Crossing the Mexico US border illegally nowadays involves a multi-day hike through the desert and is extremely dangerous. I’m not sure if it’s as dangerous as crossing the Mediterranean on a smuggler boat, but many people do die making the trek from Mexico to the US.
I feel like tourist places are “weirdly concentrated” as you put it. When I was Florence the center was obviously super busy, but walking only 15 minutes in one direction there seemed to be almost no tourists around (of course, the area I was in didn’t have any sights). It made me think that maybe there’s a bias to the feeling of overtourism because people think about the one part of the city where all the tourists are.
New Orleans Louisiana is like this, walk down Bourbon street and it's packed with tourists but turn and walk perpendicular to Bourbon street for 2 blocks and you're all alone.
I think there’s a zero sum fallacy in play here. For example you say “Those fancy resorts take all the prime real estate” but many resort towns in Mexico like Cancun were literally invented out of thin air for international tourism. The alternative reality is not “Cancun for the locals”; the alternative reality is no Cancun.
In general we have the ability to expand the amount of available housing/hotels/etc. to meet increased demand. It’s not a zero sum game.
Even sticking with Japan, Kyoto was basically saved by international tourism. An American tourist ended up ended up intervening 20 years after his visit when he saw Kyoto at the top of America's list of cities to use nuclear weapons on.
Although I don't think the commonly repeated story that Stinson visited on his honeymoon is true, he had gotten married in the previous century
This is a little bit what confuses me about these stories.
As someone who lives in NYC and works with Broadway shows we thrive on tourists. Are there locals who live in Times Square or a few blocks off? Sure, it’s not all that annoying, and most folks like me live in an area that isn’t particularly crowded with tourists, if at all.
When I read stories like this, I never quite understand if it’s worse other places than NYC. Or if I’d go there and be unphased. That it’s just people from some empty suburb where lots have a 10 acre minimum that are bothered by this and write these stories.
Wow, this is an extremely long-winded and self-indulgent "well actually" comment. I read the whole thing hoping to find the point, but it never came.
Who cares if it was an actual honeymoon or another trip decades after he was married? He was key to sparing the city, and his personal experience with its rich history was a part of that. That's the interesting story, and nothing in this article refutes that.
Replace foreigners with "white" and you're more or less spot on.
I know far too many non-Japanese-asian people who get held to the standards applied to Japanese people - not even over tattoos, but things like language, cultural understandings, etc. The aspect of this with white people is where the infamous "gaijin smash" came from.
We were told by our onsen host that as long as we made a genuine attempt at covering our tattoos, the onsen didn't mind (given that we were obviously foreigners). Making an attempt at covering was still required (and we used high end stage makeup that was waterproof).
Seems like if you smile and act friendly and dumb and American you get a lot of slack along with the Japanese shopkeeper version of an eye roll and a headpat.
This rule applies to most confucian/communal East Asian societies with individuals from the West. People aren't idiots, they realize cultures differ, so they're willing to give some slack; especially, with a culture they're somewhat familiar with through media (the US, for instance).
With Japan and Korea (especially the latter) towards Americans, there's also a soft-unspoken rule (that sort of goes both ways) due to the relationship those countries have fostered towards each other. A Brit/German/Italian/etc who spends more than a short visit in Korea/speaks Korean will probably start being taken to the side for flouting cultural norms like age-deference, polite speech, etc to be informed of their cultural mores (usually phrased with an indication that they also come from a structured society, they should understand that this is the way it is); while this will rarely happen to the same group of Americans. In some cases it's the "dumb/naive American" effect, but it also has to do with the larger relationship between the two countries.
If you’re integrating/being an “expat” in a society, you’re going to develop familiarity. The “average” Korean won’t know anything about you and continue to just treat you like a tourist (unless you speak fluent Korean), but your social and professional circle won’t. You can’t go very far into relationships in a foreign country without people knowing your background.
Less importantly but somewhat obvious: many Koreans are fairly competent in English and familiar with common American accents. They’ll know pretty quickly if you aren’t speaking with one.
language/accent obviously, dress, manners and also English people in particular look distinct physically given that most white Americans are more likely to have Northwestern European ancestry. The stereotypical "American white guy" would have an easier time on Swedish or German TV than joining the cast of Peaky Blinders
Isn't this like saying it's impossible to see the difference between a Korean person or a Japanese person speaking English? It should be fairly obvious from the accent alone.
This is a part of the issue, knowing the rules but nonetheless not following them. And then — culturally unaware — thinking it's ok because nobody says anything.
The fact that they share a head of state is irrelevant? If it was relevant, you could equally make the claim that Britain is under the "stewardship" of the Canadians. I think the British would be surprised to hear that!
"Also by floating proposals that the Danish *state* and British *monarch* cede their stewardship of Greenland and Canada to the USA."
Yes, one still can be tedius and argue that the Throne's veto over Canadian legislation doesn't qualify as 'stewardship' (since it is supposed to be symbolic)
The point of my comment (which I maintain) is that Britain has strong ties with Canada, and so Trump butting in, pushing for Canada to abandon the Commonwealth to become a state, comes across as hostile.
Canadians may find the threat more alarming than Britons, but it's welcomed by neither people.
Canada the country, being a democracy, is owned by the Canadian people, not the king (just like the United States is owned by the American people, not the president). If Trump encroaches on the sovereignty of Canada it is an affront to the Canadian people. What the British think is of distinctly secondary importance.
I'm not sure you see the irony of your stance. You're complaining about the American president butting into Canadian affairs because it infringes on some supposed colonialist rights of an absentee king.
If Trump encroaches on the sovereignty of Canada it is an affront to the Canadian people. What the British think is of distinctly secondary importance.
Yes, and that is consistent with my comment.
You're complaining about the American president butting into Canadian affairs because it infringes on some supposed colonialist rights of an absentee king.
Well, if Canada has such weak ties to the UK, it might as well be part of America. Heck, just preserve public healthcare, and French language laws... why not?
Of course, that is not the case. There are still strong historical, legal, traditional, cultural, and familial ties.
This is why PM Carney invited Canada's king to Parliament last month. It was a reminder to Trump that his overtures were not simply an affront to Canada, but also to Britain.
I'm not convinced. This article focuses on individual use and how inconsequential it is, but it seems like to me it dismisses the training part that it does mention a bit too fast to my taste.
> it’s a one-time cost
No, it's not. AI company constantly train new models and that's where the billions of dollars they get go into. It's only logical: they try to keep improving. What's more, the day you stop training new models, the existing models will "rot": they will keep working, but on old data, they won't be fresh anymore. the training will continue, constantly.
An awful quantity of hardware and resources are being monopolized where they could be allocated to something worthier, or just not allocated at all.
> Individuals using LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini collectively only account for about 3% of AI’s total energy use after amortizing the cost of training.
Yeah, we agree, running queries is comparatively cheap (still 10 times more than a regular search query though, if I'm to believe this article (and I have no reason not to)) after amortizing the cost of training. But there's no after, as we've seen.
As long as these companies are burning billions of dollars, they are burning some correlated amount of CO2.
As an individual, I don't want to signal to these companies, through my use of their LLMs, that they should keep going like this.
And as AI is more and more pervasive, we are going to start relying on it very hard, and we are also going to train models on everything, everywhere (chat messages, (video) calls, etc). The training is far from being a one shot activity and it's only going to keep increasing as long as there are rich believers willing to throw shit-tons of money into this.
Now, assuming these AIs do a good job of providing accurate answers that you don't have to spend more time on proofreading / double checking (which I'm not sure they always do), we are unfortunately not replacing the time we won by nothing. We are still in a growth economy, the time that is freed will be used to produce even more garbage, at an even faster rate.
(I don't like that last argument very much though, I'm not for keeping people busy at inefficient tasks just because, but this unfortunately needs to be taken in account - and that's, as a software developer, a harsh reality that also applies to my day to day job. As a software developer, my job is to essentially automatize tasks for people so they can have more free time because now the computers can do their work a bit more. But as a species, we've not increased our free time. We've just made it more fast-paced and stressful)
The article also mentions that there are other things to look into to improve things related to climate change, but the argument goes both ways: fighting against power hungry LLMs don't prevent you from addressing other causes.
You don't need to store the diffs for the coordinates that are not in the bloom filter. If the number of coordinates that changed is small, the size of the bloom filter will be small, and this is a significant optimization.
As a rule of thumb, Bloom filters require 10 bits per element for a 1% false positive rate. Say 100 pixels changed between the frames, that 1000 bits or ~125 bytes to store the which-pixel-changed-map.
Runlength encoding of the (in)active bits can use anything from ~10-200 bytes for 100 pixels (Say 1 byte per run, 200 runs of active vs. inactive in the worst case).
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