The expansion of the sport pilot category should mean you can fly most trainer airplanes with just a driver license.

No, unsustainable societies like the Lykov family or the Tasmanians were also often unspecialized. I suspect that specialization improves sustainability in general, at least up to a point. But it depends on how it's structured. The Khwarezmian empire had a high degree of specialization for the time, but one bad decision by the emperor made it unsustainable.

You could apply the same logic to "Women in X" groups. It's not discrimination as much as it is support.

Would you consider the images you create to be art?

Of course. The writing I create is art too. There is still creativity involved: I still have to come up with the prompt for the AI.

I never said anything about the degree. Of course my art is not as valuable as someone who has spent a lifetime perfecting their craft. But both are still art.

You're going to fall of that high horse of yours and break something. Most art for blogs before AI was shitty stock photos, maybe with a filter applied. It was not high art. It wasn't a major creative endeavor. It was a means to get Google with it's toxic ranking to bubble a blog post higher than the low effort copy/paste slop.

Google ranks a text-only page lower than one with a hero image. It ranks pages with a single image lower than one with multiple images. The stock art industry had long ago devalued actual art on the web selling vast collections of stock photos for a few dollars or giving away dreck for free.

AI tools have put no more actual artists out of work than Shutterstock or Unsplash. At least with an AI tool someone can make a hero image slightly more creative than "vaguely ethnic woman looking at computer" or a n out of focus picture of a dandelion.

TIL hero images on blogs are a valid metric when discussing art as a concept. If that's your primary exposure you're uniquely unqualified to have an opinion.

He commented elsewhere that he uses a Python library that wraps a private API

Right, the point is that complexity is unnecessary.

How did we ever survive without computerized vehicles?

We tolerated worse gas mileage (computer controlled fuel injection, transmission, etc.), safety (anti-lock brakes), etc. We added computers because we wanted to lessen the effects of climate change and keep more people alive.

You're using a broad definition of "computer". We've had these features for decades now, until recently the logic was handled by microcontrollers. It's not clear that the functionality requires computing devices also capable of data gathering, storage and upload.

>"climate change"

Not really. Personal vehicles are responsible for such miniscule portion of co2 emissions it barely matters.

Emission regulations enjoy popular support because of city air quality, not climate change. Yes, people tolerate taxes on CO2 emitted by their vehicles (do you have that in the US BTW?) because it has a very beneficial side effect of also limiting particulates and NOx CO and such emissions that actually killed hundreds of people every year in major city centers. Also caused lifelong disability for many children(asthma).

Instead we got people like VW rigging their firmware to report emissions falsely so they could look better.

Fun, no. Accurate, mostly.

It does have that: “report an issue.”

I personally miss the air cover working from the office provides for doing nothing. Way easier to seem productive just by existing.