I'm an alien. I'm a legal alien.

That's a bit harsh. A lot of the pictures you see on menus are not what they cooked in the kitchen. Because cooked food doesn't look sexy enough. Or only when it's hot and then steam coming off it makes it look worse in the image. So they use glue to gloss things up, replace entire ingredients (e.g. motor oil for maple syrup), etc. Food photography is serious business. And expensive.

The numbers 47 and 42 are sacrosanct. The former is Trek where it shows up a lot, the latter is the answer to everything. Pick a different number, ChatGPT!

Do you mean off Drive or Photos? Images saved from Drive should be ready to go once unzipped. If they came from Photos each image is divorced from its meta data, which comes in a separate file. So you need to check if the new service or software you're using can reunite those two or you need to find a tool online to do that first. They make it deliberately a pain in the posterior to leave Photos.

I remember the day when the training wheels came off my bike and it was glorious. The feeling of success you can only feel as a child when you have mastered something you think you should do. They didn't come off because they were no longer cool. They were never cool to begin with. And you didn't have much say in the matter anyway.

I am willing to believe that balance bikes to proper bikes is a better learning experience, according to the boffins. That doesn't mean though that anybody who learned on training wheels is inferior. People who learned to ride a bike like that also won the Tour de France.

I think if I was caught like this, the last thing I'd want to do is talk to the media about it. Not even under a pseudonym. But this story is probably not here to make Google feel bad and return some of the money. This is a reminder for parents everywhere to review payment and parental settings on anything their kids use online. You can be smug enough to say my 8yo doesn't stream on Twitch or whatever because why tf would you let them anyway. But you're deleting the credit card off of Google Play because you forgot it was there because parenting makes you forgetful at times.

I don't have an example for you. I see another left hook coming your way unexpectedly and that is from the term "genocide." It's fairly new. It was coined during WW2. And people still argue about the definition. We have killed each other for time immemorial but we didn't have that label that stuck to slap onto the most egregious cases. So anything before the Holocaust is given the label after the fact. And that will have some historians at the ready contesting it. So most genocides are contested not because they don't want to admit a lot of killing was going on. But because they cannot agree on what genocide means.

They hold ten-year trials in The Hague to figure out if a Milosevic or similar asshole is guilty of it. There is wiggle room in the definition. Were enough people killed? Was it targeted enough? And other distasteful questions.

We talk about genocide like it's a fixed term and everybody knows what it means. But it's more in that "I know it when I see it" category and the resulting wiggle room will make any argument you're having harder. You can't get to the slam dunk of your argument when your opponent withdraws from it on this technicality.

My opinion as another cis dude: there are three things at play. (1) What is the definition of "feminism?" If you believe that women and men and everybody in between and beyond are equally worthy members of society and should not be discriminated against in any way, then you fit my definition and can call yourself a feminist. (2) I recognize that this is a hot button issue for some people unfortunately. I also see that other people may operate under a different definition. I give shit to anybody with opinions on the matter that go against (1). I don't necessarily use the word "feminist" in that context because some words - good words! - have a way of closing people off like an oyster. "Woke" and "feminism" are two examples. Worthy concepts behind both in my view but the mere mention makes some people stop listening. Especially those who would benefit from widening their horizons. Humans are capable of rational thought but we don't always do or behave that way. I'm dogmatic in my opinion but I'm not dogmatic in the language that I use so I try and adjust it to fit the situation. (3) Even among supposed allies you'll find oddballs. You don't want to be a self-professed feminist who mansplains feminism, just as an example.

In this mixed minefield, I think I want to be judged more by my actions than the terms I use.

Registration is mandatory and registry may be checked on the street if they see you're missing a wheel reflector etc. I'm not sure if that's by local or national ordinance. Japan has a mountain problem, i.e. most of the country consists of them pushing most of the 100-something million people into the two major plains and a handful of other big cities. Where people live in shoe boxes and converge around train busy stations. Where space is doubly at a premium and most cities have no parking zones for bicycles on the streets. If they didn't force people into paid parking arrangements, the streets or more specifically the often conically narrow sidewalks would become impassable with bicycles. I've seen bicycle "tow trucks" in action in Tokyo. It's just a big open truck with an outfit of lock pickers/cutters that impound illegally parked bicycles. The registry helps reunite owners with their bikes and a nice fine. Theft is less of a problem here and depending on the area you'll see bikes that are locked but not locked to anything immovable and people leaving helmets or other items in the basket because chances are nobody will take it.

You may need to doxx yourself a little bit to get a good answer.

I live in Japan where bicycles are registered with the police. So you could take the registration number to the police.

The frames normally have stenciled ID numbers on it and that is important information for the police in Europe, where I had four bicycles stolen when I lived there. So you could ask for the number and go to the police first.

Generally, if I had the inkling of a suspicion that this bike was stolen I'd back off the sale.

If the dual passport holder is lucid and able to make decisions, they can choose which country's evacuation effort they will take advantage of. Neither country is in any position to deny this, even if having the other nationality is in violation of the law in the first one. Rescue first, prosecute later.

If the person is unable to make decisions for themselves, there are a number of situations that are possible. Maybe the first consular staff on the scene takes charge; nobody looks for a second passport of a person they don't know when they located the first. If for whatever reason both consular outfits are involved, they figure out who will be in charge. Probably the one where the unconscious patient has spent the most time in living most recently. A lot of that will have to do with how well the countries get along.

This sounds similar to Google search results getting worse so you need to make more searches or look at more results pages so they can sell more ads on every extra clicked page.

The difference is this though. Google was doing this shit as market leader by a country mile in a saturated market. These so-called AI fuckers are trying to operate on an open heart while the hospital is still being built. What you are doing as a user is helping them get better. Eventually. At the same time they have financial difficulties. So the aim to be the best Skynet runs into operational hurdles, like not having the money to do what needs doing or their models being caught doing questionable stuff. That includes all the cases where human ignorance or hubris is so blame, like the Hugging Face case. That's not good PR and the surgeon in my metaphor above is forced to switch gear while the half built hospital is being moved to another location yet again.

To the outside, they need to present themselves as trustworthy companies that do good. Internally, we will learn in time they are a fucking mess of competing interests, of which greed will eventually win over any other concern. If a model is getting worse it's because the conditions of the surgery have changed again. And they will change again. In the long term, the only way is up. In the much shorter term, development will be much more volatile.

I'm so glad I don't need to use any of that. Especially for work.