This started in my head as a plot device in a story, but I was wondering if it'd actually fly in the real world.

There are many public figures who almost certainly have closets which are positively creaking to bursting point with skeletons. Politicians, especially. Can you hire a private detective to investigate someone without having a clear goal in mind? Like, just "investigate until the money runs out" kinda thing, in the hopes that eventually something incriminating or reputationally hazardous is found?

Is this legal? If so, who should we send the P.I.s after first? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

It would be interesting to see how certain people would behave if they simply heard we were planning this. Like, would JD Vance suddenly start burning shit in a barrel in his backyard if he heard about the army of P.I.s we've paid to look into him? We could make that the scheme: go through the motions of crowdfunding an investigation, but the real P.I. will be watching the named individuals and seeing what they do in response to the threat 👀

If it is, I assume it's measured in thousandths of a gram or something, but are we all nevertheless a wee bit heavier than we ought to be?

A single mildly bumpy ride won't turn you into an NFL domestic abuser, but over the course of 20+ years? And if you were on horses or in rickety carts from the time you were a squishy infant? Boom, curdled grey matter.

No horses = no war, no murder, just pure enlightenment and peace on Earth.

Beware the horse 👀

The theory, which I probably misunderstand because I have a similar level of education to a macaque, states that because a simulated world would eventually develop to the point where it creates its own simulations, it's then just a matter of probability that we are in a simulation. That is, if there's one real world, and a zillion simulated ones, it's more likely that we're in a simulated world. That's probably an oversimplification, but it's the gist I got from listening to people talk about the theory.

But if the real world sets up a simulated world which more or less perfectly simulates itself, the processing required to create a mirror sim-within-a-sim would need at least twice that much power/resources, no? How could the infinitely recursive simulations even begin to be set up unless more and more hardware is constantly being added by the real meat people to its initial simulation? It would be like that cartoon (or was it a silent movie?) of a guy laying down train track struts while sitting on the cowcatcher of a moving train. Except in this case the train would be moving at close to the speed of light.

Doesn't this fact alone disprove the entire hypothesis? If I set up a 1:1 simulation of our universe, then just sit back and watch, any attempts by my simulant people to create something that would exhaust all of my hardware would just... not work? Blue screen? Crash the system? Crunching the numbers of a 1:1 sim within a 1:1 sim would not be physically possible for a processor that can just about handle the first simulation. The simulation's own simulated processors would still need to have their processing done by Meat World, you're essentially just passing the CPU-buck backwards like it's a rugby ball until it lands in the lap of the real world.

And this is just if the simulated people create ONE simulation. If 10 people in that one world decide to set up similar simulations simultaneously, the hardware for the entire sim realty would be toast overnight.

What am I not getting about this?

Cheers!

Wouldn't it cut down on search queries (and thus save resources) if I could search for "this is my phrase" rather than rawdogging it as an unbound series of words, each of which seems to be pulling up results unconnected to the other words in the phrase?

There are only 2 reasons I can think of why a website's search engine lacks this incredibly basic functionality:

1. The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats.
2. They're just too stupid to know that these sorts of bare-bones search engines are close to useless, or they just don't think it's worth the effort. Apathetic incompetence, basically.

Is there a sound financial or programmatic reason for running a search engine which has all the intelligence of a turnip?

Cheers!

EDIT: I should have been a bit more specific: I'm mainly talking about search engines within websites (rather than DDG or Google). One good example is BitTorrent sites; they rarely let you define exact phrases. Most shopping websites, even the behemoth Amazon, don't seem to respect quotation marks around phrases.

Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s. Some of them have found their way online thanks to preservationist efforts, but most are seemingly gone forever. (I'm talking about the particular magazine I read as a kid, many others have complete or near-complete collections available online in the form of scanned hardcopies.)

Do the publishing houses keep a digital copy of every magazine they release? If so, why don't they release them? They could probably charge a fee to download them, like other digital magazines do, but of course it'd be great if they just shared them for free for historical purposes on the Internet Archive or something.

It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no? 🤔 The raw files probably take up a few CDs' worth of space for the entire run of the magazine. Big assumptions on my part, I have no clue how any of it is done!

So:

1. Do they retain the files forever?
2. If so, why might they not be shared 20 or 30 years later?

Cheers!

[-ish] Ireland, Scotland = Irish, Scottish

[-an] Morocco, Germany = Moroccan, German

[-ese] Portugal, China = Portuguese, Chinese

What rule is at play here? 🤔

Cheers!

If a judge is called 'corrupt' by a defendant outside court in front of the media, or if something more unambiguously libelous is said, can the judge sue the defendant?

Alphanumerical lists are sortable by alphabet and number, obviously, but if you have a list where each entry begins with a different punctuation mark (or any other kind of non-alphanumeric character), is there a similar standardised ordering method for them?

I imagine, for example, that a comma will come before whatever this is: ¦

I just tested an A-Z sort in Google Sheets where each cell was a different punctuation mark, and it seemed to rearrange what I'd entered into some sort of order, but is this order shared universally? Is there a global Unicode-compliant ordering method everyone uses?

Cheers!

How do you sanitise the area to prevent infection? If you get surgery on the rusty sheriff's badge, how does it not get infected the next time you lay an otter egg? Do they connect a colostomy bag in that case, to give it time to heal?

You can get a lethal infection from a paper cut if the right (see: wrong) bacteria get into it. Short of piledriving a snooker cue coated with hand sanitiser, I don't know how a filthy corridor of doom like the excretory system can be kept free of bacteria after Dr. Bussy Torn MD has been rooting around in there with his weed whacker.

Surely antibiotics aren't enough on their own to prevent infection? Anywhere else in the body, sure, but the chucklet waterpark is like ground zero for biological malevolence. It would be like wearing nothing but a steel showercap to keep mosquitos from biting you.

What dark arts are surgeons invoking here?

I was watching a film yesterday (went in blind) and during the opening credits I saw something along the lines of "Special effects artist for the Creature". I had no idea the movie was going to have a creature in it before reading that, so when it was eventually revealed later in the film I was kinda annoyed that I knew it was coming. Would have been pretty cool to have it sprung on me out of the blue, because there were no hints during the preceding part of the film that anything supernatural or weird was happening.

It got me thinking about what other films contain spoilers in the opening credits. Do you have any other examples?

We get novelisation of films, but what about plays? I know I can freely read his plays anywhere online, but surely reading a script is less ideal than reading a novelised version written for people who were born sometime after Bach, assuming you're not planning a word-for-word performance yourself of course.

I don't even enjoy reading the scripts for my favourite films, and I understand all of the words, phrasings and allusions in those. With Shakespeare, I need to do a 4-year college course just to know what the fuck he's on about.

This isn't me being anti-intellectual, I respect anyone who can read through Shakespeare and enjoy it, it's more about life being too fucking short and I'd like to experience the stories in a less torturous manner if possible.

If this has been attempted, can you recommend any authors?

Cheers!