I think the more modern the US city, the more effort they made to try it. Spain has some grid systems and there are certainly efforts elsewhere so it's not like they don't exist in Europe or around the world. But usually the efforts are dwarfed by more organic city growth. In either case it's still more sensible than a straight line.

Blocks / grids might be common in the US but they aren't super common in Europe, Middle East or Asia. A new city might have a central core (e.g. a palace, or central forum which was designed) designed on a grid. Or maybe a Roman settlement grows from a military encampment. But that structure is soon subsumed as the city grows & absorbs nearby encampments & villages. Then it becomes a hodge podge of streets and alleys. Thereafter there will be periodic efforts to knock parts to widen roads or remodel slums etc. but it's quite organic. Circular designs were common in Mesopotamia and even Baghdad was modeled on a circle but it doesn't last.

But if a new city was to be build then either a grid or a series of circles joined by radiating roads clustered around a purposeful center would make a lot more sense than a line. Neom reminds me of those dumb mega projects architects sometimes throw sketches of out to tabloids to gain free publicity than something anyone was taking seriously.

It was always a stupid idea in just about every way possible, from construction, to operation, to lies about being "green", to its reliance on non-existent future tech, to the assumption anyone wants to live in a police state within a police state. Oh and lots and lots of dead workers. But it's very hard to say no to somebody who has people chopped up into bits for criticizing him.

Same goes for some of Saudi Arabia's other mega projects - ski slopes, mega resorts, giant cube buildings ffs. While not as outrageously stupid as the Line, they'll still cost billions and likely fail in their ambitions. Imagine if the kingdom used the money for the betterment of its people instead of wasting it on boondoggles - solar farms, desalination plants, land reclamation, housing, health, roads / mass transit, liberalisation, democracy / rights etc. If the idea is to prepare for a post-oil world then all those things would pay off far better than pouring blood and money into the sand.

Not buying Nintendo products and having to suffer problems that they themselves created.

... if I use some shitty tech to bootstrap better tech then is that somehow bad? I realise there is more to this than that, but it seems like a terrible argument to complain coal power is being used to manufacture solar power.

... here is a whacky idea - AI slop is uploaded because there is an economic incentive to do it. Remove the incentive and it won't happen. Start by letting people report it, or saying why they're "not interested" in a channel. It shouldn't take much to identify this trash and demonetize it or send it straight to the bottom.

I think people are realising that these "sales" are no different than any other day on Amazon. And the majority of content on "sale" is Chinese OEM garbage.

Typo follow up - I wrote Matauranga Maori, not Mtauranga Mori using an 'a' with an overline but Slashdot stripped it out.

I do. New Zealand has been going down a path of elevating Mtauranga Mori culture to the equivalent of Western science. And so you get guff like this press release.

In reality it will be actual scientists who do the work all the way through. Even if it is successful (a big if) it will be decades to releasing a viable population into the wild. After all that, Mori can help out with preservation of their habitats and conservation work. Again, with modern science. But hey NZ has to pander to this shit and I feel sorry for them.

This is definitely one company that deserves to be broken up into chunks. Virtually every major retail outlet selling glasses / sunglasses is owned by them and they purposefully run them separately to give the illusion of choice while fixing prices. Same for their actual branded glasses. They even manufacture glasses for competing designer brands.

More fool to anyone who thought it would catch on or didn't think through the consequences of recording strangers without their consent.

There have even been people who've gone further and surgically attached cameras to their heads - and then whined about the hostility and sometimes violence they've suffered as as a result. Because people resent being filmed and only tolerate in a limited capacity and certainly not by random strangers.

More wearable e-waste that is a) limited in what it can do (AI or not), b) looks ugly, c) has terrible battery life, and d) acts as a punch to face magnet and hostility amplifier for anyone creepy/stupid enough to use it where it isn't welcome. I'm sure a few people with more money than sense, and no shame will buy it like usual before it dies on its ass again.

This ambitious partnership, which integrates mtauranga Mori (traditional knowledge) with advanced genetic engineering to support ecological restoration and revolutionary conservation tools for taonga (treasured) species, signals a new era of indigenous leadership in scientific innovation.

This "ambitious partnership" sounds like pandering bollocks. The entire press release is written like this.

Lol I see Limewire (another revenant brand) also touts AI.

Can't want to find out how Gnutella and Limewire respond to this