(Inspired by this conversation thread)

Any and all thoughts on visual novels are welcome. Some potential questions for jumping off points:

What are your thoughts on the VN genre/format?

What are some of the best VNs you’ve played/read?

What would you recommend to someone who’s new to VNs and wants to try one out?

How do you think VNs compare to games, literature, and other interactive fiction?

So, quite a few people don't like/watch video content, and don't like seeing the homepage filled with videos. Let's try something new, see if it sticks.

What are the best videos you have watched this past week/fortnight?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Do you thrive on chaos or structure? Are your personal spaces clean or populated by all kinds or objects? Do you wear bright colors or white shirt and jeans? Do you prefer fast cuts or meditative editing? Probability or deduction? Heidegger or Russel? Buñuel or Buster Keaton? Lynch or Spielberg? Godart or Hitchcock? John Lennon or Paul McCartney? A party or a small gathering? A lot or just a little?

:)

Question is for our users here who work/worked in the tech industry (in any capacity) or in a techy position in any industry.

What have you learned?
How did it change you?

Previous questions in series:

What have you learned from...
...being a parent?
...going through a breakup?
...moving to a new place?

These threads remain open, so feel free to comment on old ones if you have something to add!

I was reading this text from the Washington Post (sorry for the maybe paywall):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/xi-jinping-crackdown-china-economy-change/

The opinion asserts that in response to liberalization of Chinese life, driven by capitalistic economic growth, is the reason that Xi Pinjing "cracked down in every sphere imaginable — attacking the private sector, humiliating billionaires, reviving Communist ideology, purging the party of corrupt officials and ramping up nationalism (mostly anti-Western) in both word and deed."

My conspiratorial brain latched on to the humiliating billionaires line, and started thinking about a between the lines message along the lines that billionaires are good and should not be humiliated, a subtle warning-response to the progressive grumblings here in the U.S. that a failure to support capitalism will result in totalitarianism.

Then I started thinking about the questions, are billionaires good for society? I had always held the position that a billionaire is a market failure (in my econ 101 understanding of the term), much like pollution. It is improper hoarding and unfair leveraging of capital into disproportionate and un-earned degree of pesonal privilege.

It is certainly a by-product of euro-american capitalism, whereby the desires and welfare of the many are trodden on by those with the ability to fight and to shape the regulatory machine meant to protect the interests of the common-wealth.

I see a few possibilities. One, is that my understanding of economics is wrong, and producing as many billionaires as possible is the ultimate goal of capitalism and in fact good for everyone, even in theory.

Two, it is indeed as I suspect, a market failure. And the failure here is one of degree, it is not, in fact problematic to have some individuals with significantly greater wealth among us, and is, in fact, beneficial overall, but to have some with so much more than the rest of us (wealth inequaility) is a result of getting in the way of a clean functioning marketplace.

Three, economic theory is working as described, and economic theory/activity is an insufficient foundation for the maintenance and success of a whole society, and we need to find a way to constrain it to its own sphere, so that it provides us with what we need to be healthy and happy, but no more.

I turn to the bright minds of tildes: am I looking at this right?

So, I know quite a few people don't like/watch video content, and don't like seeing the homepage filled with videos. I'd like to try something new, see if it sticks.

What are the best videos you have watched this past week?

Toward the end of August, I signed up for a trial of Kagi -- a privacy-focused search engine.

You get 50 free searches, and then, if you want to continue, you can convert to a paid account at $10 a month.

I mentioned here that I wasn't planning on converting to paid, as $10/month felt very steep and I didn't think I could make it my default search on my iOS phone, but @pallas's comment here ultimately made me want to give it a try.

Thus, I dropped the $10 bucks to turn the free trial into a paid one-month trial.

I'm very glad that I did.

The free trial itself was actually not very convincing to me. Knowing that I had limited searches and not wanting to run through them more than I needed, my searches were in the single digits each day. I was very judicious about what I searched and how I typed it. Furthermore, I kicked myself if I instinctively typed something like "imdb everything everywhere all at once" into Firefox's search bar instead of going to imdb.com and then typing in the movie title, as that meant I'd wasted 2% of my allotment on what wasn't technically a search but more of an internet navigation optimization.

On the searches I did I felt like I got good results, but I wasn't sure if that was because of the quality of the service or if it was because I'd simply thought more about what I was actually typing in. Also, the trial made me way too aware that I was searching with limited queries to really make me feel at ease about actually using the service.

Now that I've paid for a month, however, I've just used it as a stand-in for how I used to use DuckDuckGo -- "wikipedia steam deck"-style searches and all.

Kagi doesn't track your search contents, but they do track your number of searches. I have completed roughly 400 searches this month, which Kagi says costs roughly $5.00 out of the $10.00 that I paid them. I don't know nearly enough about any of this to know whether this is an accurate accounting of actual costs or overstating things, but I will say that the $10 price that I initially felt was steep has looked a lot more worth spending after a month on the service.

Kagi generally finds what I'm looking for within the first link. If it's not the top link, it's in the top 3. Furthermore, it seems to dredge up less junk. With DuckDuckGo, I loved that I wasn't being tracked for the purposes of advertising, but it felt like DDG had no problem serving me pages that were built specifically for that purpose. I'd often look up product reviews and get re-routed to sites that appeared to be nothing more than machine-generated lists of recommendations with Amazon affiliate links. I've had to deal with less of these while on Kagi. Some of them still come up, but they're either further down the rankings or they're put into their own "Listicles" section.

Where Kagi really shines though, is local searches. Pretty much the only time I would bang through to Google from DDG was for local stuff. I don't know if it's my location in particular, but DDG is not great about giving me things that are specific to my area, often preferring to give me a smattering of things that are from similarly named locales from elsewhere around the world. Kagi, on the other hand, gives me the kind of local results I get from Google.

Most local searches of that type tend to come from my phone, and this also helped me understand that better search on a phone matters WAY more than better search on desktop. The smaller screen and limited view means that it's significantly more important for the top result to be the one I want on my phone than it is on desktop. As such, Kagi is winning me over because it's made mobile searching frictionless -- something I couldn't say for DDG. That aspect alone is probably going to be what keeps me on the service. I'm planning on paying for at least another month, though after that I might go back to DDG for a month to see how I feel in comparison.

I mentioned earlier that I didn't think I could make it a default search on iOS. I mistakenly thought Apple had that locked down? Turns out it's actually possible through an app. Also, Kagi apparently has an entire browser for macOS/iOS. I tried it out and it works quite nicely, though AdGuard+Safari seemed to do a bit better ad-blocking than the stuff they'd built into Orion, so I've stayed on Safari.

There's actually a whole lot of cool looking power-user stuff on offer from Kagi (you can individually prioritize and de-prioritize specific domains across your searches, for example), but I'm not the kind of user that needs significant search depth, so I can't really speak to anything other than the standard search experience.

What I can say is that I've been very happy with that experience so far.

Also, it should hopefully go without saying, but this post isn't sponsored in any way nor was I requested to post it by Kagi. This is me choosing to give my own experiences with the service because I thought people here might be interested.

I struck me while using my Steam Deck the other day to watch Twitch that the device has almost everything it needs to provide users with a tablet-like experience alongside being a gaming device. When you're not in desktop mode Steam provides you with a high quality UI optimized for many of the same constraints as a tablet. For "great on deck" games and the store/library UI you get an easily navigable touch screen-supporting experience. If Valve can bring in Android apps for Twitch, YouTube etc. we could get that kind of experience universally.

Desktop mode can peacefully co-exist with a tablet experience as you will switch between the two distinct modes of operation. This seems like a great way to capture a market of users normally turned off by ideas of tablets replacing their normal computers. I haven't used a tablet in years but I would use one that was a full Linux gaming OS at the same time.

IMDb Link
TheTVDB Link

Has anyone else here watched this? If so, I would love to hear your thoughts.

I just finished it and am sorting through how I feel about it, especially after that final episode. I’ll type out longer thoughts in a comment once they’ve settled.

This might just be because of the change I’ve made in my online behavior, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

I’ve talked many many times about my long stint on Twitter. Specifically the brief stint where I was highly active on leftist twitter from early to mid 2020 (where I managed to get around two thousand followers which seems crazy to me now considering I’m just a random guy). Back then tensions were high. People were getting laid off, high profile civil rights protests were happening, and there was nothing much to do but to be online. Personally my internship I had lined up during the summer (since I was just about to graduate college) ended up getting cancelled which led me to a period of depression. It’s also the reason I started spending so much time on Twitter and what led me to drink heavily and gain a bunch of weight. I imagine a lot of people who became extremely online during this period were in similar boats.

Anyways, I made a couple of online friends during this time period. It initially started as “Bernie” or “Rose” twitter. We were all pretty normal social democrats supporting Sanders for the presidency (which before Super Tuesday seemed like a big possibility). And then when it became clear that Biden would be the democratic nominee, a lot of people ended up going to the dark side. They started using hammer and sickle emojis on their display name. Started talking about how they were going to read Marx and Lenin (but they never did). They started making memes about how awesome Castro and Mao were. Bios went from “BernieOrBust” to “Marixst-Leninist-Maoist.”

A lot of talk started happening of “grow your own garden the end of the world is near” and also “arm yourselves comrades the class war is among us.” Somehow everyone became very fond of the second amendment. There were twitter accounts LARPing about joining the Socialist Rifle Association, e-girls were taking provocative pictures of themselves posing with automatic rifles in front of a Soviet flag. It became a whole thing. Some of this online behavior was covered in articles like The Cut's Before We Make Out, Wanna Dismantle Capitalism?

I ended up disconnecting from all this around September/October of 2020. I actually ended up voting for Biden in November which I wasn’t planning on when I was addicted to Twitter. I go a little bit into this detox here.

Fast forward to this year. A wave of mass shootings happen. Something that used to be a normal thing pre-pandemic but which stopped/slowed down thanks to lockdowns and schools remaining closed. With all of this in the news again, I start thinking back to the friends I used to have. And their gun loving, revolutionary wanting, “libs get the bullet too” type of tweets that they were writing back in 2020. I don’t remember most of them let alone their names. But I do remember a few.

I look them up. And there are dozens of tweets about the need for gun control. They’re talking about how nobody actually needs guns, and all of the typical liberal arguments in favor of gun control. A stark contrast to what they were saying before. They still have “socialist” in their display names and bios, though from the retweets I saw of them they were no longer following the “Mao is cool” type of people. For lack of a better term, they calmed down. They don’t long for a revolution to happen. They don’t want blood on the streets.

I think what had happened is that they all forgot what mass shootings were. How destructive they were. And now that society is mostly back to normal, including mass shootings, they remembered what that was like.

Now this is too niche of a corner on twitter to talk about in terms of larger online behavior. But back in 2020, I did predict that when Biden became president a lot of these online socialists would retreat into the liberals that they used to be. And it seems like that has happened, at least to some extent.

I mean, I’m glad for them. They seem more balanced, and it’s good that they eventually found themselves like I did (even if I did it a little quicker than they did). But it is still an interesting progression that a lot of my former online friends took.

Note: Outer Wilds, not The Outer Worlds.

If you do not want the game spoiled for you, please do not read any further into this topic.

I have given the game two honest tries, and I've stopped each time. I like what the game is offering, but I don't like playing it.

What I'm wanting isn't just a traditional "spoiler" -- I can look up the plot and lore and details and such -- I'm more wanting to know about the full experience of playing the game. People talk about this game with the same awe and cultishness with which people talk about The Witness (which I loved). I saw a few glimpses of something that in my time in the game (e.g. the Quantum Tower puzzle). I've read so many comments warning me to not learn about the game and people wishing that they could play it again for the first time, that I know there's definitely something more here.

Unfortunately, I'm not the player to discover that more.

Thus, I'm hoping someone here can take me on their journey through the Outer Wilds instead. Tell me about what the game was like for you, how it unfolds, and, most importantly, what is it that makes people talk about the game the way that they do.

*Disclaimer: I am not an apologist, theologian, or a philosopher, just someone interested in the topic. Perhaps this could've been asked in r/AskPhilosophy or maybe even r/changemyview, but I figure the conversation might be good here

The recent post here on Absurd Trolley Problems has had me thinking about ethics again, and I realized I've never been introduced to how one can be an atheist and be not only a moral objectivist, but a moral realist. I remember a debate I watched years ago with William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens where Craig asks Hitchens what the basis of morality is, and he acts insulted, insinuating that Craig intended to say that atheists couldn't "be good without God" (which I think became a famous moment for the both of them.)

But I never got the answer to Craig's question that I wanted. Without God, how should we determine what moral facts there are? How should we determine if there are moral facts at all? I grew up in a fundamentalist religion, and found myself in adulthood deeply interested in apologetics, and see similar responses in debates to the one mentioned above. Now while I believe Hitchens was a moral relativist, I often see and hear cases where atheists do seem to want to say that [insert atrocity here] was objectively morally wrong. Can atheists reasonably claim that there are not only moral facts, but objective moral facts that they can access? Upon examination, aren't you ultimately required to derive an "ought" from an "is"?

I skimmed The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris some years ago, and it seems to "avoid" (i.e. commit) the "is/ought" fallacy by simply declaring that "human flourishing" (however that may be defined, separate issue) is an irreducible "ought" in his eyes. The book is great, I think that science should be part of the discussion about how one ought to live their life if the goal is some end like human flourishing; doctors already give prescriptions for behavior based on a presupposed goal between both parties to promote health and well-being. Both of these necessarily presuppose a state of affairs that one "ought" to seek to attain.

But none of this answers why one "ought" to do anything; sure, there are facts about what one "ought" to do in order to attain a state of affairs, but that isn't morality: that's true of any subject where two people agree to share a goal. It doesn't tell us why they should have that goal. None of this feels like a satisfying answer to the question Craig posed. I don't feel like I'm any closer to these objective moral facts.

I should say this topic is really meaningful to me. I've thought a lot about veganism, and the suffering of non-human animals. I've thought about the impact of my consumption decisions instead of perpetually leaning on the "no ethical consumption" crutch (even though there are reasons why that would have merit in certain circumstances. I literally can't stop thinking about climate change and how powerless, yet simultaneously complicit I feel. I've read Peter Singer, Scripture, Kant, John Stewart Mill, Rawls, and works from many others, and can't find any reason for an atheist (and maybe even a theist?) to think that there are these moral facts at all, much less objective, accessible ones. This really leaves me with "I guess I should just do whatever it is that I feel like doing", which probably seems to you as unsatisfying as it was for me to type.

like, say I've invented a magic trick that I don't know how it's done. What is my moral obligation to report novel phenomena? If a divine singularity spontaneously opens up in my living room, or in my kidney, and somehow I harness it and taught myself to fly -- do I have to tell people, or do we think it would be too scary? It seems really obscene and disruptive to announce something so premise-shattering. Shouldn't I labor in secrecy? Do I have to expose my abilities to some sort of mandate before I can start?

I'm a longtime Linux user, and I haven't used Windows in a while aside from just launching games from Steam on my living room computer, but my new work laptop is Microsoft's flagship Surface Pro 4 so I figured it'd be the best experience you can have on a Windows machine.

I got the laptop in yesterday, and here's the summary of my experience:

• I am required by IT to use Chrome. To install Chrome, I had to click through no fewer than three "Are you sure you don't want to use Microsoft's more secure, faster browser?" banners to do so.

• When I plug in my external monitor, by default, the two monitors were mirrored; when I went into display settings, it didn't show the external monitor until I closed and reopened the settings menu.

• I have an Apple Magic Touchpad 2, and I had some issues getting it set up on Ubuntu 20.04 when I initially got it. These problems are now solved on the latest version of Ubuntu, but I was expecting a nice contrast in a good plug-and-play experience on Windows. Instead, I had to install sketchy drivers from some random GitHub page to get it to work properly.

• I've had some minor annoyances with my audio interface (a Zoom R-22) not being set as the default when I want it to be on Ubuntu, and I was really looking forward to getting a smooth video calling experience with my nice mic and interface on Windows. Lo and behold, the R-22 audio input - the whole reason I have it - doesn't work at all, at least in the Zoom video calling app.

• On Ubuntu, I use QV4L2 to configure the framing, zoom, exposure, etc of my camera. It's a bit clunky, and I was looking forward to having a smooth experience with this on the premier business OS. Unfortunately, the camera on this laptop has extremely aggressive aperture priority mode enabled, and there is no first-party app to configure it! The documentation tells me to go to Settings -> Devices -> Camera but there is no such menu item. So, I just look either washed-out or ultra-dark in every video call.

• After running Windows Update and rebooting, I was greeted with a full-screen and quite annoying to exit tutorial for Microsoft Teams - an app I did not install, because my company uses Slack.

This in addition to some setup papercuts, but I think those were probably due to my corporate IT's process rather than Windows itself.

Is this common? Do people who use Windows just... put up with this kind of thing? Or am I having an exceptionally bad experience for some reason?

I'm really struck with the references in this show. As an aside, it's a really enjoyable show. And this time, unlike Lost, I expect to be let down at the end, and am just appreciating the ride as long as I can til it goes dumb. It's also awfully familiar to some other recent shows, like Homecoming and Loki. I've only just finished ep 2. Thank you, red letter media for the introduction.

Interesting references:

Mark Scout looks a lot like original macintosh era Steve Jobs.
Lumon -> Lemon -> Apple
using a logo without text. Also, the teardrop, if you squint and abstract a little, is like an inverted apple with the bite gone
corporate aesthetic is like evil Jony Ive Apple (I've heard tell it's not unlike 60's IBM), not counting the old testament painting.
founder's cult
I feel like I'm forgetting a couple.

Non Apple references:
Portal (and portal 2): opening animation, instruction books

The Matrix: scary codes on a screen, black goo

The Cube Series: general plotline (I am only on ep 2, mind you).

I made an account a few years ago but only started contributing recently. Outside of the barrage of awards, levels, limitations, I really just don't get how to find my way around the site.

For instance, Google Sheets is listed in both Web Applications and Stack Overflow. Is there a way to get a consolidated view of all of the networks or do I have to check each one individually?

With the semis behind us, we now have all the qualifiers for Saturday's grand final!

Who's your favourite? Most entertaining stage show? Overall thoughts on this year's crop of songs?

Which song do you think will win? And who (if any) will get the dreaded 0 points?

Who got robbed in the semis? Which songs should have rather won their national qualifications?

lou's post here resonated with me and my attempts to get my family to use better security practices (i.e. 2FA, password managers). They're very difficult to wrap your brain around to the average user, and they have the ability to create catastrophic failstates if used incorrectly. Furthermore, even when they work well, they can still be kind of clunky (different sites use different methods; writing down/printing recovery codes feels like a dated solution alongside other tech-forward things).

Also, outside of this, password requirements are their own bugbear, with nearly every site having different criteria. Even as someone who uses a password generator and manager on the regular, I still have to adjust the password creation criteria to do things like fit character limits or specific requirements (and don't get me started on forced resets!). I totally get why so many people reuse passwords, or have a default one that they sort of modify as needed to fit a given site's needs.

From my (admittedly super limited) perspective of a lay user: usernames, passwords, 2FA and the whole stack seems like something that's suffering under the technical debt of decades' worth of web development and networking. It seems like things have inched forward and many new layers have been added to address emergent problems, but the whole system gives a sort of barely-held-together-by-tape feel.

What if we could use what we know now and redesign things from the ground up? If we could start fresh, today, what might username authentication look like beyond the usual username/password combos that we're so used to?

I'm interested in any ideas -- not necessarily just feasible ones.

Also, despite me being the one prompting this thread, don't feel the need to simplify technical explanations or anything. I'm mostly interested in lurking and seeing what all you very smart techy people have to say about the topic. :)

I'll start this post off by summarizing my hair loss experience.

When I was 18, a few months shy of 19, I went to the barber and there was a miscommunication and the barber ended up buzzing my hair off. This is the first time that I was able to see my hairline in a while and I saw that it was higher than I remembered. I was scared at first, I couldn't believe that my hairline was receding. But then I read a few things figures maybe it was just maturing, and then I eventually forgot. Actually a few months later I was back thinking to whether I was losing my hair or not. I talked to a cousin of mine and he said something about a pill that he was taking but that it had a possible side effect of erectile dysfunction. I wasn't going to take a chance on that when I wasn't even sure if I was actually balding.

The next year and a half, I stop thinking about hair loss. It's like I had my memory wiped of that moment, probably due to stress from school. The only thing that happened is that I thought to myself was "man my hair is kind of weird right now." And also I had developed a scalp issue, which I later found out was psoriasis also due to stress.

So, right before the pandemic hits in February 2020, me and my dad go have lunch at this restaurant. I take a shower and go out. My hair is still wet by the time we go to the restaurant. My dad looks up at my hair and asks "are you losing your hair?" And that's when I realized that I was indeed going bald. For the next three months, I was going through all the stages of grief. I was wildly depressed and anxious. I did some research into possible treatments. It took me a while to learn (or re-learn) about the pill known as finasteride. I then find out about a website where you can buy prescription meds without a prescription shipped over from India so I buy finasteride from there and I started treatment on May 1st 2020. I was 20 years old. I then go to the dermatologist two months later and they prescribe me Dutasteride which I have been on ever since.

My initial side effect on the drug was watery semen, which cleared up a few weeks after starting the drug. My hair has re-grown a lot. It's back to it's original thickness, and my hairline has made a rather substantial comeback. It's not all back, but enough to the point where the average person wouldn't know I'm balding anymore.

Let me know if you have any questions. I would love to post pictures, but I rather not if that's okay with everyone.

I just wanted a pretext to share my first successful Expert+ song on 150% speed + Ghost Notes :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HQIvNCF9RA (two-part video, first half on Ghost Arrows, second half on Ghost Notes)

I got back into Beat Saber a week ago after a 2 months hiatus. I like the new OST and mechanics and I love the new Fall Out Boy DLC. Highly recommend it!

Has anyone else been playing it lately?

I'm working on opening a VR arcade in Brussels and thinking of promoting Beat Saber quite a bit there :)

I notice this primarily with the YouTube videos. I've started to notice that the videos I see posted in here I have already had recommended to me by YouTube. And I realize it must be because when I watch a video here, the YouTube algorithm decides I'm interested in that kind of thing. So, functionally, by posting and interacting with content in Tildes we are tuning the various algorithmic recommendation feeds that we interact with to view us all similarly.

It's just an interesting side effect I noticed and some food for thought about the effectiveness of a link aggregator or discussion forum at surfacing novel, interesting content we might not find otherwise. In part, this could just be an effect of Tildes being kind of small and having lots of self-selection biases for its user population. Perhaps if it was more diverse we'd be exposed to more things that break the mold and recommendation algorithms won't be able to pin it all down as easily. In fact, we may be able to use this effect as a way to test the breadth and diversity of content and types of people a site is attracting.

This post will include spoilers from all first 3 episodes.

Arcane came out on Netflix a few hours ago. I binged the first 3 episodes. It easily exceeded my expectations. I played the game for many years and I can't believe how they managed to bring those characters to life. Now I'm really hoping that they develop the Runeterra universe more like Disney is doing with Star Wars.

The character that teleports Jayce and his mom is called Ryze (Maybe I'm wrong and it's not him?). He is considered the main protagonist of Runeterra. Some other characters that I've spotted include Vi, Jinx, Ekko, Singed, Jayce, Viktor, Twitch(?), Caitlyn, Heimerdinger, Warwick(?).

One of my favorite thing about League of Legends is it's art department. This show has some great music and the video is like a painting. I really like how bright the images were, especially during that first robbery scene. The view on the cities was breathtaking. They went for a really stylized look and I really like what it does to the effects like lightning or smoke. Sometimes they draw extra lines around the objects or characters' silhouettes to make them stand out.

The story itself was good too. I was pretty engaged with all the characters. Many of them we've never heard about before in the lore. There's a meme in the community about how characters have a "dark and secret past". It's nice to finally get rid of the secret part of the quote. Seeing it animated was pretty emotional they really didn't pull any punches :D. It gives so much context for why those characters behave the way they do.

It's definitely a show I'll have to rewatch multiple times to catch all the easter eggs. For example Vi wears these goggles in the game.

I'd love to hear what people unfamiliar with the game think about this series so far. Also for those that didn't know, this series will end up being around 6 hours long once it's fully out. The second act will launch on November 13, and the third act will release on November 20.

btw for those that want to read more about this universe, there's a map here. The story is happening in Piltover & Zaun. They publish a lot of short stories here.

Edit: Arcane showrunner interview: how League Of Legends broke the video game movie curse

I have never been in the military, nor wanted to. I assume a great degree of hardship is required in military life, but I wonder what everyone thinks of the exaggerated, highly theatrical shouting and demeaning language used on recruits. Does that actually make someone a more apt soldier? Does that really prepare them for difficult/tough/combat situations?

What I meant is a world without any barriers whatsoever for the circulation of people. Each country would have border checks for things like explosives, heavy drugs, and weapons, but apart from that everyone would be allowed in, always. I'm not sure about economy measures, trade barriers, and circulation of goods, though.

But please, feel free to interpret "world without borders" however you wish! ;)

Keyword Research and SEO are entire industries today. There are tools like ahrefs and semrush that promise to give you "trending" topic keywords for a sum of monthly subscription money.

However, you can discard all their claims using a similar logic that you use to discard the claims of Astrologers, Voodooists, Stock Experts who "recommend" stocks, etc:

1. If an Astrologer knows the future of everyone, wouldn't they profit massively from it themselves using the information rather than telling the trick to everyone else (just for a pittance)?
2. If a Stock Expert knew that a stock's price will go up (and how much), won't they invest thousands and make millions themselves instead of giving those "tips" to "subscribers" and again, earn only a pittance?
3. If SEO and Search Marketing companies knew exactly which keywords can rank your blog or site in the Google Search Engine, won't they write articles on those topics/keywords themselves and profit massively with the page views instead of revealing that secret to you for merely a few cents!