added POPCNT to Nehalem, in 2008/2009 (for server CPUs, Nehalem has been the first that was better for any purpose than the AMD server CPUs, unlike for consumer CPUs, where Intel had surpassed AMD already since the middle of 2007, with Core 2).

> POPCNT has been added to the x86 ISA by AMD, in "Barcelona", in 2007, presumably because some customer for AMD Opteron has requested it.

Might have been Cray, they were using Opteron in that era.

And any clue about what they were doing with POPCNT? Does it has any particular use in encryption?

Yes, encryption:

https://vaibhavsagar.com/blog/2019/09/08/popcount/

Check out https://vaibhavsagar.com/blog/2019/09/08/popcount/

Back in my days as a CPU logic designer, I actually worked on a scientific mainframe where the MIB came by and said "We'll buy some if you add a vector pop count."

Anyway.... if you have cipher text that has been scrambled by a linear-feedback shift register, you can take two copies of the cipher text, shift one copy by N bits, XOR them together, and do a pop count on the result. Repeat for bunch of different N's. For some N that corresponds to the length of the LFSR the auto-correlation will be much better. So now you have at least that to go on... of course you don't know the feedback equation and you don't know the initialization constant, but you have the start of a handle.