Maybe it's time you all voted for people who might change that? It's really amazing to me how on the one hand people in the US seem to crow about democracy all the time, yet also just accept as a fact that their government will never actually work to help them.
In the end, US doesn't need encryption backdoors because most chat and email protocols are not end-to-end encrypted and the TLS data streams are decrypted in the datacenter owned by US companies.
Am I the only one using zed? Mostly I use it with Mistral but I also have deepseek in there. I find a good workflow is to store issues in markdown files and write thorough issue descriptions that reference relevant files. Then I can just ask the zed agent to implement the issue and it works pretty well.
It seems like these comparisons are more "expensive traditional design vs low cost modern design." None of their examples had what I would consider a single expensive and nice modern design. But every single example of "traditional" design was essentially luxury pricing.
It's not just that, but that too. E.g. a cottage like this https://www.superkul.ca/projects/double-island-cottage/ vs a "traditional" cottage. I'm sure people have preferences for both, but to me this is still a beautiful design where all the examples in the article are just low cost ugly designs.
I think it's true that construction in general has become cheaper over time, so comparing older buildings to newer ones often results in comparing more expensive design to cheaper design. But that's different than aesthetic. To properly compare aesthetic they should normalize for cost at least, if not also execution.
I suppose they did have the expert vs non-expert study, but the only example they showed from it had a hideous buildings in both types so I'm not sure what that's supposed to really accomplish.
> The missing part is that traditional building used to be cheap (in fact the cheapest way of building things).
This is only partially true.
Traditional building used to be cheaper than it is now, yes, but things like ornate decorations and facades were still expensive additional work. It's worth considering the survivorship bias here - the traditional buildings people know and love are the ones that were well built and cared for.
> but things like ornate decorations and facades were still expensive additional work
This again, is partially true. A lot of ornamental decorative elements in public facades were, essentially, mass produced using molds --- very few were hand-made in the way they are done now.
They would degrade over time, however they could also be repaired or replaced relatively easily.
Your point about survivorship bias is also somewhat more nuanced. The buildings that have survived were often, as you said, made with more expensive materials, and they lasted longer; but there was also a change in tastes over time, in particular against ornament and decorative elements, and a change in the idea that certain buildings should be maintained. In the past, people were just way more accepting of tearing down or replacing buildings. Conservation as a general approach was not as common, nor were people as inclined to see certain buildings in particular as uniquely worthy of conservation. It is those buildings which were deemed "appropriate" for conservation and "historically significant" which have largely shaped our understanding of "traditional" architecture, a somewhat snapshot idea of architecture on the cusp of modernism,
MacOS 26 forced me to give up spotlight for Raycast. It would do this thing where new delayed results would steal highlight focus so hitting the enter button to select something from the list became a lottery. Would you select the thing you see or would something else replace it in the time you press the button.
I use Raycast now and it's 1000x better simply because it actually selects the highlighted thing.
I had Safari build me an extension that lets me press control+space on any page to bring up a spotlight-type search box and to search in Kagi.
It did it, it works… but it’s beyond stupid that this still isn’t just a setting to add a custom query string, even if they bury it in the advanced settings.
I used to always do this but I hate liquid glass with such passion that I even upgraded to an iOS beta just to get any improvements to it. Worst UI update in the history of the company.
> It's funny that American tech giants invented AI, because AI is going to unseat American tech giants.
Ah yes, let's ignore that 40 years of research done on neural networks and give all the credit instead to the tech giants that came in as soon as there was enough of a breakthrough to start making them useful in language tasks. Definitely the American tech giants and not the Canadian and international researchers who spent their lives building the foundations. /s
Well, a bunch of people on the world stage thought it would score good political points (and/or they thought opposing it would make them look bad with no upside because its a non binding vote). That doesn't mean the people who make and use maps thought it was a good idea. If anything, the fact this is coming from politicians instead of people who use/make maps is probably negative signal for it actually being adopted. If the people who actually use/make maps wanted this, they would just do it, they wouldn't wait for the UN to say something.
Well, the underlying thinking "only people I directly voted for can do things" is wrong. I guess you never directly voted for your minister of economy, or? In many countries people don't directly vote for the prime minister, chancellor etc.
The key term some people never learned in school is "direct democracy" vs. "indirect democracy".
Even many clubs, e.g. in Germany the ADAC, have systems where people vote for an assembly (or, in politics: a parliament). And then the assembly vote fot ehri CO (or, in politics, for their chancellor). Now, it can happen that this chancellor together with 26 other head of states is a member of the Europen Council (EUCO, one of the 7 bodies of the EU, what btw most people all the time intermingle). And that this EUCO now votes on their president.
In your logic, this presidency of the EUCO is then null and void. Because not directly elected by citizens of the EU.
In my logic, I realize that this position is removed from the people, but it still done by a democratic process. A multi-stage process, but still democratic. And that it still has some bearing.
Asking for the whole world population having an election on e.g. the UN Secretary General --- under the implication that only this would give representation --- is bogus.
Oh no Mr. Schurig. I never praised "direct vote" (that would even worsen it).
I implied instead that there is a crisis in representation.
(...You could be German and you have not noticed, in spite of all the vocal effort in the North? That and all the other similar signals clearly affecting current history.)
I'm Canadian. Canada represents me. They voted on this. That's how the world works. Sometimes my government is not the one I voted for and my interests are not represented, or sometimes my interests are not the majority in my country. That's life.
No one is forcing you to use the new map, you can keep your old map. No one will arrest you for it. Enjoy!
This question is nonsensical. Canada is not ONE identity. It's millions of people, hundred thousands of companies and organizations. Go and ask them individually.
Also, the UN voted to use this map for itself and suggested (!) that others should use it. It never said that everyone has to use that map. It actually said that this voting is "non-binding".
One can still note a poor decision based on its merits.
An equal area projection map is obviously valuable. But it's practically asinine to pick a projection that distorts land features when there are several equal area projections that do not.
Further, Ukraine had to abstain from this vote because they shoehorned in something ridiculous considering the official position of the UN members that Crimea is Ukraine [1], and Crimea is depicted as outside of Ukraine.
I have no idea if there are other hidden yet important changes, since there is hardly any commentary apart from size and shape.
No, the resolution doesn't include a map, it's purely about which projection to use so obviously it doesn't mention any land borders.
As best I can tell the Ukrainian ambassador saw the example map made by the Equal Earth creator in 2014 with its somewhat questionable choice in colouring Crimea and saw an opportunity for virtue signalling. Or maybe he really thought the vote was about that specific political map from 2014.
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