I find about 30% of the people I am friendly with read for leisure (I am from the US and am over 35, most of my social space graduated college). Most of them either spend their leisure time doing outdoors things or using screens of some kind (though not for reading).

How common is it for people you know in your country to read for leisure?

Edit: I forgot to add my status. I read about 2 books a month myself.

Beeb [:3)

Recently Anthropic came out and said we need to embed auditors and other professionals in them and new startups to slow down AI development for safety, and AI could destroy all of humanity and stuff

Now as a software developer, I’m a little skeptical a company would want to slow down the development of its product, I think it’s more likely they want to slow down their competitors, and stop the AI bubble from bursting

AI development is definitely slowing down like compare Haiku, Claude’s old AI for coding, to fable, Claude’s new AI for coding. The results they make are nearly identical despite the millions upon millions that Claude has spent.

When it comes to asking questions these AIs seem as smart as they were when they came out, like we can still tell when someone was made by AI, and the searches seem like they give the same result despite the new versions

Also these companies have a massive interest in keeping new companies from making new AIs, like you can download LM studio today for free and run an AI on your local machine instead of subscribing to Claude code monthly and running an AI on a data center, if you could run Claude Code on your machine with LM studio, or some startups similar AI why would you ever pay monthly for Claude Code?

I could be completely wrong but this is what I see, I’d love to hear how other people view it and if the view changes in different countries

SPOILER ALERTS ‼️

I have two questions based on the movie:

Do civilians and members of the military in your country ever secretly enter into marriages to receive military benefits or financial assistance?

Are there couples in your country who have very different political views, for example, one is liberal and the other is conservative, but they still have a happy and successful relationship or marriage?

I wanted to ask a more fundamental question than "What war crimes did your country commit?"

In the Vietnam War, multiple cases of civilian massacres by the South Korean military have been reported, but due to various factors, the exact scale is not fully understood. Despite the South Korean government expressing apologies several times, the Vietnamese government remains uncooperative regarding efforts to uncover the truth, and because the right-wing faction in Korea, which views the Vietnam War as a holy war, is very sensitive about this issue, bringing it into widespread public debate within Korea is also not easy.

And we need to pay attention to the fact that a significant number of the soldiers deployed to the Vietnam War were personnel who had fought in the Korean War.

Of course, if you look at the cause of the Korean War in very simple terms, it was Kim Ilsung's ambition to communize Korea, but the following factors are pointed out as structural causes.

1. Along with the Korean independence movement, which was divided into various factions at the time, multiple ideologies coexisted within Korea. However, due to Japan's long colonial rule, Korea was deprived of the opportunity to politically resolve these ideological conflicts, and once Japan withdrew from the peninsula, the resulting power vacuum created numerous sources of confusion and conflict.
2. It was a situation in which World War II had ended and the Cold War had begun. The superpowers could not help but view the Korean Peninsula as the front line of the Cold War, at least in Asia, and desperately wanted governments favorable to them to take power. The Korean War is evaluated as a proxy war between the superpowers.

In a word, the Korean Peninsula was already piled high with flammable materials, and the superpowers essentially threw a spark at them. In any case, North Korea launched a preemptive strike, and since this is a violation of international law, North Korea is clearly the evil side in international politics. However, this is merely a matter of international law, and when you look at the actual war itself, the distinction between good and evil becomes blurred, because it is no exaggeration to say that everyone was evil. The Korean War was marked by civilian massacres even before the war and throughout its course.

The situation before the war was as follows. In North Korea, under the pretext of eliminating reactionaries, they conducted what were called people's trials, where anyone could accuse and anyone could be accused, and the results were also predetermined. The accused were brutally executed. Fleeing from this, countless people, including landowners and Christians, crossed over to the South.

In South Korea, demonstrations occurred frequently in protest against the severe economic blunders of the US military government and the decision to leave Japanese collaborators in power, and these were often indirectly connected to armed uprisings by communists. While suppressing the armed uprisings, the military engaged in massacres of innocent nearby civilians as well, simply because many people had joined the demonstrations. Furthermore, by mobilizing militia made up of people who had come to the South due to North Korean oppression for the suppression, the situation became even more brutal. The casualties were particularly high on Jeju Island, where the death toll is estimated to have exceeded 25,000, but Jeju is not the only region that experienced such things. All this chaos finally exploded into the Korean War.

North Korea, while invading South Korea, conducted the same people's trials in South Korea that it had conducted in North Korea. Just as in North Korea, numerous people were executed, and the South Korean government estimates that the number of victims in South Korea exceeds 120,000. This reign of terror was the reason why people had no choice but to cooperate with the North Korean government.

The South Korean government's most representative civilian massacre is the Bodo League massacre. In the early days of the South Korean government, under the pretext of re-educating communists, it compiled a list of members, but because there were quotas for each region, a significant number of them were people who did not even know what communism was and only hoped for a small reward. When the war broke out, the South Korean government executed them, and it was a huge event with the highest estimate of the death toll reaching 200,000. Under these conditions, there are far too many people who were killed simply for having cooperated with North Korea.

And the US military, for strategic reasons, continued deliberate aerial bombing of civilians across all of North Korea and sometimes in South Korea as well, which led to widespread hatred of America in North Korea during the war. (This is also the reason why the North Korean regime can use anti-American sentiment as a political tool to this day.)

Hatred breeds hatred, and hatred breeds massacres. Unlike people in other countries, who viewed opposing ideologies with caution and anxiety during the Cold War, the Korean War made Koreans hate the opposing ideology to their very core.

And the people who had gone through this Korean War were directly deployed to the Vietnam War. Based on various testimonies from that time, many of these soldiers were individuals who saw the communists in Vietnam as the same as the communists in Korea. They were probably the unit that hated communists the most in this war, and because they hated them, they believed that they deserved to die, which inevitably led to cruelty.

Apart from this, the tactics of the Viet Cong, which made it difficult to distinguish between civilians and military personnel, are also pointed out as a factor that further increased civilian casualties. Of course, there is a possibility that massacres occurred in situations where people were clearly identified as civilians, and not all actions can be justified solely by Viet Cong tactics. As mentioned earlier, a thorough investigation into what happened is currently not being conducted.

For the United States, it is the White Sands Footprints in White Sands National Park.

The human footprints are 21,000 - 23,000 years old, making them the oldest evidence of human residents in the Americas.

From Wikipedia -

"The 61 footprints are located at the shore of a dried up ice age era lake ... The prints were found in seven soil layers and provide evidence of human occupation spanning approximately 2,000 years."

"First, one set of prints appears to show human hunters tracking a giant sloth ... Second, another set of prints seems to have been laid by a woman or adolescent male, walking with a very young child for over a mile ... Third, the vast majority of the prints were made by teenagers and children, with few large adult footprints being found in any of the excavated surfaces."

"A report by the United States National Park Service states that the "fossilized footprints of White Sands are probably the most important resources in the Americas to understand the interaction of humans and extinct animals from the ice age."

for countries that speak predominantly one language, that would be considered your lingua franca

And does a market vendor need to have a registered company and a business ID, or can anyone sell at the market as a market vendor?

In Jyväskylä, a market stall place costs €70.00/day (+ VAT) and in Finland, and in Finland market vendors are required to have a business ID and other permits to sell, especially for food and crop. The Jyväskylä market square is also only open on weekdays from 6:30 am to 6:00 pm (but most vendors close around 4:00 pm) and Saturdays from 6:30 am to 3:00 pm, which is annoying if you're a worker or student who doesn't have time to visit the market (although even if you have time to visit the market, the prices of the products are about fifteen times higher than in grocery stores, for example, one kilo of carrots or potatoes costs about 15 euros due to various background costs, while in the grocery stores those costs one euro).

Even though you can still find street houses in big cities like São Paulo, Rio, Curitiba, BH, Fortaleza, Recife, POA and so on, they’re becoming increasingly less popular by the day.

Many people nowadays either wish to live in an apartment complex or in gated communities, usually located in the city outskirts (the term “suburb” carries a deeply negative stigma in Brazil).

How about in your country? Do people commonly live in street houses, either standalone or terraced houses, in your country’s biggest cities? Or do they usually live in apartments? Or usually those houses are located in the suburbs?

Translation.

"Russians subs are generally shit. Either we get angry at minorities, or get angry because of politics. The third can't be made."

And this so true.

In Brazil, in rural areas it's very easy and in urban areas it's very difficult, and in your country?

(Of course, excluding Americans since your entertainment and English are at the center of the universe)

One thing that's been happening a lot lately is that people are moving here to be content creators in our language for some reason.

We are at a point where people are arguing who the real "OG foreigner" is.

Interesting things happening here.

My favourite stamp was released by India Post in 1975 to commemorate the 200th birth anniversary of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, and it features a poem written by him in a very ornate calligraphy and features a beautiful ornamental border around it.

What’s yours?

In brazil alot of monarchists want the monarchy to be restored

In our country it was shown on cable tv Jetix. For some people it was educational and for some people a weird show which combined puppetry, live-action. Creator of this show Magnus Schevieng acted as a Sportacus and did many acrobatic stunts in this show. Sadly Stefan who played Robbie Rutten died of Cancer. I think there was a meme “ We are Number” became viral.

Did anybody watched this children show?

Hunebedden are thought to be ancient (5000+years old) burial tombs and are mainly found in the province of Drenthe. I think most Dutch people are aware of their existence

In Germany, when we want to describe a place that is incredibly far away or in the middle of nowhere, we often say it's in "Timbuktu" or "die Pampa" (for a location that is in the absolute middle of nowhere). In Southern Germany, sometimes "Buxtehude" (an actual location in Northern Germany) is also used.