I don't know how it would work for people who can travel visa free, but for people on K-1, F-, M- and J-visas, as well as for people on work visas, you're required to set your social media visibility to public between the time when you apply for the visa and the time when a decision is made on it.
>to set your social media visibility to public between the time when you apply for the visa and the time when a decision is made on it.
That's absolutely crazy, thanks for sharing. We're entering a pretty dark time here. It's easy to imagine that authorities won't really care if you don't have social media and will just deny you out of convenience. If this gets even more entrenched, then social media gets closer to being a requirement. (and a requirement that is quite a personal detriment)
There's a subreddit for software people with adhd and it's terrible, every second post is about a New and Exciting Tool to manage adhd. Most of them are vibe coded, all of them come from randos I wouldn't trust with what I had for breakfast, let alone a whole life management system.
I check in every few weeks and I don't understand how anyone can use that subreddit more frequently.
that's eventually what drove me away from adhd_programmers as well, tho I'm sorry they even still allow AI apps anymore cuz it was bad before llms blew up
ah yes, the places where women can expect to die if they happen to need medical care while pregnant and where LGBTQ people are not treated the same as most citizens. Sounds lovely.
Whatever the epithets, the truth of the matter is those urban areas are closer to what Canada aspires to be (and currently is). Whereas the parts of Canada she cares about are alive and well in the US (and used to be more like what Canada was).
The question becomes: if you're traveling on a line, and you see the destination looks dark ahead of you, do you turn around or keep going?
Canada's notoriously polite deference led them to align with those powerful tech, marketing, and financial hubs in the US. A cheerleader on the sidelines. But everyone gets to pick. There's a lack of acknowledgement that there's even a choice; the dog that didn't bark one could say. But it's part and parcel of why modern Canada is the way it is.
I was not born in Canada, but I chose to immigrate here and it's one of the top 5 best choices I've ever made. I have access to so much that in other places would be wildly expensive. My life is richer due to the diversity of the people I am surrounded by, if I bought every book I borrowed from the library last year it would have cost $3000 or more, and even after moving away from a large city I have access to public transit good enough to cover most of my needs.
It's actually really wild to think I spent a couple of years working in Boston more than a decade ago, and I used my zipcar subscription way more often than I've ever had to use a communauto in fake london (a city no one would mistake for having good urban planning).
Being Dutch* it's such a strange concept that you don't have to pay to bring books to your home. I hope that we will see that over here as well in my lifetime. It would do wonders to increase literacy in the population.
I spent a lot of time in Latin America growing up, including in parts that didn't have public libraries. Your comment is shocking to me, I guess I just assumed most developed countries has libraries that function in similar ways. Wikipedia says there are about 600 libraries in the Netherlands, do you not get to borrow books for free?
They're integral to the fabric of society in my view.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I never knew there were libraries with a subscription model. Hopefully that means the catalogues are really good and well-taken care of.
Is this a strange concept due to you being European or because of your particular European country? I thought public libraries where you can borrow books is a common thing in Europe, but I could be wrong since I just assumed that.
And is the party whose political program is the closest to what the article rightfully commends as great about Canada, yet all it gets in return from many a Canadian is cheap potshots.
As is, the first-past-the-post system will continue to give PCs an unfair advantage until they either splinter into two or are outflanked by a yet nonexistent party from the right. Neither option doesn't seem likely at the moment.
The other option, I guess, would be for the Libs and NDP to merge, shed their conservative members to the PC and try to be the Ontario party. Splitting the centre-left while not splitting the centre-right is really counterproductive. And if I was a PC grandee, which I';m not, I'd get all my buddies donating to the NDP to keep things the way they are now. Perhaps the Libs and NDP need to foster the far right to peel voters away? But man, there's a risk in that kind of behaviour in case they ever win. That'll be the wrong kind of orange wave.
> then perhaps AI is the electric scooter for the mind
I have a whole half-written blog post about how LLMs are the cars of the mind. Massive externalities, has to be forced on people, leads to cognitive/health issues instead of improving cognition and health.
I think you'll find that while those locations are bad, they don't compare to places in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Jordan. There are places easily 100x worse.
Far more fossil fuel is burned in Northern climates (needlessly!) for winter heating than is done for just living in the Southern climates, including A/C.
I am against companies doing age verification like this due to the surveillance effects, but I agree with you that the censorship angle is not a good one.
I suppose mainly because I don't think a non-minor committing suicide with ChatGPT's help and encouragement matters less than a minor doing so. I honestly thing the problem is the user interface for GPT being a chat. I think it has a psychological effect that you can talk to ChatGPT the same way you can talk to Emily from school. I don't think this is a solvable problem if OpenAI wants this to be their main product (and obviously they do).
