I’m having the opposite problem right now. Tightend a VM down so hard that now I can’t get into it.

We had to arm the drugs in the War on Drugs to make it a real fight.

In the back, thinking really hard about how long they can edit a music track in without being demonetized.

JSON libraries are stupidly well optimized. There are binary encoding schemes that are faster and more compact, but its hard to beat JSON for text-based.

Depends on the implementation, but most will, yes. There are other forms of associative arrays, like trie or binary tree, but hash is the most common.

Price. Once the industry retooled the production lines, CDs became dirt cheap to reproduce, and successive generations of optical media are only somewhat more expensive. Plastic shells and mechanisms cost money. CDs are probably the cheapest physical audio format ever (at least as far as production costs are concerned).

Arguably, the whole mobile app store ecosystem became a shithole because we weren’t willing to pay a buck or two for a an app. It led to an environment where alternative forms of monetization are so common that a lot of devs don’t even bother making a premium, ad-free version.

Hackey, but I guess some plastic would be enough to stop metal on metal contact and prevent sparks?

Not that my Miata “temporarily” has cardboard wrapped in tape wrapped around the cold air intake pipe to prevent it from rubbing against the frame. Nope, definitely not.

What often happens in cases like that is people on the edge leave, but those who remain are now distilled insanity.

This is why we say “the cruelty is the point”. As you note, these are not serious people trying to reduce crime. They are straight up lying about their goals, possibly even to themselves. The whole mindset is against the idea that crime is something that even can be reduced; rather, “bad people” will always do “bad things”, and it’s up to “powerful men” to protect the rest of society from them. It is rooted in a deeply authoritarian mindset that puts them as one of the “powerful men”. If you were to reduce crime, how can they prove that they’re one of the “powerful men”?