saiya-jin

There is no way to know this, universe can be chock full of trees of some form on certain type and position of the planet. Later than first stars for sure, but thats about it with our current knowledge

You mean enforced solidarity without any chance to vote out of it, not very democratic if you ask me. More like gentle modern terrorism, we strike you where it annoys you the most to manipulate you to change your opinions en masse as we need.

Not actually what the word solidarity originally means.

Also, more broadly to the topic a lot of french strikes by state sector were purely money driven, asking each year for substantial raises on top of already-agreed rises even when economy wasn't performing well, asking for 12+ salaries when leaving, of course 10+ weeks of paid vacations, ridiculously high pensions at early age and similar stuff. I don't mean folks like police or firefighters but lifelong paper pushers. That wouldn't fare well in US, would it. As I said, on the ground in France most folks don't approve most of the strikes, but they don't have any choice or effective voice unlike very vocal minority who often has strikes as a (part time) job.

One example I saw unfolding closely even if not living there - during 'gillet jaune' there was a long period in neighboring region where cars would get sometimes attacked by throwing rocks on random roundabouts and places if not showing yellow vest for support behind windscreen or elsewhere visible. This included foreign cars in France. Instead of maybe half of cars driving around with it initially, eventually everybody got scared into driving/parking with it 100% of the time. This lasted few months. This was most publicly supported strike I recall from past few years. Like most of them it eventually leads to another round of bitter political arguments since these are always also political moves.

No, you should be smart. Instead of taking whole country and its population (and everybody else anyhow connected to it) hostage, strike politicians you want to affect where its most inconvenient and 'hurtful' for them, strike the state that you want the change from.

Don't go through making life miserable all the time for 65 millions of folks who didn't cause your woes in any way. I understand its far easier and 'cheaper' to target literally everybody out there, but that's lazy and makes tons of enemies of causes that you should be gathering support for.

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Solidarity? You must live far from actual France and have some romantic young rosy view on events far away. Almost everybody who isn't protesting is pissed off at folks protesting, since they block you from doing basic things in life like going to work, shopping groceries, driving anywhere or flying, taking train, going to gas station, going to hospital (I kid you not, you can be unlucky and literally die to negligence when health care sector goes on strike and nobody would bat an eye too much, and french public health care sector is not in good state currently). Cca half of my colleagues commute daily to work from France, so I have some group of quite opinionated citizens that express their honest opinions loudly outside of French borders.

There are often good causes behind strikes. What they actually do though every single time, is take rest of civilian population as hostages, make their life as miserable as possible for as long as possible, to create pressure on politicians.

See a little flaw in the logic above? You consistently end up in the crowd of hostages that take various pressures from side to side, often in matters unrelated to yours (say massive subsidies to diary farmers should be even more massive, nobody got time to improve efficiency or processes so market gets distorted more and more and local farmers are brutally incompetitive on their own), and you and your family suffers.

US population would not handle such massive things nicely I believe, not with so many guns and gun/freedom culture in general population.

Capacities of your specific chinese broken thermometer doesn't tell much about how scientists measured temperatures decades ago, does it.

And 2F spread ain't right, doctors use rather precise instruments that need some experience to be used correctly though, we have one at home too for kids since wife is a doctor (not a pediatrician but its manageable).

Yeah this is typical junior code ninja opinion. Folks with 20+ years under our belts know damn too well how humane aspect is more important than literally anything in long term.

My wife for example is a doctor. They have cabinets of 4 GP, 1 of them as we found out is a proper sociopath with very unstable personality when things are not perfect. He is driving whole cabinet which employs 10 people to the ground very effectively, wife is running away and hoping it will collapse only after she got out legally. If it wasn't for psycho moves of this guy that cabinet would thrive. While he is consistently being reported as a great doctor by his patients. She is moving into another cabinet where head of it understood it extremely well, and is super picky about people from personality perspective.

People here on HN love stories about experts saving the world, they as experts see themselves in that position. In real life, thats hardly ever the case, most long term problems come from people and not how you solve technical challenges. Once you covered this by far the most important aspect, then of course professional excellence is next step. Never make the mistake of changing the order of those 2, ever.

I don't agree, its like saying Victorinox/Wenger ran out of business because everybody eventually got that small pocket knife of theirs and due to its quality nobody is replacing those.

Yet reality is more like - completely new markets are opening, new rich people look for quality good brands, or father happy with his knife for 20 years will buy another one for his son. Or Miele, brand completely built on just its perceived reliability. They cost 2-3x more compared to even Bosch/Siemens, without any unique features apart from this.

The problem is, as almost everywhere in corporations - C-suite bonus incentives. Quick milking without care about long term strategies or brand name is the name of the game.

You pay premium for Apple because of advertised privacy. Yet every market analyst is well aware how they are expanding their ad business with very bold plans for the future. There is only 1 direction they can go - invasion of privacy.

They are not even trying hard to make it look like they are above ads revenue streams. Which is fine, as you mention everybody else is doing it in some way, but lets be honest here.

The last thing anybody concerned about their looks wants is to have strong side light shining up close on all the imperfections, scars, bumps and overall messy skin that looked so nice and smooth before.

Guys really don't want to see woman's pores and pimples 3D facial structure. Or anybody's else for that matter.

It doesn't have to be prohibition which over time would harm HN badly, just slower and delayed approach of earning good access. Or show age and karma of users commenting next to their nick, some scam patterns will become obvious.

Yeah but people literally have to use phones for basic functioning at work and private life, that was true 20 years ago already. Uncomfortable ski googles with many cons and little content costing up to 4k?

We all know there is going to be next gen which will be marginally better and marginally pricier. It will still not be enough to 'be there'. At that point the market for wanna-shop-this will be fully saturated. Good luck with that.

The only way to solve all this mess would be to have killer apps. So far what we have seen that even 3 trillion company can't put together much in this space quickly enough, so I am not holding my breath. And literally same problems are with other headsets released even 5 years ago - there is simply not good-enough and enough of content to make people buy it and keep using it. Apple must have seen this from 10 miles too and pushed hard, but reviews politely say all the same thing. Almost all folks here with earlier VR headsets write how after initial wow faded it collects dust in cellar now.

Me, I prefer watching movies from 4m on huge screen, the social aspect with family and simple freedom of movement in more cinema experience is great. For gaming these days PC monitors offer much better visual experience than even these VR goggles, over 40" high refresh say oled with good ie Sennheiser headphones and you are as deep as you want to be, and for many games (that I like to play if I have some time), mouse is simply a superior controller to anything else.

Never grokked real market for it - all the toyota hilux owners? These type of cars are basically not used in Europe, you can sometimes see it on farms but almost never on the roads and general population simply doesn't buy them, they are not the best choice since they drive poorly and have high running costs, and also way too big for our roads and parkings.

Also, legendary hilux has solid reliability in brutal conditions (thats why every isis in desert has them, ideally with some gun or rockets mounted in the back). No way some early 1st generation of much more expensive electric car will match that. You want to have that safety of lugging around additional fuel tank or two in jerrycans and refuel in a minute, instead of doing additional mental gymnastic re chargers.

So a bad civilian car, and farmers are very price sensitive so not a great choice for them (now).

Its not like it was a great mystery 20 or even 30 years ago that too much sitting on one's ass in front of computer or generally being physically very passive is a disaster for your health, whole routines were suggested not only to avoid carpal tunnel and in some nations whole offices did morning exercises.

Seriously, in 2024 there is no excuse... but folks without any discipline/resolve like to take weak shortcuts in their lives and then complain when unavoidable results eventually come in.

Ah yes the digital-only menu, one of more idiotic cargo-culting moves (although not sure who they are actually following here, maybe just general zeitgeist). I try to politely suggest that this is their weak spot when paying and tip accordingly.

I think we need an ai to detect an ai content, but for sure it sounds like an endless arms race

That's an obvious scam that any trained eye spots in 5 seconds, and very typical for more primitive undemocratic societies like Russia and China. I am curious why nobody reacted since at least few must have realized this.

Once you clarify you deal with scam no voting can overrule anything, you can easily go public and expose people if they would keep pushing for it. This is 2024, we have (at least some) tools to deal with such things in such situations.

> It satirizes the yakuza, who retaliated for their portrayal in the film by killing the director.

They did kill him, and even admitted that later.

Why couldn't it? Imagine doing some Comic Con 45 min special with your virtual actor. Yes its not the same fame, but people will adjust quickly. If they mix together good voice recognition in real time they can do press conferences rather easily, its just about gluing well together already existing pieces. There may be hilarious glitches from time to time, but who cares?

No real fame was achieved about stupid stuff like opening restaurants or random sights in the town, I think we as society can easily live without that.

It takes hundreds of man years of various to produce even cheap looking b-movie. A-level one have easily tens of thousands of man years overall, just watch the credits on some Marvel movie and put 3-18 months of effort there.

If you want to achieve almost the same for 0.1% of the cost with 1 very talented person and some computing power (or small team of talented writers/artists), it won't take long and Hollywood's business will collapse. You don't need to pay a cent to that old guy in the video.

Current A-listers will slowly fade while milking their residual fame, but more importantly there won't be a next generation in same way it was till now. A major shift indeed, bigger than Hollywood ever saw. If the quality is there it will be unstoppable and unions won't make any difference, next country with more liberal laws can render very same stuff.

The thing is, you run the same prompt twice and you get twice an unique result. Its trivial to keep asking for more renditions of given scene till you are happy with it, even kids can do this and certainly somebody in sweatshop in Vietnam can do that too. You literally need 1 person a bit of computer power. So instead of team of pixar and disney you have 1 guy with the product and some aws prepaid computing.

Now I don't know how long it took openai to put together that 10 minute demo video, if they ran 3x the resulting prompts or 100x more and had to cherry pick hard (ie that bird's head, I was expecting heavy morphing of those feathers but they kept their visual consistency, for sure this was not the first attempt with at-glance-perfect result).

Yeah serious relationships are not a 'game' and shouldn't be approached as such. Otherwise you bring very wrong incentives and mindset into interaction (relationship) that shouldn't be there if you actually seek high quality long term stable one. There are only few setups/recipes for such result, they all look very similar and this is not the way. Also if you find somebody with properly good heart and you are not pulling your weight between you both, they will eventually notice and act accordingly.

I know it sounds trivial and automatic, but I've met surprisingly few such couples. And all those questions of 'what did I do wrong' have an answer, usually quite a few (and on both sides, but its never 50:50 guilt).

Well its not about money per se, rather power, competence and whatever it translates to. This is almost a daily sight in any society if you know what to look for, and basis of who we were and who we are also today. I don't see any problems with it, there is good logic and history behind it and it explains a lot of behavior of various folks.

Certain age usually brings this 'seeing' effortlessly and you actually become annoyed by additional layer of personalities that you see (since you can't escape it anymore facts that a lot of people of both sexes are just badly broken or simply not good people to the core), you just need to grind through enough people/stories around you like any other skill.

Well then requirements were not 'super clear', they were simply incorrect and it doesn't matter in which way. A very bad start of any project, since beginning you are already putting out flames left and right

Then you didn't care to look for them. Sennheiser, B&W and other traditional companies have buds that sound light years better than greatest tech Apple can currently produce, and do cost more correspondingly.

On top of things like much longer lasting battery, much better support for advanced HD bluetooth codecs (I can plug them into anything like some cheap TVs anywhere). But to me overall sound quality is still #1 reason to invest into premium quality.

Of course then somebody from A team comes with 'but they integrates greatly with my iphone' argument, which is probably true but not that relevant to above. My Senns integrate effortlessly with my Samsung phone/tv/laptops too, thats kind of baseline in 2024.

So what? Chasing money in life is utterly stupid long term strategy, if somebody told you this they were lying to you (or deeply unhappy people who went that way and instead of admitting the mistake they just drag others in same pit). Literally everybody who achieved anything serious in life says so. Yes it sucks when you don't have them at all, but once over that they should never be the top priority.

Do what you like, and for most normal humans (TM) moving to managerial position is moving to worse job while paid marginally better. More stress, far less interesting creative work and more baby-sitting/micro-managing incompetent folks, chasing other teams, processes, politics etc (if you don't do that you are not really a manager in any bigger company).

I am software dev for 20 years, my current full time employment net salary is over 20x compared to my first full time employment while doing largely the same job. You don't get good increases by moving up the ladder, you get it by switching companies and negotiating hard. That's it for the money part.

Seems to the only thing you need to change is to start doing some real sports(TM) instead of stuff you do just to lose weight. I mean sports that you will feel very bad for skipping, and stuff you can actually engage in few times a week. I'd recommend climbing for example (that's a serious gateway to permanent improvement of lifestyle for everybody I know including me, but its not panacea so other stuff may work for ya). That's a great way and first step to completely change yourself.

That's the core of most weight loss - if you want permanent results, you need to do permanent change in your habits, no way to hack around this simple fact of life (if you don't count pussies like Musk lacking any serious impulse control who eat copious amount of diabetes medications because... that really seems like a great idea along term, just ask any senior doctor in private).

Imagine what these people could have done if they weren't at this point... just names that few, even of many few will remember. Ask the same question in a decade.

Your argument falls apart since you deal with mobsters who don't respect any contract if it doesn't suit them. Remember pinky promises that they won't invade Ukraine just before they did it? If you keep stepping back to bullies, soon you are standing with ocean behind your back. And if you don't think russians would love ruling as much Europe as they can grab, you haven't been listening to them a single bit for past 2 decades, their ego is gigantic. We've been there for 40 years not so long ago, but maybe you weren't born yet to recall these times.

Also, this is how russia was defeated - mix of US being simply too strong and one sane russian leader who realized how bad this is (Gorbachev, he is deeply hated by all russian elites who now try to bring good ol' times back).

What you propose is a position of weakness, that leaders of russia see as a sign of weakness and will act accordingly.

I just wish all these naive commenters would spend a decade living in russia to understand what we're actually dealing with and what kind of conflict is inevitably coming to the western Europe.

If you want to bash german politicians for current situation, 100% guilt falls on Angela Merkel. Making

1) Germany ultra weak militarily, you really can't let intellectuals drive whole nations since they have 0 clue about realpolitik, warfare and all those ugly aspects of it, and currently bundeswehr is a pathetic underfunded joke with rotting helmets that even current russian army would roll over without breaking a sweat.

2) a massive push for critical fuel dependency on russia

3) never standing up to that murderer in any way, even as he was killing and invading Georgia and Ukraine

He played her and similar to her very efficiently. Of course its nothing compared to masterclass he pulled/will yet pull on Trump.

As somebody coming from cca eastern Europe, being enslaved by russian troops after their bloody invasion, western Europe is... to keep things ultra polite - ultra pussies. You simply don't grok how depraved and hardened to cruelty russian mind is, things like fair game are an insult. Also their incredible durability to withstand absolutely horrible treatment, just buckle up and continue. Western sanctions my ass, just make sure any good chips don't work for them somehow because they don't care for the rest.

This is the case when you are dealing with mobsters who kill and know only rule of stronger, and you come with your polite smile and handshakes and expect things like keeping their word or contracts. I don't even have such a problem with EU dumb naivety in the past, but what is shocking that they didn't wake up right after invasion and starting putting 10% of GDP into army, to see some effects in 5 years just in time when real stuff starts happening. Every single post-soviet country keeps issuing very strong warnings due to previous horrible expereiences with russian terror, but these are completely ignored on EU level. This is a major long term weakness that will not get unpunished.

Yeah, when SHTF its very easy to be ashamed to be from Europe, for quite a few generations.