Frutiger Aero my beloved. The apotheosis of skeuomorphic design, killed by a neverending downward spiral towards the least distinctive, creative, and inspired designs imaginable.
It's really ironic that this design cycle coincided with the rise of high-DPI displays. All those pixels used to upscale monochrome boxes with square corners. What a tragedy.
Easter is not inherently a christian holiday goddammit. At least not in its popular celebration. Last I checked Jesus didn't pop eggs from his butt when he resurrected (that we know of) and the preachings of the Easter Bunny are unfortunately not canon in Catholicism.
To complain about "religious persecution" of profoundly pagan (if not outright heretical depending on who you ask) traditions is... certainly an interesting exercise in religious cognitive dissonance.
There is almost certainly internal communication that basically reads "hey let's get an actress who sounds as close to ScarJo as possible". There's also the CEO tweeting "her" on the day of release.
Is that legal? IANAL, but OpenAI's reaction of immediately shutting that shit down leads me to believe they realized it is, in fact, illegal.
Your comparison is also incorrect. You're not getting a JEJ soundalike, you're getting a JEJ soundalike to do a Darth Vader impersonation. Meaningfully different semantics. They don't just want "white american woman who vaguely sounds like ScarJo I guess" they have proven beyond doubt that they want "The AI from the 2013 movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson".
Also legality aside, it's really fucking weird and ethically wrong. I don't care if it's legal or not, you shouldn't be able to make an AI replicate someone's voice without their consent.
Google's slow demise is entirely expected late-stage enshittification.
What is frustrating is that search is mostly a solved problem. Crawling and indexing are solved problems. Fighting adversarial SEO is a continuous task, that Google Search is essentially refusing to perform but is clearly cheap enough for an upstart like Kagi to do reasonably well (their only added-value is the aggregation and filtering of other indexers such as google and mojeek, and let's be honest it's probably 99% google's index powering Kagi).
This shows that the lack of meaningful competition in the space is actually merely a matter of capital. There are too many webpages to scrape, process, and save and nothing short of "indexing almost as much stuff as google" is going to cut it.
In the software world we're used to seeing FOSS alternatives to most things, because software's capital costs are typically almost equal to manpower costs. However for search this doesn't work, just like it historically hasn't worked too well for some really expensive software (such as audiovisual creation tools, with the notable exceptions of Blender and to a lesser extent Krita).
There should be a well-funded non-profit building and providing a high-quality, exhaustive, transparent and open-source indexing service for the world. It definitely sounds possible, and even rather easy in the grand scheme of things. Yet current economic incentives do not favor such models. However I do wonder if there are not options to be explored, such as distributed crawlers or even a distributed index (after looking it up, YaCy seems to be doing just that though at a glance it seems, uh, old and clunky). Or maybe the EU should finally put a real focus on meaningfully funding indigenous FOSS R&D so the enshittification process of American tech giants doesn't crush us as well.
I am not American and have never been anywhere close to either of these stores and have no fucking idea what a blue light special or whatever is.
The good thing about comedy though is that anyone with half a brain can understand the context clues and laugh. The joke isn't about k-mart or sears.
It's even dumber than you think:
Producers elsewhere in the European Union can continue to sell vegetarian food with meat names in France.
It's so incredibly dumb it's honestly amazing.
"Humanity is a disease" is not the same statement as "humanity is capable of committing atrocities" though. The latter leaves the door open for a "but", while the former makes humanity itself a systemic problem but refuses or "forgets" to pin the blame on anyone or any system.
Such statements devolve the conversation into defeatist pseudo-nihilism, where a "true nihilist" knows that the betterment of humanity will have to come from within.
I do agree that capitalism is not the root of all evil, but it is central to the particular "planet's fucked, housing is unaffordable, and no-one cares" doomer sentiment that is depicted in the meme (at least that is how I read it).
Of course he does.
The point is that Batman is the archetype of a right-wing superhero. Batman is how rightwingers understand social justice: accumulate as much wealth as you can, use crushing physical violence to punish bad guys, act charitably at an individual level but do not ever work to solve social issues at a systemic level.
Even in-universe he's nowhere near as much of a positive force as he could be if he used his money to force political and social change instead of as an outlet for his mental issues.
He's not actively villainous because right-wingers don't see themselves as such. But when that fantasy meets reality, you get Elon Musk.
Let's just appreciate for a moment how great of a choice Ode to Joy is for the European Anthem. It's a very memorable tune which honestly kind of slaps in a way that few anthems do.
Still not as great as La Marseillaise (which is not even a song, but a war chant meant to be hollered), but one of the best anthems out there nonetheless.
Nothing inherently, you can go ahead and eat apples from your apple tree.
The main issue with "organic" foods is that the term is usually very badly regulated. Sometimes there is no difference between "organic" and "non organic"... besides price. Sometimes "organic" foods use very ecologically unfriendly techniques, or are grown/processed in countries where supply chains are not inspected anyway.
Then there's the fact that if something is different, it may not always be an environmental or health win. Growing your food in 30cm of water may be one organic and traditional way to avoid using pesticides (see: rice), but doing that with corn in the middle of Arizona would obviously be a terrible idea!
Anyway, overall I don't think organic foods are worse if you're well off enough that the price is not an issue. But you shouldn't feel personal guilt for buying whatever's cheaper, because quite often the alternative does not justify the price anyway. Eating truly "organic" food unfortunately requires a lot more involvement than picking the green package at a national supermarket chain.
The story of how that background was created has been stated by the artist himself: he was studying in the quartier de la croix-rousse in Lyon, and incorporated it in the drawing using multiple reference pictures.
So while the neighborhood is recognizable, it is not a perfect match from any POV.
The vibes I got in the other thread about Wedson's announcement is that the concerns may be valid but there are indeed a handful of contributors who are aggressively shouting down Rust contributor's efforts to set up the processes you outlined based on hard prejudice. The video Wedson posted was hard to watch. From the outside looking in it looks to be way more about ego than any particular technical roadblock.
Furthermore Lina's concerns here are only broader what you are saying:
Mainlining memory safety improvements, in C, for C code should be welcomed and it is very concerning if she indeed got shunned because the end goal was to offer lifetime guarantees (which to my admittedly non-expert eye sounds like it would be a good thing for memory safety in general).
Seems like a moral panic over absolutely nothing (where are the Rust developers allegedly forcing people to learn Rust? all I've seen in these threads today is Rust developers asking for an open mind and a willingness to collaborate), and that the response to this "concern" is to block any and all changes that might benefit Rust adoption is really concerning (but unfortunately not unsurprising) behavior.