40% of Canada's land area is covered in forests. It is simply impossible to "manage" that much forest, and it's utterly fucking absurd to suggest otherwise. And to try to take climate change out of the equation is just a way of misdirecting away from the actual fucking cause; GHG emissions raising surface temperatures.

When will humans stop buying the most trivially fucking moronic red herrings? What a disreputable idiotic species.

It's almost as if allowing emissions to ramp up with little meaningful effort to control them is having the inevitable consequences predicted decades ago. But let's not deal with that, because it's hard. Instead let's have the President of the United States demand Canada hold back the tides.

That's not an argument.

"Yeah, that guy is dead now. We have a pretty solid idea who did it. But not sure if that'll make him alive again, so let's not bother with catching them."

I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

Your link - seriously?

"Tobacco giants say"? Dude, they said that smoking is actually healthy for a few decades. I'd trust my cat around buckets full of her favorite treat more than those companies.

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.

The endless scroll is predatory at every moment.

It even reloads when you stop for a while. Switch to a different tab, do something else for five minutes, come back - it reloads and refreshes everything. Why? Because that activates a primal fear in your brain that you're losing something, missing something that might've been important, so your instinct is to NOT divert your attention elsewhere.

In theory I would agree, but the issue here is that social media platforms intentionally compromise your ability to make decisions. That's what the addictive pattern is all about. You could at any moment decide to stop scrolling and get back to work or life - but everything in there is designed so that the decision is made for you and bypasses any critical thinking paths in your brain.

And while I'm the first to agree the politicians are sleazebags and are the first ones that need much tougher regulation and laws, it's a fact that laws in this area actually do work. Anti-smoking laws have reduced smoking, for example.

Someone hasn't flown in a while.

I don't click the cheapest price. What happened is that the major airlines have copied some (not all) of the budget airline shit. Luggage used to be included, now it's an extra - which causes people to bring carry-on to the max instead, which leads to the overhead compartments always being full.

Yeah, good point. No, wait, that's complete bullshit.

I've taken a number of trips on business class in the past years. What you get in business class today is what you got in economy class 20, 25 years ago.

You know what, you may actually be right if you compare multi-thousand halfway-around-the-world intercontinental flights. I've never flown to Australia, so I can't compare that. I'm talking about shorter flights (a few hours) which I do frequently and where I can compare. We might both be right.

So... ordinary airport before enshitification ?

Air travel used to be pretty cool. Now absolutely every part of it is annoying. Especially the booking and its 25 upsale offers.

A few years more of this and you'll have to book business just to get a seat and fresh air.

Probably.
But the mirrors, for example, are made by Zeiss. Lots of parts are from the supply chain and ASML doesn't even HAVE their secrets.

You are right that some industrial espionage could be useful. I just say it's not as useful as most people would assume (which is basically the Hollywood plot of "steal this secret and we can copy it"). Nah. You can find on the Internet how a nuclear bomb is made. But it takes a lot more than a print-out to actually make one, and a couple of those steps are genuinely hard.

Fascinating answer.

It seems to me that the unablated thoughts fall into the category of "what would a human user expect that a good answer to this prompt would be?" - and out comes something that is clearly an aggregate of stream-of-consciousness writing.

But then the ablated models seem to go for a direct answer without much less interpretation and "pretend to be human". I wonder what that's about. I'd love the AI to answer more like the machine it is, and right now I'm getting that through skills.