Hard_Space

If you're looking for pastoral splendor and thinking beyond the extreme commuter belt, try the north-east. I went out with a lady from there for some years, and traveled up from London most weekends.

Like Romania, it has an almost impenetrable firewall of negative PR that isn't born out by the experience of living there. Yes, there's an ugly old ICI factory that covers several square miles (the emblem of the region). But everything beyond that is gorgeous, green and largely untrammeled. I shall never forget walking through waterfall-strewn valleys and splendid forests and meeting hardly anyone else except some friendly dog-walkers.

This is true. I was also amazed to find in Romania that the salaries quoted are 'net' by default. I don't know of any other country that does this.

I wanted to settle in Europe prior to Brexit finalizing, but I felt I was kind of done with Italy, having lived all over that country. Romanian is another Romance language, like Italian, so I figured (quite wrongly!) that it would be easy to learn. It was a right move for the wrong reasons, and I eventually found everything I was looking for here, including well-paid remote work (prior even to COVID).

As a native-born Brit who moved to Eastern Europe four years ago, there is some information in here I actually didn't know.

Also, as someone who has moved country twice (six years in Italy was the first time), I should note that this article doesn't deal with what I can only describe as general UK culture and the British character.

I would strongly advise anyone heading Britside to do what I did with Bucharest and have as long an 'exploratory' trip as you can to get a feel of the place: the way people look you in the eye (or don't); whether you sense hostility; and just the general social atmosphere. You can assess this kind of thing in a couple of weeks, usually, at least at a broad level.

As someone who gladly left, I'm obviously not the person to ask about whether you'd like living there. But it would be a good idea to stay with friends there, if possible, and scout that aspect out for yourself.

The only director who laboriously follows through on 'I want it to not look like CGI' is Christopher Nolan. Others seem to favor stylized beauty over absolute CGI realism.

>So although there might be some pains and anxiety going back into the office, the biggest benefit for workers may be simple job security. Remember something every manager knows: The hardest people to let go are the ones you know.

That's about the most direct threat I have seen in a growing crop of media-supported articles about the importance of 'being present' at the office. What an absolute reversal of stance!

There is a strange value in obsession, particularly in one's career, eschewing 'all round' skills for massive specialization in a sector where nobody, or almost nobody, does likewise.

The tipping point can be a long time coming, and if your specialization is subsumed into automation, or falls out of fashion, you're more than averagely exposed. But if you're willing to take that risk, it's a surprisingly reliable shortcut to success.

These might help:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-mode-web...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-mode/dmghijel...

> You’ll have to opt in — either at start-up or when you’re browsing your home page. If you do, the usual page upon page of box art and show descriptions disappears. Instead, the Netflix matrix chooses something it thinks you’ll be into and just starts streaming it, along with an onscreen graphic briefly explaining why it chose that title. Don’t like what you see? A quick button press skips ahead to another selection.

This is horrendous. It's bad enough that there is no way to examine further details of a program without it autoplaying, which means that in order to read and evaluate a show I have to

a) Click into the details b) Let it start autoplaying, or press play myself c) (I am now watching the show, the details have disappeared) d) Press pause e) Press 'back' to get back to the details.

I wish Netflix would just stop 'addressing' this 'problem'. Outside of the US, even if their ML-based recommender system was much better than it is, most catalogues do not have enough content to really get you a great match based on what you have watched.

This latest approach is like YouTube autoplay on steroids, just designed to keep you mindlessly consuming. There is no way to avoid consumer resistance, prevarication and occasional indecision. Steamrollering us into shows NF wants us to watch is not the answer.

Maybe it's just semantics, but isn't the central model of ML to generate metadata (i.e. labels, classes, segmentation) and then operate on it?

I don't know. Even the constitution acknowledges the possibility of truths that are 'self-evident'.

I remember when the Guantanamo torture scandals emerged in the 2000s, how various political actors attempted to say 'Let's not get hot under the collar about this - let's put it on the table and talk it through.'

For me, there are some things that just don't warrant debate, and encompass such deep-seated truths about humanity that putting them up for debate is a repulsive and disingenuous act, as outlined in 'A Modest Proposal' . I agree with the parent poster that this is one of those cases.

EDIT: This was supposed to be a response to the parent comment of the one it got attached to (for some reason).

I think it would be better if the website provided information on pricing. Also, for HN, a Chrome-only extension is a hard sell. Perhaps a Firefox add-on is in the works.

I wish this trend to start articles with 'tl;dr' would stop. Opening with a summary paragraph predates the attention-deficit/time-starved age by many years, and is not an innovation.

The growing frequency of articles on this topic are beginning to look like astroturfing to me, particularly since we appear to be nearing some kind of decision regarding how deep an impression pandemic-induced WFH should leave on society, and whether or not all those costly office buildings should be filled up again.

I posted this piece with the usual outrage (I feel strongly about compact mode), but today I installed it in Windows Sandbox and can see very little difference, to be honest, between compact mode and normal mode.

That said I agree with comments in this thread to the effect that the option will be removed from about:config in short order, and so don't know what my solution to the problem will be.

So this is basically Sakura [1] copy and pasted. I know, because it looks exactly like my website, and that's how I did it.

[1] https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/demo/

https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura

I had a more positive experience with Hetzner, and would recommend them. They do indeed default to Frankfurt DC.

It's interesting how different parts of the face have greater emphasis in terms of expressing emotion across Asia and the west - see 'The Eyes Don't Always Have It' section at https://www.iflexion.com/blog/emotion-recognition-software.

Returns Null.

True. For the article, I experimented with a number of 'in the style of' prompts. Where there's a distinctive visual iconography with strong key features, BigSleep [1]does an amazing job of abstracting and reproducing that style. Besides artists, it also does very well with iconic movies like Blade Runner and The Matrix.

[1]The Deep-Daze author's most popular T2I mashup: https://github.com/lucidrains/big-sleep

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1NCceX2mbiKOSlAd_o7I...

> - the prompt plays a big role in the quality of the result; “A painting of a dog playing fetch” will usually turn out better than “dog playing fetch”

However, it can get taken very literally, in that you might get a picture that features a frame around the painting.

I wrote a piece on this, including a chat with the creator of this notebook/GitHub (also commenting in this thread), a couple of weeks ago: https://rossdawson.com/futurist/implications-of-ai/future-of...

This brings back memories of the 2003 era Etna eruptions, when I was living in southern Italy. After the regular programming stopped, the RAI channels would just run a live feed of the volcano spewing lava at night, all night long. It was a hell of a screen saver!

>Every process, system, and best practice should be designed around helping people optimize for that 4 hours of really great work.

That's an accurate figure IMO. I have tried every which way to keep the quality and intensity up after the four-hour 'great work' mark, but I can't do it, and I think most people can't do it. There's some kind of daily mileage allowance we get, and most of us are running on fumes after 4 hours, it seems.

Reminds me of the Strontium Dog SF comic strip from the late 1970s. He used a 'time bomb', a grenade that would send you back 24 hours in time if you got caught in its radius, so you'd instantly die in space.

https://britishcomics.fandom.com/wiki/Johnny_Alpha

If a stranger comes up to you and addresses you by name, you're probably going to be creeped out. It's human nature. Same thing here - you didn't start this relationship voluntarily or invest in it; why would you react positively to an unknown entity approaching you with prior knowledge about you?

Same for me - took them twice as a teenager. The first trip is as tangible to me now as a memory of an amazing journey or holiday. The second one was a kind of dud sequel. Never felt the need to return to them, but was glad to have experienced it.

Sad, and a deal-breaker for me. Have disabled updates and notifications via a JSON file, pending the possibility of a turn-around or other solution. When will the white-space mania end?

I don't know about this - it seems to me that all you need to do to shut down a community that threatens you is harass it systematically. I think we should be looking at more intelligent solutions.

This is why I'm not going to bother with a Pi-Hole. For my girlfriend, half the things she likes to look at would disappear.

On a more positive note, I bought my 81 year-old Dad 'Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World' for his birthday in January. He's so knocked out by it that he sends me PDF scans of certain pages. So probably the way to go is starting with a little covert education.