Absolutely! Like I said, this is a topic I’ve always struggled with, and I’ve leaned both ways. I just so happen to be leaning on the side of recreational air travel this week lol.

The example with Prague strikes me as rooted in capitalism, not so much tourism. Like, ideally governments (local or otherwise) in tourist-heavy areas step in and implement things that address those capitalistic problems you describe - penalize rental property conglomerates, enforce a liveable minimum wage, build affordable permanent housing and mixed-use spaces, etc. I hear your comparison between tourism and imperialism, and I get that some tourist areas are pretty awful where the local residents are treated as subhuman and that definitely sucks, but idk, it feels more like a capitalist/classist issue to me.

Do you think “having tourism” would do more damage than “not having tourism”? Because that’s what we’re really comparing here. Tourism may be a net negative, but if the absence of tourism is a bigger net negative, well, I’d argue that “having tourism” is the better option.

Obviously making tourism into a net positive should be the goal, but that’s a whole different discussion (which your idea of “educational holidays” probably fits into). But I don’t think we get there with a blanket ban on most forms of air travel. Not to mention, making air travel more efficient/greener would have huge ripple effects across multiple industries. That seems like a no-brainer approach to me, at least in the long term.

Man, this is one I’ve tried to wrestle with multiple times. I feel like there are monumental benefits to trans-Atlantic/trans-Pacific recreational flights (really just most long international flights). Banning those would almost certainly increase feelings of isolation, and probably make the already-rampant xenophobia plaguing the world even worse. There really aren’t viable alternatives to flying for getting across a multi-thousand-mile-wide ocean - boats are too slow for the average person, and building trains over the ocean is impractical. Maybe the focus should be on making planes more environmentally friendly, instead of outright banning them?

Is this an AI-generated response? On a post demonizing AI? Lol bold

That’s usually what happens when a political nightmare assumes one of the most powerful offices on the planet

What an incredibly selfish and self-centered approach to this platform

That could have been part of the problem, yeah

Man, this false air of superiority you’re exuding is pretty weird. There are bad engineers, and bad skilled trades people, and bad managers, and bad business people. Every walk of life have people that are bad at their jobs, it’s by no means unique to any one class of worker.

You can save quite a bit by getting a refurbished Pixel - looks like the cheapest “Google certified” option (so it comes with a 1-year warranty) is a 6a for $250, which is nearly half off MSRP. I’ve been using my 6a since launch, so it’s been going for 3 years now and I have no desire to upgrade.

You can definitely get cheaper smartphones, but $250 for a 6a feels like a pretty big bang for your buck.

Bro this could be literally any large east-Asian city on an overcast day, most (all?) of which have better urban planning than the rest of the world by a large margin, and most of which fall firmly on the “capitalist” side of the spectrum. “Bloc” housing (or as we call them over here, big-ass apartment buildings) aren’t some communist-exclusive phenomenon.

But you can’t say X + Y is better than Z (by itself)

I mean, yeah, you absolutely can. Especially when X + Y and Z are both common configurations, and using X or Y by themselves is uncommon or a known bad setup.

Sure, you can’t be certain which of X or Y is making the differences in the comparison, but the comparison can absolutely be made.

(ABI? Idk)

Application Brogramming Interface?

Of all the things even vaguely related to this post to be upset with, you chose to comment on title casing?

Eh, splitting the party (or at least exposing the division within the party) is a long shot, but it’s really the only productive way forward if the Democrats want to actually change and fix things. Repeatedly exposing Democrats that vote against the people’s interests is the most surefire way to get those Democrats voted out and replaced with more progressive candidates. Failing that, breaking away from the Democratic party and forming a new more progressive party isn’t the worst long-term option, even if it (probably) won’t be very effective in the near-term.

The first thing I thought was something like helping sort/categorize photos/documents/etc. for libraries or museums or something. But then that made me think of all the existing citizen science efforts out there where they have people categorize images of galaxies and stars and stuff, or run protein-folding simulations on their home computers, etc. I wonder if those kinds of existing things could be spun as “volunteer work”.

Yeah I feel like if a direct attack on American soil that killed thousands of civilians didn’t spark WW3, then nothing will

In a nutshell, interpolated frames are basically just extra generated frames that go between the frames outputted by the video game itself. They’re used to combat things like motion blur, and to make animations look smoother.

It’s programmed to answer your questions, not to be correct, or have the self-awareness to say “I don’t know”.

Chat-based LLMs are text generators. A really really really souped up version of the word predictor on your phone’s keyboard. They don’t “know” or “understand” anything - all it’s doing is calculating the most probable next word, based on the prompt it’s received and the words it’s already generated. But it doesn’t have knowledge. It doesn’t know what it’s outputting. Expecting it to know when it lacks knowledge isn’t really reasonable, because the concept of knowledge doesn’t really apply to an LLM.

None of this is a defense of LLMs - quite the opposite. I think LLMs are a brute-force, dead-end approach to artificial intelligence. But I think it’s important to understand what they are, what they’re capable of, and what their limits are if we’re going to interact with them.

What difference does to make if someone is sitting on the bench, laying down, standing, crouching, or in any other comfortable resting position? It’s a public bench, to be used by the public however they see fit, as long as they’re not causing harm.

It’s weird to enforce the “correct” usage of a public bench, or the “correct” amount of space a person is allowed to take up, especially with such drastic elements that you yourself admit are not very effective.

Literally anyone using the bench potentially prevents someone else from also using the bench. Why is it a bigger deal when it’s a homeless person doing the using? Also, I’m sure there are other more attention grabbing options than a flyer, if we use our imaginations a little bit. Why is your focus on prevention and not education/outreach anyways?