Yes they are… the reason I think that way is that I like to look at relative rankings; as in, it’s not accurate to just look at how many stars a place got, but rather compare it with other places around it

If I recall… at least in Chicago where good restaurants easily get 500+ ratings. I have never had a “miss” at a place 4.7 stars or above on Google, and the local “cult classic” was at like 4.9; 4.5-4.6 can be hit-or-miss; any fine dining below 4.5 is almost always a miss. Obviously since almost none of those establishments got below 4, just looking at the number of stars isn’t useful… but if I have adjust my expectations accordingly (>=4.6 is solid, <=4.4 is bad) it’s actually quite useful

Sadly I have no clue whether it translates to other places. Fairly certain ppl in my current city are a lot more critical (so maybe a 4.7 in Chicago would be… 4.4 here, or something like that)

Now that OP mentioned it, I just realized how few alternatives there are to Google Maps…

For reading reviews, sadly I think Google is still by far the best review aggregator especially for restaurants, in big cities especially the star ratings are scarily accurate (edit: with caveats). I guess expert reviews (such as all of Michelin’s ratings) are good too but they aren’t always available

For writing reviews, I sometimes order food with apps (recently using Too Good To Go) so I’d still leave comprehensive reviews on those. If the place is not on OpenStreetMaps I’d add it. Other times sadly I just don’t, I don’t really have a functional Google account at this point

Do intangible things count? I’m planning a 4-day trip to a nearby country which I anticipate to cost up to 500 EUR total. Otherwise… not much

This was yesterday. High speed rail in Japan/China and in Belgium/Netherlands

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Belgium
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_Netherlands

I was watching an RMTransit video last night, and just realized how almost comical it is that Belgium and the Netherlands (which together is not much bigger than the Tokyo or Shanghai metropolitan areas) have multiple high-speed rail lines

… according to Wikipedia, body symmetry

Other qualities tend to rely on frequency of interaction and are not instant

I’d pick Berlin too. Frankfurt was mostly an afterthought and the only advantage it has for me is that it is interconnected so…

If I am being realistic, probably Berlin, Brussels, or Paris (maybe also Frankfurt). Specifically these cities, not anywhere else in the associated countries

I’m using the following metrics (and possibly some personal bias):

• A highly developed region that is internationally well-connected and has a strong passport… which leaves us with parts of Europe and some Asian countries. I’m personally excluding UK because of Brexit
• OP didn’t mention that “culture weren’t an issue”, so sadly most of Asia/Scandinavia/Central Europe are out due to difficulty for outsiders to integrate… and among the rest, choices are limited to large, diverse cities that are easy to integrate
• A place that is resilient to climate change, so the entirety of the Netherlands is out (or maybe I just hate NL)

The conclusion is that I should really get aggressive at learning French and German now just in case

I mean that is pretty much what AI bros want to do… and/or maybe already doing

From a researcher/developer perspective: the biggest bottleneck that affects current-gen AI is the lack of high quality training data; the more high-quality (a.k.a. human-generated and not complete shitposts) training data, the better. What people write on their computers would probably overwhelmingly be high quality. That means, without major technological advancements… if AI companies have access to the types of contents you just described, it is very much in their interests to use them

I don’t 100% agree with this view, but if you subscribe to Prof. Emily M. Bender’s thought of seeing AI models as plagiarism machines, maybe you can say that AI is “stealing your soul”

Alright. I was sick for the past few days but it seems to be Autistic burnout rather than cold/flu… regardless, I’ve mostly recovered which is good. Can go back to playing my favorite games now

The local arcade doesn’t have much but they do have a Pump It Up 2024 cab, which I’ve been playing a lot recently. I think I can clear some easier lvl 16s now which is good (it might not mean much for ppl who don’t play, but lvl 16 isn’t that easy)

Can relate, in fact I still use Chinese for anything related to numbers because all the numbers are one-syllable 💀 (why remember “seven” whey “qi” does the same?)

I did have a bit of a superiority complex in high school, but that’s because I was fluent in Japanese which was considered a “cool” language that basically no one else at HS was fluent in. But after that not much. Besides I don’t think most people would realize or care that I’m fluent in three languages

Now I live in a city where most people are multilingual and I don’t speak the local language (French) despite all the other languages I speak or understand so… I definitely feel inferior, but I don’t think that’s what you are asking

I am fluent in Chinese/Japanese/English; my Japanese got way worse after HS but I can still read news/play videogames and hold up a conversation. I’ve learned a bit of German and French so I have some basic reading comprehension

Yuppp, this has been on the front page of Nature news for a few days. I was worried to share it because I was worried ppl would jump too quickly to conclusions, and all-things considered it appears that mRNA vaccine is a lot more… peculiar than what researchers would have imagined, in good and bad ways. We now have reports about the COVID vaccine doing things such as:

• people can have pretty severe reactions to it
• somehow it reduces cancer risk (as a form of immunotherapy?)
• someone’s breasts got enlarged to a dangerous degree after having the Pfizer vaccine (warning: this is a clinical report, contains NSFW images)

Oof… the “sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” thing actually hit a lot of the popular alternative frontends way earlier than when it was rolled out to main YouTube; it was actually one of the main reasons that made me drop Invidious. Sorry but I don’t think I know if there is a direct workaround especially now that YT is quite sensitive about alternative frontends…

As others suggested, yt-dlp seems to always find a way, so if you don’t mind downloading the videos locally and/or use mpv to stream them that is always an option

Maybe also try asking on c/nostupidquestions?

Realistically I don’t think they (as in the authors) as researchers can do much… but as you pointed out, there are possible ways to deal with this. Rats are common pests and I would be surprised if there aren’t some experts out there, so I am hoping that even acknowledging this issue alone would lead to better outcomes. This paper got quite a bit of traction so it definitely helps

Lots of K-pop get people who don’t understand Korean at all to vibe; there’s also famous (infamous?) songs like the remixed Caramelldansen (which is Swedish), Tunak Tunak Tun as you mentioned is a good one too

Personally I… vibe to a lot of songs that don’t have any lyrics at all

Or how about ones with fictional lyrics? Such as siromaru + cranky: conflict (OK this might be a bit too niche…)

This amount is peanuts compared to the operating budget of the city I live in…

Realistically? I was pleasantly surprised by someone trying to make little tree pit gardens on the street where I live. $10,000 might be enough to make some of those on a few residential streets and kickstart a local initiative for the community to keep maintaining them. There may be some leftover money for acquiring a few communal trash bins to help with trash issues around the neighborhood as well

I’m speaking from experience, I have tried… To give them some benefit of the doubt, designing a good difficulty variation is difficult (pun not intended), even games like the original Hades which has a very extensive difficulty modification system still gets flack for it

For me it probably is. I do not like many of the live-service game mechanics (limited stamina, gambling, microtransactions) but at least I get why; the one I mentioned just feels lazy and would make otherwise good games feel unplayable

Something that hasn’t been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay…

Case in point, unmodded Skyrim’s legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation’d…)

Doing well. Still under my parents’ care since I didn’t want to bring them over until I settle down in the new country (which has certainly taken longer than I expected)

Trying to video call my parents almost every day so I can see the cats. Temperature has dropped where they live so the cats cuddle with dad a lot on the bed, which is really cute