Looking back at history, it would lead to more propaganda and more support for going to war.

A population getting attacked only leads to that population wanting to an us vs them mentality and emotional knee-jerk reactions over rational responses.

Because: “The dose makes the poison”.

In other words, any chemical—even water and oxygen—can be toxic if too much is ingested or absorbed into the body. The toxicity of a specific substance depends on a variety of factors, including how much of the substance a person is exposed to, how they are exposed, and for how long.

For anyone downvoting this who didn’t understand the reference:

Russia is saying that they’re the ones shooting down their own planes, because they don’t want to admit that Ukraine has the capability to shoot down their planes.

Your question:

what things did the LHC discover that have real practical applications right now other than validating some hypothesis

Is really multiple questions:

1. Is doing fundamental research with no application in mind useful?

2. Has the LHC led to practical applications usable today

The answer to question 1 is yes.

There’s different types of research programs made to target different goals. Some aim for short or medium term applications, and others are just pure fundamental research.

Just because pure research doesn’t have an application in mind, doesn’t mean it’s not useful. The application isn’t the goal, the expansion of our knowledge base is. Everyone who ever thought up of an application for something did so based on their own knowledge base. If the knowledge base never expands, then we run out of applications to think up. This is why pure research is useful.

And all of history supports this:

• The discovers of rays shooting off cathode-ray-tubes in the 1800s were just doing pure research and had no idea it would lead to TVs
• particle accelerator research lead to invention of cat scans
• chemists trying to research heavier elements leading to the discovery of nuclear fission, leading to nuclear power
• electrolysis research lead to the invention of lead (and rechargeable) batteries
• etc…

The answer to question 2 is also yes:

The obvious ones are:

• improved manufacturing processes
• improved supercooled superconductors
• improved large scale vacuum chambers
• Improved data processing
• Trained a new cohort of experienced scientists/engineers/workers/etc (who can now work on new projects outside of the LHC)

“the means” in this case would be authoritarian repression.

“The means” always has to be something bad for the “ends” to try and justify reaching for “the means”.

I had no popus using uBlock Origin on Firefox

E2E:

As far as I understand, Google wants to treat RCS similar to how it treats web:

1. Have a standard
2. experiment with some extensions
3. learn what works and what doesn’t
4. build what works into the standard
5. repeat

In that case, e2e encryption is coming to RCS.

I know Samsung is also experimenting with e2e encryption too.

Other:

iMessage itself also has more features than RCS. Built in e2ee would be a big one, and aome other more vain ones.

What other notable features (besides e2e which is discussed above) does iMessage have?

[…] Signal or even WhatsApp would still be superior.

(Besides e2e,) What features to Signal and/or WhatsApp provide?

You’re both right and wrong.

Right:

1. Google does have a management problem that incentivizes creating new messenger apps instead of supporting existing services, this has nothing to do with RCS though.
2. Google is trolling Apple.

Wrong:

1. RCS is not a downgrade to Apple’s proprietary protocol (unless you consider sending a laser show screen overlay animation as a specific feature, and not an easter egg)
2. Everyone inside only Apple or only RCS has the same features (message reactions, high quality media, x is typing, seen timestamps, etc…)
3. RCS is open, Apple’s protocols are proprietary. No one but Apple can access their own proprietary protocols. Apple could support RCS if they wanted to. Apple is entirely responsible for the friction between their own protocol and RCS.

Prediction:

Apple will continue trying to control their own bubble to force people to purchase iPhones as long as possible. They will attempt to stall any EU regulations on standardized messaging with deceptive rebuttable that will take politicians time to realise that they hold no real weight. Eventually those arguments will be pulled apart and Apple will be forced to include a future RCS version as a supported fallback. (just like how the EU is forcing apple to allow third-party app stores, and USB-C connections)

I’m on Android, I can see both direct message reactions, ... when people are typing, and see when people have seen my message.

This is all a part of the text message standard that every modern phone follows.

Apple are the only major company that don’t follow the RCS standard.

Good news, X is now down.

Modern PHP shits all over the PHP v3, v4, v5 days of yore.

Anyone making new projects from scratch is living in a land of bliss while those working in projects/frameworks that started in the days of yore are having experiences across the whole spectrum of, “Wow, I sure am glad we migrated to modern php” to “please kill me, I’m in so much pain”.