The country is incredibly resistant to change, which is perfectly on brand considering the Edo Period.

They only want foreign workers that work for established Japanese businesses, farms, etc. Or are so wealthy that they can start their own business with large initial investments.

That last part is getting outlawed very soon, though enforcement is a different story

I mean “we” are the descendants of both colonizers and colonized.

My grandmother was (at least phenotypically) fully indigenous, my grandfather was (at least phenotypically) fully European. But both were born in Colombia.

It’s very hard to draw a clear line between who is descendant of colonizer or colonized because of how much interracial rape, marriage, trade, business and everything in between there was.

We shouldn’t whitewash our past (many people do), but depicting all South Americans not actively living in native reserves as fully European or fully indigenous is very misinformed or downright malicious at best.

The prevailing narrative in many South American countries is that either we were horribly oppressed and abused by the Spaniards / Portuguese, basically appropriating the plight and history of natives, or that we came on boats from Europe and erased natives, which invisibilizes their story and a huge part of our own history and ancestors.

South America is messy like that. And I have no doubt that if another great war breaks out in Europe, we will keep receiving European immigrants as we always have.

Not German. But it’s usually differentiated by the use of possessive or no possessive.

Mein Freundin = Partner

Eine Freundin = Friend

English is usually the same though.

My girlfriend = Partner

One of my girlfriends / a girlfriend = Friend

People nowadays have new targets: immigrants, LGBT+, progressives etc. But at one point in time, the Irish were one such group, surrounded by harmful stereotypes. They’re fully justified in being wary of the British even to this day.

Moreover, you just need to see what people did to the Irish to imagine where all modern nationality anti immigrant rhetoric can go

Colombia has IKEA, this is just an old picture

Colombia too. This picture must be old af

This is actually extremely similar to the way the US has carried out its brand of imperialism throughout most of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Quite interesting.

What makes it truly Facebook boomer slop isn’t that the story is implausible (because such a misunderstanding and then correction is perfectly likely) but the lack of sources, the anecdotal and vague nature of the post, and the slightly misguided message of “motherly experience will always beat studies and expertise” which is only pandering to the mothers who read this stuff.

If this actually happened, give that woman a name and tell us who she was, don’t just call her “a mother”.

This also varies widely from country to country. You’re not going to see the same level and type of corruption in a place like Liberia compared to for example Thailand, Colombia or Morocco.

Some countries have corruption so deep, it’s almost impossible to live without engaging somehow, and the State acts almost like a paramilitary group that beyond taxes, charges for protection from themselves, while other countries have flawed systems that still guarantee a certain degree of protections and due process to as many people as possible. And yet other countries are only poor but still have functional systems and institutions.

The term “developing country” is, in my opinion, quite misguided because it lumps together countries like Venezuela, Haiti, Belarus, Somalia or Eritrea, which are totally royally fucked, with countries like Argentina, Botswana, Thailand or Colombia, which have big problems but are in no way close to the other group.

They break guitars, for one. That’s literally their company policy.

That’s ALL of Reddit. Go to soccercirclejerk? It’s thinly linking anything in football to American politics. Go to pics? It’s pictures of American politics. Go to whoadude? It’s videos of Americans being political in impressive ways.

Everywhere you go, the American politics are unavoidable. And I’m not American, and I already know that country is almost entering a civil war, and I don’t want that to be the only thing I see all day and night.

The funniest part is that based on what people are saying or GPT5, the ending where AIs get super bored of humans’ stupidity and dump them seems so likely

But I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem that can’t be solved. LLM and so on are ultimately simply statistical analysis, and if you refine it and train it enough, it can absolutely summarise at least one paper at the moment. Google’s Notebook LM is already capable of it, I just don’t think it can quite pull off many of them yet. But the current state of LLMs is not that far off.

I agree with AIs being way over hyped and also just having a general dislike for them due to the way they’re being used, the people who gush over them, and the surrounding culture. But I don’t think that means we should simply ignore reality altogether. The LLMs from 2 or even 1 year ago are not even comparable to the ones today, and that trend will probably keep going that way for a while. The main issue lies with the ethics of training, copyright, and of course, the replacement of labor in exchange of what amounts to simply a cool tool.

The problem is that you do need to keep training models for this to make sense.

And you always need at least some human editorialization of models, otherwise the model will just say whatever, learn from itself and degrade over time. This cannot be done by other AIs, so for now you still need humans to make sure the AI models are actually getting useful information.

The problem with this, which many have already pointed out, is that it makes AIs just as unreliable as any traditional media. But if you don’t oversee their datasets at all and just allow them to learn from everything then they’re even more useless, basically just replicating social media bullshit, which nowadays is like at least 60% AI generated anyway.

So yeah, the current model is, not surprisingly, completely unsustainable.

The technology itself is great though. Imagine having an AI that you can easily train at home on 100s of different academic papers, and then run specific analyses or find patterns that would be too big for humans to see at first. Also imagine the impact to the medical field with early cancer detection or virus spreading patterns, or even DNA analysis for certain diseases.

It’s also super good if used for creative purposes (not for just generating pictures or music). So for example, AI makes it possible for you to sing a song, then sing the melody for every member of a choir, and fine tune all voices to make them unique. You can be your own choir, making a lot of cool production techniques more accessible.

I believe once the initial hype dies down, we stop seeing AI used as a cheap marketing tactic, and the bubble bursts, the real benefits of AI will become apparent, and hopefully we will learn to live with it without destroying each other lol.

I’d be happy to go back to 2011

Bizarre and yet not very surprised. There’s all sorts of funny English used everywhere in Shanghai