No matter how beautiful architecture is it's still not natural beauty.

I do agree there's plenty of places in other countries that have natural beauty, but the US has a combination of very large natural spaces, kept in a mostly natural state (not over developed), and does a decent job maintaining it. This is relatively rare (although the US is not the only one).

The US Forest Service has nothing to do with the amount of ads and billboards in US cities.

Canada & Australia are better examples than the US.

How is that relevant to this conversation?

> How is that relevant to this conversation?

Because it's important to put Americans in their place. They are not good, and must be reminded that others are better.

I'm 90% sure this is satire, but given how things are and how fashionable it is to hate on America/Americans I'm not sure. I guess that says something ha

It’s not as rare as you think.

Anyway not hating, just giving some other examples.

There's hundreds of countries in the world. I said "relatively rare" and I said explicitly US is not the only one with worthwhile nature. Where did I give the impression I thought it was uniquely rare?

I buy both physical and digital books and much prefer digital, reading on my kindle is more convenient (especially to adjust the font size). For sharing with family, I have a family library set up with Amazon and the experience is really smooth.

I do enjoy owning physical copies of books I liked, and they are part of the “decor” at home at this point. I have limited space so I have 2 completely stacked bookshelves, and then piles of books around the kitchen on top of the cupboards etc.

So I don’t think it needs to be “either or”. :)

Are you okay with losing your entire Kindle library in case you lose your amazon account?

The last 2 chapters made me not want to recommend the book. I’m so divided about it because the book started of incredibly strong.

This has been my feeling on Dune book 4 - God Emperor of Dune. While it contains several great banger quotes, it leans way more conservative than the previous books to the point that it was difficult to finish. "Oh no, female warriors kissing! ICK!!" and Leto's whole "Humanity _NEEDS_ me as GOD EMPEROR because this IS JUST THE ONLY WAYYY!" are just some examples.

I thought the whole point about Dune was that even the 'good guys' are really pretty messed up people at best and that you should absolutely not be taking moral advice from any of them. See every idiot AI-hater accidentally endorsing slavery by a bunch of idiot psychotics by saying "We need a Butlerian Jihad".

Book 1-3 of Dune are masterpieces IMO. Book 4 was still good although I didn’t enjoy it as much as the trilogy. But I still consider it part of the same overall “Leto/Paul arc”.

Book 5-6 were okay, but didn’t live up to expectations.

To go on more of a tangent, I really thought these books would be impossible to turn into films, but the Villeneuve films are good so far!

I think you may have missed the point of GEoD

I do something similar - but I'm quite picky with books I buy due to limited physical space.

Same! I just finished the book a few days ago. The first half is really good, a cool premise and interesting story. The second half just got a bit too weird for me and by the final chapter I was happy it was finished lol.

I liked piecing the story together in the SCP wiki.

Later I read the first version of the book and it was okay, but the vibes were a bit lost.

The new version of the book I didn't even finish.

Well technical difficulty is one piece. Cost and ROI are a different one.

Have you missed the events of the past year under Trump? With literal claims of taking over EU territory?

I know that Trump is the equivalent of a hallucinating LLM, but you can’t just ignore his words whenever convenient.

GH being bought by MSFT way precedes their OpenAI involvement IIRC. And I don’t think it was even needed to train their models given Anthropic does fine without owning GitHub.

So this logic doesn’t pass the smell test to me.

EDIT: seems there was only a year in between them buying GH (2018) and investing in OpenAI (2019). So _maybe_ they had that foresight.

Honestly given that they’re nowhere near profitable even with their main product this is the right move.

I started out gaming on CRTs in the late 90s. Moved to LCD in the mid-2000s and haven't looked back. I don't miss CRTs, not least the bulkiness of them lol.

For real haha. I remember helping my dad move his old big screen TV out of his house when he replaced it with a "flat screen" and holy hell, it beat the hell out of 4 of us and we only had to take it 100 feet. The bulk was something I'm the young will never be able to appreciate :-D