I just feel like this becomes time consuming after a while. Will there be soap? Toilet paper? A bed? You don't know unless you ask! But ... c'mon ... they can just tell you on the website.
Or just don't travel if every detail becomes an issue. I make certain basic assumptions--yes I assume there will be a bed and toilet paper--but, in general, I adapt as necessary.
That is fair. I have noticed doors going missing in hotels but typically travel alone so it didn't really register as an issue. I would not want to share a room with a coworker ever, bathroom door or not.
If you’re going on so much travel that this is a burden then you’re truly privileged. Maybe your assistant or travel agent can handle this issue for you.
Jabs aside, you don’t need to be rich to use a travel agent or Rick Steves guidebook instead of blindly booking hotels on Internet sites. If there’s an issue like this you’ll easily find it on review sites and most of those are searchable.
The same thing applies to other experiences like restaurants and museums. For example, it’s always smart to jump on Google/Trip Advisor reviews and type in “kids” or “stroller” into various attractions to make sure you are prepared if you’re bringing kids along.
Travel is never perfect. I’ve been in weird rooms with actual glass walls with a perfect framed view of the shitter facing the bed. I have no idea why they did this, maybe this culture values natural light in bathrooms? I witnessed it more than once so it wasn’t just one creepy place. Individual privacy especially within the same family is something of a recent and western concept from my understanding.
Either way it was hilarious and a minor inconvenience considering it was a lot minute hotel. It’s just peeing and pooping, we all do it. My traveling friend and I took turns averting our eyes. We had warm clean beds and a story to tell.
I think that connecting outlying areas (especially ones you the railroad build yourself) to department stores is what got Japanese rail companies going, but it's probably less important now than it was initially. Farebox revenue covers profitable operation of the railroad. It even appears to cover upgrades; browse around on the satellite view of Tokyo and you can see many private companies moving their above-ground infrastructure to (expensive!) subways because ... trains hitting cars interferes with their ability to earn money. It is honestly something that I have trouble wrapping my head around. The business is so good you can afford to make it better, but the business is a commuter train? Weird!
I think Japan is successful because of a less pervasive car culture than the US. People expect to walk 30 minutes to the train in the morning, that's just something you do. It would be unheard of in the US (and also dangerous in many suburbs, because they are designed to move as many giant SUVs as possible per hour, not to let pedestrians and cyclists get to the train station).
Also, a big caveat is ... all of this is Tokyo and Osaka, very large, rich, and dense cities. When you go out into the middle of nowhere in Japan (even an hour out of Tokyo, think the Hachikō line, etc.), rail service kind of sucks and is subsidized heavily.
I've noticed a pattern of companies writing their customers open letters asking them to do their contract negotiations for them. First it was ESPN vs. YouTube (not watching MNF this week was the best 3 hours I've ever saved, sorry advertisers). Now it's OpenAI vs. The New York Times.
Little do they know that I care very little for either party and enjoy seeing both of them squirm. You went to business school, not me. Work it out.
In this case, it's awfully suspicious that OpenAI is worried about The New York Times finding literal passages in their articles that ChatGPT spits out verbatim. If your AI doesn't do that, like you say, then why would it be a problem to check?
Finally, both parties should find a neutral third party. The neutral third party gets the full text of every NYT article and ChatGPT transcript, and finds the matches. NYT doesn't get ChatGPT transcripts. OpenAI doesn't get the full text of every NYT article (even though they have to already have that). Everyone is happy. If OpenAI did something illegal, the court can find out. If they didn't, then they're safe. I think it would be very fair.
(I take the side of neither party. I'm not a huge fan of training language models on content that wasn't licensed for that purpose. And I'm not a huge fan of The NYT's slide to the right as they cheerlead the end of the American experiment.)
> Finally, both parties should find a neutral third party.
That's next to impossible. And if that party fails to be neutral you've just generated a new lawsuit entangled with this one.
The current procedure is each side gets their own expert. The two expert can duke it out and the crucible of the courtroom decides who was more credible.
That's fair. I understand why OpenAI wouldn't want to give anyone transcripts (as a user, I frankly wouldn't even want OpenAI to keep my transcripts), and I understand why the NYT doesn't want to give OpenAI all their articles.
Maybe the NYT needs to bloom-filter-ify their articles in 10 word chunks (or something, I don't know enough about linguistics to tell you what's unique enough for copyright infringement or to prove "copying"), have OpenAI search transcripts, and turn over the matches. That limits the scope of the search dramatically, but is still invasive.
I sandwich them between my phone and a clear case now. Don't even have to take the stickum protector part off, so when you get a new phone, you can take your favorite stickers easily. Disadvantage: you get like 2 stickers total.
I love how long the terrible speech synthesis on BART lasted. I don't mean this in a negative way at all. BART was so state of the art when it was built, that it still feels like the future today. They did a good job on ... everything.
Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for.
Nah, they did a good job on one thing: PR. As public transit? We've been suffering the consequences of their chronic NIH for going on fifty years now.
Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go
find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for.
BART's covered the topic of their computerized voices a few times. This was the first I found, but they've covered it more recently with the arrival of their newer trains.
Trains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips, so I'm surprised BART chose this synthesized system. Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings?
Trains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips
BART did too. I think the announcements date back to the early days of BART. The computerized text-to-speech didn't come around until 2000 and only cover train arrivals.
Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings?
BART's always gone for style over substance, so yeah that probably played a part in it. There's a small chance that text-to-speech was cheaper than paying a human.
In San Francisco, Muni paid a Texan to record stop announcements for their buses. I've absolutely no idea how this ended up being the case but she absolutely massacred the pronunciation of a few (mostly Spanish) words.
I'm so confused by this power dynamics. So you can torrent movies just fine from Meta/Google office in Germany? No matter how you look at it, the White House has holes in the walls as in Idiocracy.
Honestly, I'm not even an Apple fangirl and that thing is a great computer. I bought one for work and it served me better than any other $999 computer ever did. It's apparently $599 now? Great value, in my opinion.
Having just switched up to the M4 air you're not wrong. Unless you have the 8GB version and it's causing you memory pressure (which it may not be), or you really need that extra display output (I did), it's a wonder machine still 5 years later.
Also, that wedge design might be peak laptop. It's just soooo nice when lifting off a surface. I know that sounds ridiculous but the attention to detail that went into that design is next level.
Even though I'm not in the market, part of me really hopes the MacBook SE (or whatever they call it) uses the wedge design to clear chassis parts like they did with the SE iphones (although I doubt it).
