turtle

One of the major factors to consider here is that public schools in the US are not equally funded by number of students. Instead, most of the funding is provided by state and local property taxes, meaning that richer areas where houses are worth a lot more, get much better funding for their schools. So while those rich areas' school funding is probably much higher than the global median, the poorer areas' school funding is likely much lower, in a very high cost of living country in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_funding_in_the_United_States#State_and_local_role_in_education_funding

The other factor to also consider is that public schools in the US have fairly extensive athletic programs, meaning that they spend a lot of the funds to build and maintain things like American Football ~~stadiums~~ fields, swimming pools, etc., as opposed to only funding actual academic education.

Edit, I've retracted the link about teacher vs coach salaries because it's about College sports, not primary and secondary schools. I still haven't found a good source for this info regarding those.

PS: Aside from fundraisers, it's fairly common to hear teachers telling stories of having to spend their own money to buy supplies for their classes.

PPS: It's also common to hear stories of poor families doing everything they can to move to richer areas just so their kids can benefit from the much better-funded schools. I've even heard of situations where they will register their kids with the address of a relative who lives in a better-funded area, for the same reason.

My spouse and I watched it last year and even voted for it. I think it was our first year watching it live? Anyway, we were getting ready to do the same this year until I saw the video I linked in the grandparent post, like the day before the event. That woke me up to the fact that it had already been fucked up the year before too, so we decided to skip it.

No worries.

If you're into comics at all, especially European-style or more realistic comics, the Tintin books are amazing! If you do check it out, get the full-size individual ones, not the 3-book hardcover sets, which are reduced-size prints.

I don't have any particular interest in ships. I don't think you have to be autistic to be a huge Tintin fan either. The books are very popular worldwide and made a big impression on me. Thanks though, I'm glad that you found this impressive. :)

BTW, I never found the specific frame from the comics online that showed the Unicorn model that I remembered from so long ago. Did you find it? I unfortunately find myself without a complete Tintin book collection. :) I found enough references on an image search to confirm that it was similar though.

Edit - PS: I actually don't think it's the Tintin model. The nose and tail at least are a bit different designs:

I guessed purely based on a vague memory from reading the Tintin books as a kid, decades ago. I guess I have a good design memory? It's a pretty distinctive design. I had to look it up online to verify that it was actually similar though.

Haha, who knows, possibly, but if so, I don't think it's related to why I guessed that.

Relevant video: 8 Ways Eurovision Is Rigged for Israel

That ship looks like the Unicorn model from Tintin's The Secret of the Unicorn / Red Rackham's Treasure.

I don't have much technical knowledge of AI since I avoid it as much as I can, but I imagined that it would make sense to store the training data. It seems that it is beneficial to do so after all, so I presume that it's done frequently: https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/7739/what-happens-to-the-training-data-after-your-machine-learning-model-has-been-tra

My understanding is also that generative AI often produces plagiarized material. Here's one academic study demonstrating this: https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/beyond-memorization-text-generators-may-plagiarize-beyond-copy-and-paste

Finally, I think that whether putting massive restrictions on AI model creation would benefit wealthy corporations is very debatable. Generative AI is causing untold damage to many aspects of life, so it certainly deserves to be tightly controlled. However, I realize that it won't happen. Just like climate change, it's a collective action problem, meaning that nothing that would cause significant impact will be done until it's way too late.

My town has pizza places that make curry pizza. Your instinct is correct: it's amazing!

Public Domain does not mean being able to see something without a barrier in the way. The vast majority of text and media you can consume for free on the Internet is not in the Public Domain.

Instead, "Public Domain" means that 1) the creator has explicitly released it into the Public Domain, or 2) the work's copyright has expired, which in turn then means that anyone is from that point on entitled to use that work for any purpose.

All the major AI models scarfed up works without concern for copyrights, licenses, permissions, etc. For great profit. In some cases, like at least Meta, they knowingly used known collections of pirated works to do so.

Yikes, that's terrifying. Although I learned today that it's apparently Spectrum buying Cox. Who knows what they will do after they buy out their competition though.