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Can anyone recommend me books about the modern elite/modern nepotism and how it works?

I have experienced/observed modern nepotism several times in my life, to give you some examples:

• person founds a so called start up with money from person relatives, which boils down to paying other people to do all the work w/o anything resembling a business plan in the first place. Start up is a total failure, person gets job as a specialist for building startups via divine intervention.
• at several companies there is a level which people who do the work can reach, and above that level people from higher class get positions seemingly out of nowhere (unless they were childhood/study buddies of someone higher up) w/o any qualification/knowledge/experience to do this kind of work
• from a certain level on (at least in IT where we have more than enough money for it) everything is politics; when discussing technical problems/solutions at that level, the first question is always who is the sponsor behind the initiative and if this comes from the wrong party, the technical merits are of no interest at all
• a lot of positions even lower level in IT usually are distributed via nepotism/connections, I observed especially SCRUM masters and product owners are chosen for their family names/connections. (Two negative highlights: Product owner was literally boyfriend of company owner and another product owner was son of parent to which company wanted to sell their shit)
• lower on the list but still annoying and experienced several times: Son of friend of boss/manager/team lead gets internship in company although better candidates are there and often the nepotism sons would never have gotten an internship on their own merits, but end up with fancy internship from known company on their CV.

I understand that when you deal with a group of people politics are always relevant and inherent to groups.

My question is literately, how does this all work and why is this so extremely widespread?

Anyone can recommend some books about this social systems which give some insights?

Further, when I see what is mounted on money/time/energy because of this nepotism or the current favorite ideas of the elite, how comes no companies (that I know of) interrupt the market with a company slightly less dysfunctional.

Are there historical examples how elites/nepotism was overthrown w/o a bloody revolution?

Solution: Indeed it was EncFs file level encryption.

Thanks a lot for everyone helping!

Original post below:

Hope it is ok to ask technical questions in this channel!

I found a folder of files on one of my back drives which was copied from a very old cell phone or a SAMSUNG Galaxy S2.

The folder is called DCIM and in a sub folder called Camera there are files with a .jpg extension.

This files are not standard JPG files. They start with the following header:

0000000 0000 0000 3900 c0d8 ac5f d196 2d63 2421
0000010 0003 0200 0000 0010 0200 2d8c 0904 0103
0000020 0000 0000 0000 0000 e960 2861 7025 ba0e
0000030 2424 dcfa 3e3b ee64 0800 c87b a43a a90d
0000040 7287 b815 7ca4 9680 ed65 6216 5f08 4f43
0000050 534e 4c4f 0045 0000 9000 b3e9 1333 92b9
0000060 0002 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000070 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

(obtained via hexdump -n 1024 filename.jpg).

The file command just returns 'data'. The jpgrecovery command simply does not process this files. If I open the file in a file viewer (shotwell), I get the error that the file starts with 0 0, which is correct, as seen in the above hexdump.

All this commands were executed on Debian 12.

I have hundreds of files with this JPG extension and for each file the header isstarting with 0 0 in this folder, so I assume the problem is not corruption of one file.

My questions:

1. What kind of file format is this?
2. How can I convert the files to JPGs?

For years now, I do not buy/create assemble a new computer, because I am totally overwhelmed by the options available to me.

If we agree there is 'The Paradox of Choice', it seems to make sense to have a much more limited choice between CPU models from a consumer point of view. For example, have for each year an entry, business and a pro model, add extreme for gamer and have each of these models have a version with a beefy integrated CPU.

But it seems also a good idea for the manufacturers: They have to design, test and build each of their models, create advertisement etc., like configuring their assembly lines alone costs money. Further, compilers have to generate code for a specific architecture, which means that all my software I didn't compile myself ends up using an instruction set of the lowest common CPU, not utilizing whatever I bought fully.

Apple (not a fan ;-)) shows IMHO how it is done with their Apple Silicon: Basically even I understand which CPU choice would be the right one for me. The Steam Deck is IMHO another success story: As reference hardware I know easily if I can play a game, and it is easy to know if my hardware is faster than a Steam Deck. Compare that to games with hardware requirements like 'AMD TI 5800 8GB RAM' (made up model) which makes my life miserable.

What I am looking for is fact based knowledge:

• Why does it make (commercial) sense for AMD/Intel to create so many models?
• What are their incentives?
• What would happen, if they would reduce the amount of different CPUs they offer? (Is there historical knowledge?)

What are CPU designs which are not fetch/store but operate directly on RAM?

I only know about the design of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), where the CPU does not have registers (AFAIK) and operates directly on RAM, with fast access to low addresses in the RAM.

What CPUs/Systems do you know, which also do not do fetch/store for their operands? Which systems are out there? Why do CPUs like RISC/Arm/AMD64 use fetch/store, what are the tradeoffs? Are there different architectures for CPUs working on operands outside of fetch/store, DMA and stack machines?

When watching movies, I always try to differentiate between my personal enjoyment and the inherent merits of the movies. There are a lot of bad movies, which I totally and thoroughly enjoy watching, and some really great movies, which I don't enjoy that much, but still can respect/appreciate.

With this prelude, I totally do not get the positive reactions to Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies. At the time I am writing this question, part two has 94% critique and 95% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, 9.0 at IMDB.

In my opinion, Dune 1 and Dune 2 have obviously high production values and good special effects. What I do not like is the acting, the pacing, the total flat/simple characters and the whole narration, which is for me a trivial love story between Chani and Paul, plus becoming a leader and get some revenge. I could simply replace the 'Dune' theme with a standard war theme and a few tribes, and I would have exactly the same movie. Also the battle scenes at the end of part 2, they are for me totally cookie cutter war movie/battle aesthetics. (Total waste: There are big Sandworms after all, and combat with personal shields etc.).

My question is, especially if you very much enjoyed watching the Dune movies:

• Why did you personally enjoy the movie?
• Do you think this movies have some inherent merits?
• How do you like the acting/plot/pacing?

Surprisingly often I see guys in the gym, which have a totally jacked/trained upper body but untrained legs.

The first times I saw a guy like this, I assumed perhaps there are some medical reasons to not train the legs, but by now I saw too many guys like this, even sometimes in a group, for explaining this.

These guys know obviously how to train and I just wonder why you would invest so much time/energy in your upper body w/o doing a minimum for your legs. It also seems not too functional; what good is your upper body strength in real life if you cannot use it for lifting something heavy, because your legs are too fragile? Further, it looks very unbalanced to my eyes and usually the stars/models have a more balanced look, so I don't even understand where these people get the inspiration/trend.

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