I'm not an expert and don't have the necessary and verifiable information to asses the consequences in regards to economy/industry, but the sociocultural effects are negative.
1. Sanctions sped up the formation of the class of war beneficiaries. Sanctions created the demand for sanction circumvention. Since their scope is huge, the demand is accordingly very high (from civil consumers to the government). This led to formation of new supply chains that keep being profitable only while the war and sanctions continue. Now thousands of people engaged in these activities have the monetary incentive to support the war and the government course. This one I deem to be the most consequential in the long term.
2. Any noticeable conflict or rights violation happening with Russian citizens abroad is to be blown out of proportion and presented as a confirmation of pervasive anti-Russian sentiment and support the government narrative of existing encircled by enemies.
3. The lack of accessible ways of integration of the emigrants into local societies (especially in Europe) led to thousands of them coming back, some unwillingly, some grudgingly and feeling disillusioned. This is a huge wasted opportunity and I don't get why it happened (I don't buy the "we must secure our countries against possible threat actors and dirty money" explanation).
Don't know about all the countries, but since you're answering a comment on Russia, I must say, it reads comically out of touch.
Yeah, the old system was purged alright, but calling it a liberation is disrespectful to the lives of millions of common Soviet people driven to hungry death, being forcefully moved around the country, killed in internal squabbles or purges or otherwise "collectivised".
And it all happened despite the fact they hadn't exactly been property for more than 50 years by the time tsarism was overthrown.
I think maybe it's my own personal bias, but it does feel like anyone who pays money for an AI girlfriend really won't want it to disagree with them. I believe they'll want an idyllic and fantasy version of a relationship.
AI girlfriend that always agree with you and never contradict anything you say isn't going to be as addicting as an AI girlfriend who on occasion disagree with you.
While I grant that some and perhaps even most people won't want the AI girlfriend to disagree, there are some out there who treat arguments as a necessary and desirable spice in a relationship.
That said, I can't really think of anything that would be worth arguing with an AI over.
you are saying that the ai gf will not be like a real human female, but you are not making any argument that there is a defect in the bf's attachment to the gf.
I'd say the set of people who want an AI girlfriend and the set of people whose defining trait is a lack of empathy is probably a bigger overlap than you think.
I don't see how this is true. I would expect a man who accepts female rejection and stick with AI to have more empathy than the women who rejected him, because e.g he is ugly.
Harassing men for their lack of dating success and ascribing negative personality traits simply because they are down on their luck makes them more resentful so you should stop doing that. It's called having empathy.
> I'd say the set of people who want an AI girlfriend and the set of people whose defining trait is a lack of empathy is probably a bigger overlap than you think.
The defining trait of people who want an AI girlfriend is ugly, lonely men.
Is lack of empathy the defining characteristic of ugly men?
Or is it simply that people in general hate ugly people and thus ascribe various ills and character faults to them?
I'd say the set of people that disparage undesirable lonely men that desire AI girlfriend are usually those whose defining trait is severe lack of empathy. This is blatantly obvious here.
I know plenty of ugly men in committed, loving relationships. You're the one bringing up looks. I don't think it matters what you look like; if you want to date a computer you have some kind of psychiactric disorder.
Ok, but then there is also the increasing number of women who don't want a boyfriend either because they want a same sex relationship or because they can't find a man on their educational level, since women graduate at a higher rate. The reason is mostly irrelevant, what matters is that supply and demand are imbalanced and one side has to deal with not getting what they want in one way or another.
Education level is less important than equality is.
Marriage is traditionally a terrible bargain for women, but it was the only choice they were allowed to make. Now, they can make their money and buy property and have kids on their own.
A lot of men haven't realized the era of the provider is over and dead, and they're now optional. They have to make women want to be with them, and a lot of women just aren't willing to compromise on equality these days.
It may seem like this makes sense, but in most places it's the opposite. Low income women are single mothers at a higher rate than women with high salaries.
In most western countries, low income women do not become much poorer if they become single mothers. In some places, it increases their living standards. But for upper middle class families, a breakup tends to be costly.
Also, there seems to be shared causal factors that lead to both stable relationships and financial stability. Such as impulse control, mental/physical health and the ability to postpone gratification.
You don't need a house to have kids. Plenty of people don't and they do just fine. And if they're choosing to have a kid on their own, they've planned out finances, too. Fertility treatments aren't cheap.
>lot of men haven't realized the era of the provider is over and dead, and they're now optional.
Cool, child support and alimony optional now. Right? Because it's always easy to be independent with OPM. People forget single moms became far more practiced after the state incentivized breaking up families.
Whether they have a marriage certificate might not matter, but the stats are clear that children raised by single moms are correlated with a lot of bad outcomes including far more likely to end up victims of the prison industrial complex. If you only give a shit about yourself and not your offspring, maybe that doesn't matter
Just because "plenty" of ugly men might end up with something, does not pose a contradiction.
Nobody "wants" to be in a romantic relationship with an ugly person or computers.
Now just because some people end up doing that, does not mean that it is what they want.
It might just be the best option available to them.
Given the choice however they would always rather have someone handsome and gorgeous instead.
Looks are supremely crucially important for somebody to seriously crush on you, be genuinely infatuated with you and have a deep burning desire.
An ugly undesirable dude or ugly fat chick is not ever going to experience this, surely they might (or might not) end up with a pleasant relationship of convenience... but it is not what they want. Works of fiction and computers are the only way they can experience a glimpse of desire and infatuation aimed at them.
This really isn't that hard to understand for people who have empathy.
lack of empathy does not stand in the way of forming an attachment. Empathy is a good feature for keeping a partner, but the ai doesn't care about that. It feels like people on your side of the argument are making a sort of moral/judgmental argument, "if you can't hold up your side of the bargain, you don't deserve an ai gf"
If you can only bond with computer software and not other humans, there's something pathological going on there. You definitely have some severe issues that should be worked out in therapy.
This is probably a simple find-and-replace task, so I wouldn't bother with proper PDF parsing or libraries. I would:
1. Use pdftk to uncompress it: pdftk input.pdf output uncompressed.pdf uncompress
2. Look at the PDF code (it's text based) to find the image insertion code.
3. Replace all instances of the image insertion code with strings of spaces the same length (there's a table of object byte offsets at the end that you don't want to mess up).
4. Use pdftk to compress it again: pdftk edited.pdf output output.pdf compress
I have a script that does this to remove pen strokes of particular colours so I can e.g. strip out marking rubric on test solutions written on a tablet.
Get the PDF 1.7 spec from https://pdfa.org/resource/pdf-specification-archive/. You're looking for the "Do" operator invoking a named image object defined elsewhere with "/Subtype /Image". See section 4.8, particularly the example on p343. Or, if it's badly done, it might instead be an inline image using the "BI" operator (a bit later in the same section).
North Korea claims to be the worlds only tax free state. But you are right, in effect citizens do pay tax, its just called "socialist income accounting" instead.
> While the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you're encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible."
Yeah, right, some. Though Control Panel is not a shining example of structured layout of available options, at least they're there.
Yeah, there are still so many features missing, and worse there is no documentation for the migrated features, other than searching the Web to find out where similar capabilities might be available now.
So a set of barely maintained applications that cannot support modern Hidpi screens that are shipped with almost every midrange laptop (except Thunderbird which is the only passable app in comparison to its alternative).
The rendering of the Office file formats by the LibreOffice is dogshit. Feature parity is a rounding error. LiberOffice UX is completely from last century. There is so many little UX things that MS added which are so out of the league (like live content update from Office 2007!) for LibreOffice and its outdated codebase.
The Office alone can maybe replaced partially in Linux-compatible environments. However the MS Office-integrated prosumer software ecosystem is the thing that keeps people on Windows. Unless Linux people redesign the whole ecosystem to be as accommodating to closed source app ecosystem and find a time machine to replace all the existing Windows ecosystem, nothing will change.
You are getting downvoted, which is sad but also a testament of how delusional the fanboys actually are. Not that I don't think doesn't have its uses cases/upsides.
The reality is that even without talking about the UI and various stability/compatibility/performance (oh god) issues there are even some very basic missing functionalities that ones will encounter regularly when doing stuff that is not just low-level administrative filler work.
If one company would decide to invest in developing a decent competitive alternative it could be worthwhile but, in the meantime, most people are better served with browser-based stuff.
Either the Google stuff, free Microsoft version or even the newer Proton offering are decent but there are some semi-commercial offerings that can be decent too.
On the surface LibreOffice is all right, but the hard reality is that it is way too much of a PITA to work with for most people to bother unless they really don't have a choice or are forced too for some reason.
The fanboys don't like that reality and would rather deny it instead of working on fixing the issue; which is precisely why it's a lost cause.
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