Oops. Thanks. I had seen a shortened version of the video already, thought this was the same version, but it isn’t. The one I saw was just the Tesla plowing through the wall.

this. watching the video, I had some trouble telling the difference. sure, from some angles it is obvious, but from others it is not.

That said, other cars, with more types of sensors, would probably have “seen” the obstruction on the road.

My understanding is that lower fertility follows higher female education for several reasons, including that women in school - and with access to birth control - prefer to wait until finishing school and starting a career before having children. Countries where women have fewer educational and fewer career opportunities, people often start having babies sooner, and more babies overall.

Another oft-mentioned factor is social safety nets such as social security (as much as that can count as a safety net). Areas with no or weak elder support outside of the family tend to have bigger families. Shockingly, this was also the case in the “developed” world back before they developed. Ask older adults in the USA how many brothers and sisters their grandparents had and it is probably a lot more than the next generation had, and the next, etc.

Do colonized people have lower life expectancy or do their children? Or both? Certainly, exploited people may also be living in (and unable to escape from) a society with poor elder care and insufficient safety nets such as social security or other retirement options. Which, of course, makes having lots of kids a totally rational decision. And also limits the ability of many women to participate in the economy outside of the home, which can also slow the development of the country / area’s economy.

Lived in Japan for many years, came back to the USA for many of the reasons you touch on. I knew a few foreigners who had non-English-teacher type jobs, but mostly, it was English teacher or English juku owner. The systemic issues, for young Japanese and for foreigners, in Japan really need to be dealt with if they have any hope of slowing their population decline. So, not going to happen.

Japan is never going to have enough immigration to significantly impact the population decline. Even back in the early 2000s, it would have taken millions of immigrants a year. Now, forget about it.

Living in inaka is not bad but not great either, for most people. So, tiny apartments in or near big cities or large houses in the middle of nowhere are pretty much the choices. Jobs in inaka? Fisherman, elderly care, sakaya, maybe some other generic retail for the eldest sons who couldn’t escape. And, of course, government jobs.

Re: media hype, yes there are still young people. But not enough. Societies need 2.1(-ish) children per couple to maintain population equilibrium. Japan, South Korea, Italy, and several other wealthy nations are way below that. Add in the Japanese propensity to live for a long time, and Logan’s Run becomes more and more thinkable each year. When the population pyramid becomes whatever shape parallel lines || are, the economics of a modern, wealthy society break down.

I gave a PD session for Japanese teachers back in like 2004 or so about why learning English would be helpful, because they might end up with a lot of immigrant children in their classes. (Or, I didn’t say, because you could use your English skills to look for jobs outside of Japan.) Of course, immigration barely happened, and many of those teachers are probably close to retirement age by now. So, my bad, I guess. Someone should do that PD today, because the situation is even worse now.

Thanks for the info!

I have no idea, so in total seriousness, I would love to hear details.

Cool cops put down 420. It isn’t about speed, it is about weed.

(or did everyone already realize that?)

I need a ‘remind me in a year’ feature!

I understand the feeling, but I think this outcome is probably the best we could hope for, given the situation. If he had tried to impose fines or imprisonment, one of the higher courts would probably have intervened and the sentencing would never have happened.

Kind of feel like the box and whisker would look something like this, only worse.

True, yeah. I just wanted to be clear about it in case people confused median and mean. I work with high school students who struggle with the difference every year. So, thought maybe some adults who’d been out of school for a while might also not realize the difference.

My first thought when I saw this pic was “Are they talking to their computers in the future? GenAI ‘interface’?” That would truly replace CLI for many of the most complex tasks.

I’ve been using Linux since around 1998. Back then it was fair to say that the command line was occasionally needed. I personally prefer the command line because it is much more powerful, and I can do so much more with it. Shockingly, I do not use Arch. (I’m on Gentoo.)

But, I also maintain an Xubuntu computer for my wife. I haven’t needed the command line for it ever that I can recall. I log in occasionally and it pops up a GUI prompt for me to install updates. GUI updater comes up, and a GUI sudo dialog elevates my permissions. Everything is updated through GUI. Everything my wife needs to do (including occasionally adding or updating a wifi connection) is done through the GUI.

(Don’t get me started on their stupid mix of snaps and debs, though. That is a huge pet peeve.)

Re: command line - have you ever seen a person try to move a bunch of 1 type of file from one dir to another in MS Windows Explorer file manager? Best case scenario, they know to ctrl-click to select several non-sequential files. Worst case, they drag and drop each file individually. In the command line, just do ‘cp *jpg …/destination-dir/’.

Important to note here the important difference between “mean”, aka the average, and “median”, the middle number in a set. Assuming Krueger intentionally used “median”, the situation is actually worse than people realize.

The average can be affected by large outliers - like billionaires. IF the “average” American makes $50,000 a year, the median could actually be more like $30,000 (totally made up numbers, as an example).

In other words, the median is the more “accurate” number to use in these comparisons because the income of the extremely wealthy has less of an impact on the result.

I was shocked to find HFCS (and a bunch of other sh*t) in SOY SAUCE in the USA! WTF?

Sorry, but if you look at real soy sauce in Asia, it has like 4 ingredients - water, soy, maybe some alcohol (from the fermentation?), and 1 or 2 that I forget. USA soy sauce (that I looked at) has like 10 ingredients.

Looking at labels (on Amazon) now, Kikkoman seems to use the traditional recipe - no HFCS. But, La Choy soy sauce does have HFCS in it.

I think AllofMP3 had the best business model - price varied based on how high quality you wanted, and they offered soooo many formats. With no DRM, of course.

Is it really the customers’ problem if the USA and Russian copyright organizations didn’t communicate very well?

Education is one area where GenAI is having a huge impact. Teachers work with text and language all day long. They have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ideally, for example, they should “differentiate” for EACH and EVERY student. Of course that almost never happens, but second best is to differentiate for specific groups - students with IEPs (special ed), English Learners, maybe advanced / gifted.

More tech aware teachers are now using ChatGPT and friends to help them do this. They are (usually) subject area experts, so they can quickly read through a generated or modified text and fix or remove errors - hallucinations are less (ime) of an issue in this situation. Now, instead of one reading that only a few students can actually understand, they have three at different levels, each with their own DOK questions.

People have started saying “AI won’t replace teachers. Teachers who use AI will replace teachers who don’t.”

Of course, it will be interesting to see what happens when VC funding dries up, and the AI companies can’t afford to lose money on every single interaction. Like with everything else in USA education, better off districts may be able to afford AI, and less-well-off (aka black / brown / poor) districts may not be able to.

I think “interactive clipart” is a great description. You are, I believe, totally correct that (at least for now) GenAI can’t do what professionals can do, but it can do better than many / most non-professionals. I can’t do art to save my life, and I don’t have the money to pay pros to make the mundane, boring everyday things that I need (like simple, uncluttered pictures for vocabulary cards). GenAI solves that problem for me.

Similarly, teachers used to try to rewrite complex texts for students at lower reading levels (such as English Learners). That took time and some expertise. Now, GenAI does it prolly many tens of thousands of times a day for teachers all over the USA.

I think, at least for the moment, that middle / lower level is where GenAI is currently most helpful - exactly the places that, in earlier times, were happy with clipart.

Am I correct in seeing this as the company is claiming that courts of law cannot require them to transfer control of an account from one user to a different user? This despite the fact that doing so has been fairly standard practice for years now?

Personally, I think the lawyers for The Site Previously Known As Twitter have a very weak argument. However, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, so there’s also that.

Gentoo on my home computer. Started way back in the day when you had to recompile source RPMs on RPM-based distros to get CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language support. Debian language support was excellent, but I didn’t enjoy always being 5 package versions behind, especially as fast as some software was being developed.

CJK isn’t an issue anywhere anymore, but I stay on Gentoo because it has all the packages I want, and it doesn’t force systemd on me.

Will be moving away from Ubuntu on my work computer because of all the foolishness with ‘is it deb or is it snap?’. Not sure what I’ll go to.