I'm sorry, I forgot that on the internet nationality is a source of expertise. Sure, a German would hold that view. Because governments have never steered public opinion through education to hide facts.

The Nazis were inspired to create concentration camps by the US racial policies against black, jewish and asian communities. So, there's that.

The unwillingness to be engaged with the task of driving a car for a few hours is not a good reason, it’s a symptom of a totally cooked attention span

You are a bad faith comementer. But it is nice to see a, even if indirect, admission that your comment was just a personal attack and you have no intention of actually owning your words. So, eat them.

You accurately described the TV series modus operandi and the reason why JJ Abrams creative philosophy is such a soulless hack that always leads to disappointing dead ends.

A car is not freedom. And the absence of a car is not being trapped. Those are false equivalences. I've been perfectly free and lived a fulfilling anxiety free life without a car. I know how to drive, just never owned one. Because, I've never had a financial or otherwise incentive to do so. You can own a car and still be a trapped and anxious ball of cooked nerves, as I've met many people who are. And on top of all of that they are financially trapped by owning a car they can't afford to pay but also can't afford to not own.

Totally depends on the country and the route. I don't live there but have family. They say some train lines are comparable to a plane ticket. Some are cheaper, some are more expensive. The most expensive ones are usually the ones that cross national borders. Though overall the train will always be considered a tiny bit more expensive, it will also be a lot more comfortable. Since the airlines with tickets cheaper than trains usually offer the tiniest seats with zero amenities.

Some countries are better than others as well. In England, trains can get you almost anywhere relatively comfortable and fast (yes, some caveats exist). Spain is rather good in the central regions but many places have spotty coverage. While in Switzerland you can go virtually everywhere except the alps without ever sitting in a car.

The big comparison, that most people fail at, is not just the price of gas. Cars are taxed heavily almost everywhere in the EU. And the tight emissions regulations also require a lot of regular maintenance. So the train will always be more expensive than just the gas, but not more expensive than the bigger picture of car ownership. Plus, if you drive, you're the sod stuck driving the whole way.

I meant like paying someone else to drive the plane/train/bus. Not the AI kind.

Having to drive everywhere makes people misserable.

Edit: we take for granted the infrastructure required to support a society that drives everywhere in personal cars. That is what is actually driving the species to extinction via climate change.

Europeans think of any European country as an equivalent to America as a whole.

Half of the problem with that phrase is that this line of thought is far more common from Americans than Europeans. No European think France = US in any other context than geopolitically, maybe. But a lot of US citizens do think that way. The phrase “Americans think 200 years is a long time, and Europeans think 200km is a long distance” is of US origin. It's literally the result of US ignorance that compares the geographical distances of a single European state, like Germany or France, to the entire extent of the continental US. Europeans are perfectly aware that 200km are 200km anywhere on the planet. Whether you are driving to another country or another state, it is irrelevant.

The other half of the problem is that the political dynamics of the European Union are fundamentally different to the United States federation. Just by the fact that the US was forged in war while the EU is an economics first agreement. Their nature is vastly different and not comparable at all. Maybe one day in the future the EU will just be a federation of states, a single country with a single constitution, but today that's not the case. There's no executive power in the EU that can override a country's authority. That alone sets them so very far apart.

Anything is cheap if you just steal it.

One thing to keep in mind is that, when it comes to LLMs, the models have not significantly changed in architecture.

There's been new experiments and advancements in architecture on neural networks, and machine learning for specific applications. But LLM, as they are being commercialized by AI corporations to the general public, have stayed relatively the same. Except for one thing. Increasing in size. Larger datasets, or more specialized datasets like with coding, and larger number of tokens in memory. This is why it takes such large data centers. It's all been just brute forcing greater capabilities by enlarging the models.

One of the things with LLM is that all the dataset influences the weighs and probabilities of the results. Even if the dataset includes a single event of a chain of words (think of the pizza with superglue incident), it can show up in the results eventually.

Sure, perception can change. When all you have is a car and a highway. It seems outrageous to want an alternative. When you are used to high quality public transport, driving there is a chore.

Driving four hours is an effort that you have to actively take. Plus costs for ownership or rental, fuel and lodging. Americans treat these factors as mundane (and the cultural romanticization of road trips that doesn't exist anywhere else), but they have real costs. Sure, a plane or a train are more expensive. But it offloads a great deal of cognitive costs as well.

The distance itself doesn't change though.

People drove a tiny bit slower. But since the city can't actually give tickets and these are civil and not criminal charges, they expect the behavior to switch back over time. Watch them fumble and get a flock camera contract instead.

There, save you a click.

Your comment is so fit for purpose, displaying such a massive willful ignorance about the world in general. Because the biggest problem with asbestos wasn't using it for home insulation. It killed millions of workers in manufacturing plants and mines. Its biggest industrial use case was for electrical insulation of high voltage transmission lines. Where it also killed hundreds of thousands of technicians in the us alone. Before that it was used for lamp wicks. Where it killed at least a couple of millions more over a century. Today, asbestos kills 250 thousand people a year, 12 to 15 thousand in the us every year.

I supposed any tool can be considered useful if you're ignorant enough about it or if you're willing to lie without remorse.

Another Battlefield clone.

EDIT: sighs OK, Fine. It is another "hey, look at me! I'm better than Battlefield!" milsim. There's like a dozen of them and they all drain all your time and soul eventually. Their average lifespans is counted in decades but their peak players are always in the few hundreds except for a random period of a few months when the entire scene obsess with one single game. Then they die again.

Gotta admit, "not a battle royale and not a extraction shooter" are actual sale points though.

I pay for someone else to hold an encrypted backup of some data. The living data is in my server, they're just one of the backups in case there's a fire at my house or something. I pay because I expect legal liability from them to hold my data safely, no freemium shenanigans. And I encrypt because no one can be trusted not to mine my info for AI or sell my shit to a shady third party for profit.

Don't worry. When AI does all the TV shows for you, then there will not be a need for crediting human labor. You'll get to all 78 seasons of Ow, my balls! One after the other. Don't worry about 80% of the screen being covered in ads, it won't cause seizures to most people.

Actors being outrageously attractive via artificial means is, meh, I suppose. What I can't stand is when they load up with so much botox and had so many surgeries that they lose all capacity for acting. Like, you see an actor in a movie giving it all and communicating emotion effectively, and a year later turn into a statue. Completely unable to emote anything at all, face frozen, facial muscles neurologically dead.

I could barely withstand the latest Wuthering Heights with Margot Robbie. Usually anachronistic music, sets or wardrobe doesn't bother me. Most of the times it is tastefully done or are details that are immaterial to the experience. But lord, this version was so over the top that I sometimes felt like I was watching a fashion show and not a movie. I'm still somewhat warm towards Emerald Fennel, but this movie was a let down for me mainly for that one reason. She is also pretty gross and can't help but to always include disturbing imagery, even if the script is supposed to be a romantic tragedy. Some of the scenes didn't subtract anything, but definitely added nothing as well. I think this film failed at what Marie Antoinette (2006) succeeded.

Mel Gibson has a peculiar talent.

Racism? it is racism, isn't it?

Implication or not. GNOME is hit or miss with accessibility features. They've done some stuff, but they could still do more at no particular greater cost to them other than a shift in attitude. Which…you know… GNOME.