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When I think "dreary," I don't think about weather. I think about ugly-ass environs.

That's why I looked at the map, saw L.A. in a red zone, and thought huh there might be something to this.

I am not sure you are interpreting the map correctly. The red-brown tones are less-dreary, while bright red is more-dreary. L.A. is squarely in the less-dreary area. See also the numerical rankings.

Your point stands though. L.A. is one fugly city.

It's harder to throw together an index of fugliness based on public data, though.

Actually, this sounds like a great use for an LLM or even boring old machine classification. I am sure Prague and Beautiful are commonly found a few tokens apart in a training set of say, TripAdvisor forums. While "LA"/"Los Angeles" and "ugly" are likely to be similarly co-located.

I'd hope so.

Just the other day I saw tourists trudging around on Hollywood Boulevard, which is a major shithole. I thought that I can't believe these people aren't deeply disappointed but afraid to admit it.

I didn't make any attempt to interpret it correctly. I saw a map purporting to measure dreariness, and on it a lot of red around L.A.

Given that red usually connotes "the most of" whatever the map is supposed to show, it struck me as consistent with my experience.

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