You can have (almost) permanent daylight time - you just have to relocate regularly between (let's say) Iceland and the southern tip of South America. Or even further north/south for even more daylight (albeit even lower temperatures).
Sure, but that's also the point: the current status quo is/was mostly good, especially for Europeans and North Americans, but the multitude of global crises - the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, the Trump administration's (and the far right's in general) war on sanity, the AI disruption (both by the technology itself and by the financial upheaval it causes), not to forget the climate crisis - might just induce you to worry how long this status quo can be upheld.
Ah, ok, that's interesting! I have been to the US three times, and was aware that there are still some counties with complete prohibition, but wasn't aware of this particular quirk. But, even from that list, it's hard to tell which states sell alcoholic beverages only in state-operated stores (similar to the Nordic states), and which license private stores to sell them (which is common throughout the world, but of course more restrictive in some places than in others).
"The ones who pay will pay" is always true (from people using public transport without a ticket to "normal" tax payers having to shoulder the losses caused by loopholes and "incentives" for the upper 0.1%), but resigning to it so explicitly is rare.
While the origins may be religious, I'd say the high taxes on alcohol and most alcoholic beverages only being available in state-run shops (Systembolaget/Vinmonopolet/Alko/Vínbúðin) is by now a 100% Nordic phenomenon.
The most interesting situation is actually in Iceland: full prohibition introduced 1915, wine legalized 1922, all other beverages legalized 1935 except for (of all things) beer with more than 2.25% ABV, which had to wait until 1 March 1989 (since then celebrated as "Beer Day") - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_Iceland
The only place where the illuminated part of the moon points straight down, as the article expects, is also the only place where the sun moves perpendicular to the horizon when setting: if you're at the equator.
To get to that, we have to first think about the literacy rate in antiquity, which is estimated at 5 to 10%. And of those, most could probably read well enough to get by, but didn't routinely read longer texts. So someone who was well-enough versed in reading to not have to read the text out loud in order to understand it was probably a rare and noteworthy creature indeed...
Even if it's AI generated (or AI "improved"), I'll comment on the content:
> The learning loop got tighter. Ask a question. Inspect the answer. Run the code. Break it. Read the implementation. Correct the assumption. Try again.
This assumes that you have the resources (time and money/AI usage budget) and the interest/motivation to do that. If you do programming as a job rather than as a hobby, the time you can spend on things like this and the budget you can spare for it will be severely limited. Also, after you have finally coaxed the LLM into generating something that fits all the requirements without breaking in new and surprising ways, has code that's not ridiculously overengineered (that's probably the real reason behind vibe coding: as long as you don't look at the horror beneath the hood, you can tell yourself everything's fine), doesn't break some convention of the codebase and has the required test coverage and other metrics, you're not only out of time for the task at hand, but also more than ready to move on to something else.
Google Street View used to be a time capsule for Germany until a few years ago: they started gathering data around 2007-2008, then there was huge public backlash (something about invasion of privacy - sure, they only photograph from public streets, but the cameras are placed much higher than an average person walking or driving, so could "look" over fences that would otherwise be too high etc.), so the government decided that anyone living in a building could request their whole building to be blurred in StreetView (with an exception for storefronts IIRC). So Google kinda just lost interest (or decided to wait for the negative sentiment to die down), and for the few larger cities that were already captured, you could always take a look at how a street used to look back in 2008.
...with stray light coming in from all sides because glasses don't cover your face completely. So the best place to use them will probably be a completely darkened room?
Maybe it's clear to native speakers, but both "pacing" and "frontier" have multiple meanings. "Pace" as a verb means literally just walking, as a noun it's the speed at which something progresses. So I'm not sure that everyone reading this phrase will immediately realize that "pace" actually means slowing down the pace of development (having "slow" in the phrase would have probably sounded too negative). Also, it's not immediately intuitive that "frontier" refers to frontier AI models.
Actually, when I first read "pacing the frontier", the first thing that came to my mind was a border guard patrolling a border by foot...
> The shade supports don't have to hold up solar panels: Shade supports cost less.
If you look at the photos, the solar panels are mounted directly on the supports. If you wanted a simple shade for the canal, you would have to mount some kind of roof on the supports instead of the solar panels. Granted, the solar panels probably weigh a bit more than simple sheet metal, but that is probably more than made up for by the benefit of generating power.
Well, Waymo could be seen as a last mile connectivity program. That's actually the "end goal" for robotaxis: not just replace taxis, Uber etc., but offer an alternative to owning a car.
> Over the past 30 years, World Wide Words has chronicled the shifting English wordscape
I know, 30 years ago it was probably very tempting to have a website with a name that could be shortened to WWW, but still, it's a bit strange that a site with such a name only focuses on English?
> Our findings reveal the sheer scale of branding embedded throughout tournament broadcasts, making exposure to unhealthy food, alcohol and gambling brands both omnipresent and unavoidable for viewers.
Do we really need an academic study to tell us that yes, there were ads on the sides of the football pitch at the World Cup, and that FIFA's choice of sponsors is questionable (but hey, questionable sponsors pay better than less questionable ones)?
Cool, but I hope it doesn't catch on. Otherwise I can already hear managers complaining to people that they have too many red words and not enough green words in their emails/Slack messages/whatever...
Yup, it helps when the prompter reads and edits the AI-generated text, but usually they just skim it and send it unedited. Worse, it's usually not 300 bits -> 1000 bits (= a concise message covering all the relevant topics), it's more like 300 bits -> 3000 bits (= typical LLM verbal diarrhea hiding the relevant points in a wall of text).