Japan is also trying to take a stab at Apple with app store anti trust stuff, but I wonder how these things will play out. Will they just pay some fine and continue to go about their day or will some big change happen, even just for the Japanese market?

I seriously doubt the Japanese government having any power when it comes to opening up the app/play store, or enforcing something of that scale. Europe has been whining a lot, but I don't think there's anything radical being done yet.

It's all but certain that the App store will be opened up to the degree the DMA demands, when it demands it.

The act will only fully come into force next year and until then nothing needs to be done (besides measures like reporting users to determine who is even affected).

I'm sure the Apple PR team is still debating whether they hide the changes in a font size 1 footnote or whether this will be a "bold decision taken by Apple".

And the jury is yet out how much malicious compliance, that will result in a second round of legislative action and some court cases, they will use.

But rest assured, something is going to happen.

I don’t know about the green kanji, but the traditional “Jueju” Poem by Chinese poet Du Fu has the line “山青花欲然”, and “青” the Kanji for Blue in Japan means green in this context, as it describes “山” which means mountain.

By the way there’s a variety of kanji that reads “aoi” in modern Japanese. 青い, 蒼い, 碧い are all “aoi”, but we use 青い mainly as blue today.

Oh that’s interesting. Yeah 青 is used in Chinese as another word for green. I don’t know that it has any connotations of blue, but I did grow up in the US, so perhaps there’s nuance to that character I’m unaware of, or the character slightly changed meaning when made a kanji.

If it was the real one plus one other AI image, it would have been a bit harder.

I wonder whether the Darien Gap or the US-Mexico border (and surrounding deserts) is more dangerous to cross illegally.

The US–Mexico border is so long and varied, danger is going to vary significantly. I cycled the Baja Divide cycling route, which starts from San Diego and goes through the nearby Otay Mountain wilderness reserve before reaching the Mexican border. The trails around Otay are littered with backpacks dropped by migrants, and when I asked a CBP officer parked in his car monitoring the area, he said that patrols were only partly successful and aliens were constantly getting through. It’s just a few km of walking before a migrant will hit a paved road where a prearranged contact can pick him up. Compared to descriptions of crossing the desert farther east, this seemed pretty safe, with the main risk the waste of days and months if one is caught by Mexican or US authorities.

There’s a good video in which a YouTube creator gets a tour around the US-Mexico border with an Arizona sheriff and discusses these kinds of issues: https://youtu.be/GdYAYgbf5Uc?si=RD8b8NTfxsyv0urz

There’s also a Texas sheriff video, but the Arizona video is more interesting IMO because the sheriff knows more about how immigration law impacts border enforcement.

The individual pods look amazing. The traditional style is good for getting to know people and what not, but this is the way it should be.

It's kind of unfortunate that we have hands suited for holding portrait screens, but our sight/vision is in landscape.

It's kind unfortunate that we have a big world, 8 billions of people to select subsets to meet, thousands of things to do and see, and we're glued to screens for multiple hours per day to the detriment of other activities, to the point of lamenting our landscape oriented vision.

It was not so in the era of button phones which typically have the lower half of "facade" filled with buttons.

Yeah but those screens were tiny. If you want a decent size landscape screen to hold naturally, you need to do something crazy like the LG wing with its flipping screen.

The "bored with her date" is great. People back then seem to have had a lot of personality. Or maybe its just the sheer amount of people smoking back then.

I love that tidbit on personality. It's true. The personalities were stronger. I'm not from the generation but have made similar observation from it. Peoples public life and reputation back then was more guarded and integrated more closely in private life as well through pristine optics and bubbling character. There was far fewer media influences and even fewer acceptable divergences from ones regional status quo. The secret lives were burried deep with shadows simply oppressed from fear as the oppression and consequences of dissent was high. It built strong wills and personality through high standards and expectations of character to achieve the standard path to success. You walked out the door with this great personality as that's all you had to have a chance in yesterworld. Today the variety of personalities is far greater but the conviction in these dispersed personalities is more flexible as we are all exposed to a wider variety of influences and generally more tolerant of dissent.

I live in Japan so this could actually be super useful. How did you make it? Where did you get the real time data from?

Europe would be crazy with all the canals

This is quite funny but you do get used to it.

You don't even calculate the hours per year you spent removing padding from text boxes anymore...