And yet, the French government did try to ban it for young people too.

… wrote someone on a social media site.

Yes. I agree. I used “country” as a metonym for the ones in charge of it.

and that is the same country that wanted to ban social media for minors because social media was harming minors? huh, I do think something is indeed harming French minors, but I don’t think it’s social media!

no, it’s the French that are the exception, we German-speaking white people aren’t very different from English-speaking ones either

Yeah, also what I was going to comment on. Pope is literally an elected position.

Mastodon is a source for links to post to Lemmy. :P

Or for that matter another pandemic that mainly affects the elderly.

I’m not yet even close to 40, yet I still believe I am one of the “people who built the World Wide Web”, in the sense that I’ve been posting to it for more than 20 years (there are still old forum posts online that I wrote at the age of 10), i.e. before it was something the general public did a lot.

I’m on the one hand proud of how much it has grown and how much more popular it has become; and on the other hand, worried that this has caused governments around the world to pay a lot more attention to it and limit our freedom on it through age verification laws and similar…

In my first language, we often use a word that more precisely translates to “believe” for situations like that.

Yes. But it was a massive source of humor for me some months ago when I asked AI chatbots to generate metro map diagrams of my city.

Sometimes the station names they wrote on them somewhat resembled real ones, but were humorously misspelled and in completely incorrect positions and orders. Other times, the overall shape of the network was roughly ok, but the station names were completely nonsensical.

Idk but Trump has been obsessed with “winning” indeterminate things since long before AI was widely talked about. During his 2016 campaign he sometimes shouted things like “there will be so much winning that you will get tired of winning”.

At least when they generate text directly. When they generate images of text, that is a different story.

multiple operating systems, I’m not so sure but I can’t imagine that it’s impossible

The keyword is virtualization.

??? Highly unclear what exactly you are imagining.

OK, “won’t be injured” wasn’t exactly true; but they are still in a lot less danger than someone in the same situation on a plane. A train or bus can stop anywhere on its route if there is a dangerous situation, a plane cannot, so in my mind it makes a lot of sense that there are security checks before boarding a plane, but not when boarding a train or bus.

Not really because an explosion on a train or bus doesn’t cause the entire vehicle to crash into the ground, only to stop. An explosion on a train or bus is going to kill or injure people in its radius of impact, but people sitting far away from it (granted: not many of those on a bus, but very much so on a long train) won’t be injured. On a plane, if that plane stops operating mid-flight, even people on the other end of the plane from the explosion are unlikely to survive.

Why would there be security checks at train stations? I know those are a thing in some countries, but this never made any sense to me. They aren’t where I live; a train can’t be driven into buildings and if something does explode on them (exactly as possible as in any crowd), the train will simply stop, not fall from the sky.

Canals are still used to transport freight in Europe. For example there is a canal in southern Germany that connects the Main to the Danube, allowing ships to travel from the North Sea to the Black Sea through rivers and that canal. Germany generally has lots of navigable waterways including canals.

Only one per day? https://what-if.xkcd.com/27/ explains what would happen if it were 86400 times that.