alex0015

Oh, that's really cool. For about two years the car I drove and the phone I had lined up such that I could kind of wedge it in the front dash next to the speedometer, and that was for sure a better location than the dash mount I have now. I'd forgotten about that.

It's a strange feeling reading these comments because not only have I never used carplay or android auto, I don't think I've ever noticed anyone else using it in a car someone's driven me in. Everyone I know just has their phone in a dash mount. I don't think it's that small a sample size either! I drive a 2014 Accord and it auto connects to my android with Bluetooth when I turn on the car. It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.

I imagine everyone who is fully involved with the carplay ecosystem feels equally as strongly in the other direction and has for a long time.

You don't need to own the land yourself, just contact the owner and organize permission for planting, tree sourcing, and labor. That's what https://www.forestunlimited.org/ does in Northern California.

Sure, people might not like AI by some narrow definition or choose not to use it themselves. But roughly every single service they consume or interact with is downstream of AI at some level now. The demand isn't just for chatbot usage and hasn't been for a long time.

I can imagine a situation where this is true, like if it was used by some company to train an internal model or a model that never got released.

But even assuming the data center was only used for AI model training, more or less everyone who uses any electronics now either uses generative AI directly themselves or uses services whose employees use generative AI at work to create those services. AI is extremely popular and widespread now among many large and diverse groups of people.

Here's the essay: Die Weltliteratur (2007) http://archive.today/1M3Q3

This resonates with me very much. I remember being very proud of myself each time I was tested in school and I was told I was reading at such-and-such a grade level above my own. Now in my 30s, I still like reading a lot, but there's so much more to reading than finishing books.

I still have a bit of reticence toward admitting that I find some books hard or haven't finished them. I found the Iliad enthralling and the Odyssey very good, but basically any other English epic poetry or drama is such a grind and I've given up many times.

How exactly do you propose to "remove profit from medicine?" If someone wants to have a procedure done and their insurance doesn't want to pay, they can still pay the doctor to get it done themselves. And it will still be very expensive because doctors in the US are used to charging very high salaries and using medical equipment and medicines that cost a lot of money. Insurance companies are required by law to use 80 percent of their income to pay claims out to their customers already. Medicine costs a lot.

In 2023 his publisher said that his printed collections had sold 50 million copies worldwide, and that the strip had appeared in 2,400 newspapers. That's at least tens of millions of dollars over many years, and with little spending and risk-averse investments, it's not unreasonable to conclude $100M for the total net worth figure.

I was watching the Netflix show The Empress with Chinese subtitles that did a pretty good job translating the German. I switched to English subs for one episode and couldn't stop telling the people I was watching with "That's not what he said! That's completely different!"

That's not quite what I meant by unusably bad, though that does have its own set of challenges for sure. I was just in Toronto for the first time and appreciated the designers of the Ojibwe Latin alphabet for pulling it off without diacritics.

What's happening with your example is just that the symbols chosen for the phonemic transcription are non-Latin so they're unfamiliar to read aloud and harder to type for non-speakers. What I meant was if we all wrote with all of our individual idiosyncrasies of speech without converging on a prescribed standard (a writing system separate from speech transcription).

"Amnu ge sum'm frum upsterz, gimmi u sek" but even more so, with IPA characters for all the 40-odd individual sounds of my dialect of English - then you write your response in the same level of phonetic detail. Exactly what a writing system shouldn't do.

The IPA still relies on convention to transcribe sounds. There's plenty of academic papers out there describing lesser studied languages and, if those conventions don't yet exist, the papers often contradict each other.

A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad. Everyone pronounces words differently than the writing system prescribes, in every language. Words are shortened and blended together constantly in connected speech.

What I'm seeing from the article is that the land is 87 acres and the data center is going to take up ~4 of them. Perhaps with the extra $3 million a year in tax revenue the city could build a park too.

The article didn't really convince me that the homes are going to be significantly devalued or that people are going to be thrust into poverty. It says so, and dismisses out of hand claims to the opposite, but doesn't give much in the way of evidence for its points.

I'm sympathetic to the agreement for the original donation. If the original deed said that the stipulation of donation was not only "only use this for a park" but also "never sell to anyone who might do something else," then I do think the city owes some very large compensation amount to somebody. If not, though... the city sold the land in 2008 to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation, at which point it doesn't really sound like the original deed has much value. If you buy land from someone privately and 18 years later it turns out it was gifted to them with the stipulation that they never sell, how much recourse should another party really have to stop you doing what you want with that land?

All I know to write about here is China: school is one massive obstacle for professional sports. Lots of kids in China try out tons of different hobbies and sports, and any sport or activity you can think of likely has a number of clubs in bigger cities, enough to create a community of people with a serious interest. I'm thinking of Chinese kids I know personally who are into football, breakdancing, archery, ballet, drama, all kinds of stuff.

And then, right at a child's age where European scouts are noticing kids over there, in China parents are hit with massive, massive pressure to help their kids academically as best they can. Good middle school -> good high school -> good university -> good job. Unless your kid is far and away a natural talent easily exceeding their peers, you're going to hesitate to let them devote more time to professionally developing athletic ability. Athletic competition at the highest levels in China is intense due to the number of natural talents you get in a large population, and with every year that goes by without your kid quite making it into the professional-athlete track, the pressure gets higher to abandon that track and focus on academics.

So the athletic practice, even for a quite promising kid, gets sidelined for more study time and after-school classes. And this happens even for kids with parents who want them to have a balanced life without the insane pressure for academics the Chinese school system is known for. For those families it just takes the shape of cutting back the athletic practice instead of nurturing it to a possibly professional level.

One other factor that I can think of is just a culture of family interest. I don't know any Chinese men older than 45 who are into watching sports at all, whereas in the West (and also India, I think?) it's common for a family interest in sports to have already existed for generations. I do know Chinese men my age (31) who are into basketball and have young kids who might grow up with that interest. That's all anecdotal, I know, but my sample is big enough for it to be surprising to me in comparison to other places.

Basketball is hugely popular in China, though it's more famous for ping-pong. In the evenings you can see pickup basketball games at every park and every public court, of which there are many.

That's funny, I spent several days in Bydgoszcz in 2015 due solely to a marvelous and slightly misleading video from the tourism board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiogaJADvPw

I learned on arrival that the city was not in fact color-graded and filled with beautiful slow motion video opportunities. Since then, every time I mention to any Pole that I've been to Bydgoszcz, the question is always "Why?"

All my memories of two fairly long trips around Poland are now ten years out of date, and I've heard only good things about its development since then.

I think you should reconsider the cost there. $100k/yr is likely well under the average for the people they're letting go. In addition, pretax salary represents only a portion, say 2/3 or so very roughly of what it costs a company to have an employee. Benefits packages and payroll taxes can cost a huge amount too.