On the other hand, if you're aiming at an international market, dropping a line easily perceived as American jingoism might be a net gain.

I'm kind of mystified by the absolute visceral hostility of a large number of Americans towards recycling.

I think a big part is that recycling is very inconsistent here. Different geographic regions have very different rules on what materials can be recycled, what condition it needs to be in, and how it can be packaged. Even moving from one town to the neighboring one means having to learn a whole new set of recycling rules.

Plus, all recycling here typically goes together in one bin, maybe two if paper is separated from plastic, glass, and metal. This has to get sorted at the recycling center, and there's going to be a lot of contamination from things that can't actually be recycled. (Coated magazine pages, for example, or the wrong kinds of plastics mixed together.) I've seen places in Europe which have half a dozen different containers for different materials. That seems like someone in charge is at least taking it seriously. Here it feels like officials are paying lip service to the idea but don't really give a damn. If they're going to do a half-assed job, so are the citizens.

In short, inconsistent rules and a lack of faith that items are going to actually be recycled rather than just end up in a landfill, mixed with typical American resistance to regulations of any sort, all combine to make recycling look like a bad joke.

I predict that this Ohio initiative won't prompt people to do better at sorting their recyclables. Rather, it will just give people more excuse to give up on recycling altogether.

I watch a lot of maritime disaster videos, so YouTubeâ(TM)s genius algorithm thinks Iâ(TM)d be interested in traveling on a cruise ship.

I find it hard to believe that any lawyer would in good faith sign off on $13B contract that hinges on such a vague definition. I therefore conclude that the lawyers are not acting in good faith, and that both sides are planning to use the vagueness to insist that the contract has or has not been fulfilled regardless of what is delivered.

Not to mention a "change for change's sake" mentality that decreases comfort and productivity in the name of changing stuff "just because".

A solid, usable UI design will last for years. But how does that drive new sales? You need to change it up every season to keep people on the upgrade treadmill. It stopped being about usability decades ago, now it's about the latest UI fashion trend.

My bet is that with the way they're going, in a few more iterations they're going to land on the most sublime and minimalist UI possible, giving us a pure gray screen with gray text just one shade darker. They'll need to design an entirely new display technology that can even differentiate the shades, that's how subtle the difference is. And they'll somehow still manage to break dark mode.

I agree with your last paragraph. The problem isn't that it was changed, but that the changes weren't revealed. That's why I said that changes (additions or redactions) should be obvious like a blacked-out area. Even for PR purposes.

There was certainly more intentionally changed than the addition of the logo. The "COOKIES" stickers on the right didn't disappear by accident. Someone had to purposefully remove them and touch up the background to hide the removal. Not cool. Whether or not they had a good reason to redact them, the fact that they tried to hide the redaction looks shady. Nothing's wrong with the good old-fashioned black rectangle. It's faster and avoids even the appearance of impropriety.

As someone who is now retired but spent most of his career finding and fixing other people's bugs... This. Vibe coding might be great for a one-off, but how's it going to hold up when bug reports start coming in or new features need to be added?

"Thank you, mysterious land dweller, for visiting us in our ocean home. Please take this humble fish as a token of respect. Now, turn around and get the fuck off our lawn!"

The article has a comparison of the photo before and after. The department logo was added, and it looks like an "auto beautify" or clean-up pass was that made all the AI artifacts. So far so good.

But they *also* removed some items and tried to disguise the fact that they were removed. It looks like some stickers (maybe?) reading "COOKIES" were edited out. That may have been by an AI "remove this" sort of feature or it may have been by hand. Either way it's a pretty poor job. I could freehand the replacement background (a yellow sticky pad) better than they did. Also, a rubber band was removed for no obvious reason. I can imagine reasons why they might want to remove the stickers, but removal of something as innocuous as a rubber band is baffling. Especially because the rubber band goes in front of one item and behind another translucent item, which means it at least takes some effort to remove. Why bother?

I'm willing to give the police the benefit of the doubt and say that the AI artifacts were unintended. I don't know if they're the result of the sticker removal or if they were put there by a separate auto-beautify feature but I don't think there was any malice intended.

I'm less willing to forgive the sticker removal. I don't know why they were removed, but it should have been done with a black "REDACTED" box so the viewer knows that the image has been modified.

IMHO (and IANAL), any changes at all should be obvious. The department logo should be in an inset box or clearly an overlaid watermark; as it is it looks like it might have been a physical plaque on the wall. Guys, this is an evidence photo. Even though it's (probably) not intended for use in court, you have no business modifying it. Adding a logo or making redactions is fine, as long as it's obvious they're not actually part of the photo. Otherwise, keep your grubby little hands off! If for no other reason than it gives the impression that you're being dishonest.

Am I the only one who noticed that the quotes from Google conspicuously say that they're ending the trial, not the feature? And that there is more than one possibility about what happens after the trial is over? Just sayin', there's nothing here that actually confirms that the feature is going away.

Well, your buying power would be crippled.

And only a total cunt would piss and moan about someone doing it of their own free will.

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Your mistake was teaching your car phenomenology.