Portraits are not an artistic medium in the same sense, they’re something one creates with the tools of a particular medium. Painting is a medium, photography is a medium, both are capable of producing portraits.
An LLM can produce a portrait of you as well by generating a facsimile of you based on existing material (or functionally a “guess” if you describe yourself I guess).
That leaves a few questions though (which I'm not implying that I know the answers to):
Did this planted forest (used for logging) replace another forest that was used as a habitat for animals? Is it counted as an equivalent to non-logging forests to justify the destruction of non-logging forests?
Can this sustainable industry sustain suitable living conditions for animals in the forest? Or can the industry only sustain itself and its own interests in future resource extraction?
Very importantly, the biodiversity of mature old growth forest is exceptionally distinct to a bunch of 20 year old (often single or few species) trees. Take parrots for example. Many rely on old trees with openings or hollows for nesting. Without sufficiently old trees, they literally can't live there. The growth of such critical habitat often takes 100+ years, whereas fungi, reptiles, orchids, insects, and bryophytes may never recover from clear-felling.
If you're not someone's flamebait LLM bot: citation please. I find it very hard to believe that an endangered species chooses to live solely in recently planted forest, particularly with focused legal defense from such an esteemed and long-running NGO as the Wilderness Society. I find it far more likely you are incorrect, and frankly spouting nonsense.
There is nothing 'advanced' and 'sustainable' about clear felling old growth forests supporting endangered species, if you are lucky enough to have them as Australia is (they are vanishing globally at an insane rate). It is about as nuanced as shooting your children in the head.
Just want to point out, it’s polarising because it’s a wedge issues that divides voting blocks neatly, and nothing to do with it being The Issue that it is.
More people die from obesity, cars, flu, preventable illness, etc. But we discuss endless this one issue… it’s for political science reasons not humanity/moral/etc reasons.
It's different from those other cases because it's like getting in a car accident and other people saying you can't get treatment because it's against their religious values, or saying you're not allowed to lose weight because they don't like it.
Design and manufacturing for the rocket part of their business is mainly split between Auckland and Los Angeles. Various sources say they have between 500 and 700 employees in NZ.
My understanding is that they have a rocket body fabrication facility in NZ, where some of their historical institutional carbon fiber fabrication knowledge and stuff is, the engines and avionics and electronics are done in the Los Angeles area.
But you're ignoring the core point (in both your metaphor and in the argument at hand):
- If everyone took a Waymo... Waymo sucks. Not true of trains.
($/MW of power is stupid with nuclear in the age of solar and batteries, with basically zero safety concern... i.e. you can deploy solar and batteries to houses... not so much for nuclear)
People talking to each other in person tend to modulate their voices to match the context. People talking on speakerphone tend to crank the volume and shout.
And the person on the other end of the line often doesn't realize how uncivil the situation is. They might know they're on speakerphone, but they actually can't see that they're interrupting the trains of thought of dozens of people around them. This means the content of the conversation is more likely to be inappropriate for public consumption, making it even more distracting for the forced participants.
The person holding the speakerphone is to blame, of course, but they often seem to go into a state of pathological flow where they're almost as oblivious as their conversation partner.
Plus devices are tinny and grate. Watching a video on the phone of someone speaking is much more annoying than someone speaking in person, even at the same volume.
I think this is the only meaningful point being made in this thread.
The sound from a phone speaker is annoying, more so, than a typical in person talking. To me the solution lies somewhere in fixing that to make it sound more natural.
Everyone else claiming that some how having “loud” conversation is rude, feels like they’ve fallen into some anti-social hole… we are literally the only animal to have developed complex spoken language… it’s part of our humanity.
It’s all context. Some cultures are loud, some are quiet; some people are loud, some are quiet; some places are supposed to be loud, and so on.
The people being quiet in an normally-loud place create no problems. The people being loud in a normally-quiet place are causing problems for others by violating the quiet.
Loud people also tend to be oblivious to this and then get defensive when it’s pointed out. Not always - I’ve known some naturally-loud people who had figured out that being shushed meant they were in the wrong.
No, the loudness is a whole separate dimension. 99% of the time, there's no need to be loud in public. Not when you're talking on the phone (the microphones on a phone work great!), not when you're having a conversation with one or two other people close to you. Not when talking to Siri (etc). You can talk quietly in a place that isn't very loud, and in a place like an airport you can talk just loud enough to be clearly heard -- there's no need to shout or to project your voice.
There are exceptions to this -- of course nobody expects you to worry about your volume at a concert between sets, at a sporting event, etc. But people who speak very loudly everywhere are annoying to everyone around them.
No, loud conversation on a train during commuter hours really is rude where I live.
Most patrons have a conversation at a normal volume where the words are clear to their conversation partner but not to people sitting further away.
Speaking loudly enough to be understood from a significant distance is rude because it prevents other people from having their own conversations, and it forces people who are not having a conversation to listen to you. Speaking at an appropriate volume is not anti-social, it is pro-social: other people can't be social themselves if you're too loud.
The unwritten rules loosen up at night, during events, or at other times when there's a boisterous crowd.
For speakerphone-appropriate situations (e.g. being alone or with people that all want to participate in a call), yes, that would be great.
For everything else, the solution is to STFU. People blasting reels or having rambling non-essential phone calls in public transport is detrimental to everybody's stress level and by extension mental and physical health. I'd love to see it banned and the ban actually enforced.
Shout out to the GGT 101 bus driver that made the annoying passenger on some endless legal/business call actually shut up with a polite but firm "Sir, this is a bus, not a call center". Best trip across the Golden Gate Bridge I've ever had.
I think I've had that driver (or we were on the same bus!) because I remember this happening on that bus when I took it as well.
To the larger point about loud conversations -- any conversations above what is appropriate to the situation, even in person conversations, are annoying. Ever go to a restaurant and you're able to hear the loud table across the room because they're yelling while everyone else is speaking at a normal volume? Highly annoying. "Who ordered the mojito? Monique ordered the mojito!" I'm just trying to enjoy a cocktail and talk with my partner, not listen to your cacophony.
Doubly annoying if you have a speech processing disorder of any kind. I already have a hard time understanding people on one side of my head, I don't need to also be picking up someone's loud voices interrupting my attempts to listen.
It's similar to the distinction between a driver having a conversation with a passenger in a vehicle vs. the same driver having a phone call, even in a hands-free / speakerphone mode.
The passenger will be far more aware of context and circumstances, including traffic or other hazards, and will generally adapt to those surroundings. The remote party simply has no access to those cues.
(And yes, some passengers may be oblivious, for various reasons, including but not limited to children. I'm discussing the general case.)
In theory yes, but in practice they usually have the speaker up far higher than they are speaking themselves so we do only hear one side clearly.
I think the high distractability is a trifecta of volume, non-naturallness of the sound (compression etc: feeling out of place in the space) and this point.
If their voices sounded shrill/unnaturally amplified/too loud, definitely. Listening to an annoying conversation on speakerphone is 10x more annoying than when it's face-to-face.
Or we could realise that they still have that lead, and they were limited in the US by US government policy that propped up Detroit for union/votes rather than economics/environment.
Meanwhile BYD had US money with a a friendly government enhancing it.
You shouldn’t be angry with Musk, you should be angry with Trump/Biden (ignore left/right they both let Asia take Battery and chip technology on their watch).
Not defending Elon, he’s clearly got some flaws, but Telsa’s expansion has been phenomenal, even with massive head winds against it, just look at Rivian, VW, Lucid, Ford, GM… or anyone if you want to talk about “squandering”.
> Or we could realise that they still have that lead, and they were limited in the US by US government policy that propped up Detroit for union/votes rather than economics/environment.
> You shouldn’t be angry with Musk, you should be angry with Trump/Biden (ignore left/right they both let Asia take Battery and chip technology on their watch).
I mean, you should be mad at both. But it started far before either of their presidencies. They just continued or amped up policies that came before them.
Biden might have tried to (weakly) reverse it in his term but it was far too late at that point. You could probably say the same for Trump in his second term if you are being charitable and steelmanning both.
It's not just presidents or even politicians though. It's the entire American corporate system and it even extends down into responsibility from regular citizens. We need wholesale change in how we do business and interact together as a society.
The rot might start from the top, but it certainly extends to the bottom. Think of how the average union UAW worker acted during their peak days vs. how a Chinese line worker acts today. We certainly are capable of doing good work, but not under the current cultural zeitgeist.
reply