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Macleans has a long-form piece on the explosion in Canada's rat population and Alberta's success at keeping the pests out https://macleans.ca/society/how-canadas-cities-got-so-repulsively-ratty/

I have never lived anywhere with less than 100,000 people or worked in local government so am not the person to ask about small-town government.  Would it help to know that he is mayor of an area four times as big as Wales? https://www.northernrockies.ca/en/our-government/about-us.aspx

"They barely do any assassinating and they are a faction of assassins, they just seem to be the kind of assassin who stands on a rooftop in cool capes all the time."

"very famous medieval Armenian church"

"the internet ad we would all click on would be "portugaling lunatics in your area want to meet YOU click here""

"Are we saying that YouTube shorts aren't very fashionable to wear?"

Friday the 29th would probably work for me, not sure if I will have shift work then.

Another bit of the Holy Roman Empire which almost ended up in CH is Vinschgau.

I miss travelling but I live somewhere that you would need a car or be willing to fly.

Austrian urban graveyards pull out old graves regularly in a way that isn't the norm in the UK, which for UK readers is why there's a big pile of rubble in the bottom left image.

It used to be until British Christians gave up their taboo against cremation.  When every Briton except a few Jews and nonconformers had to be buried in hallowed ground, there was just not enough of it to let them sit in a grave forever (certainly not for urban parishes).

In the Canadian Prairies its very common to work at remote distant sites in mining, forestry, or construction on a "2n days on, n days off" schedule.  A mayor is taking this to extremes by working two provinces away while holding down a position as small-town mayor https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/northern-rockies-regional-muicipality-mayor-saskatchewan-1.7368106

A suburban stag has killed a large dog https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/aggressive-deer-kills-dog-in-oak-bay-yard-9747784

Roland Warzecha has a series of posts about how he likes to wield the bronze sword from the river Tollense, near the site of a famous Bronze Age massacre slash battle (in German a battle is a Schlacht which is related to the word "slaughter") https://www.patreon.com/posts/preview-tollense-110579699  Not all Bronze Age swords had small pommels like this sword.

Also, part of the point of NaNoWriMo is to train yourself to write fast (because that really helps for making money or building an audience) and LLMs can short-circuit that at the cost of creating bland prose with vague plots that needs a great deal of editing.  So using a LLM to write can defeat the purpose of NaNoWriMo. 

I think there are people who use LLMs to create a 'crappy first draft' but I'm not sure how well that would work for creative writing.

Freelance writing, editing, and art are very important niches for people who can't fit into a corporate job due to physical disability or neurodivergence.  So the promotion of these technologies is a direct attack on people with few other good options.

OTOH, I like their warning that "AI" is a very broad and vague label (many search engines probably used related technologies before 2022).  An old saying is that AI is whatever computers can't do yet, because when we teach computers to play chess their way of doing so seems anticlimactic.

Scipio Americanus ... some wires got crossed

The thing which makes the US system so bad is the combination of the two-party system and the imperial presidency.  Because so much federal policy is fiat by whoever holds the Oval Office, people get really fascinated by who that person will be, and because this is determined by 50 two-way races it can shift wildly (although university-educated Americans who like to talk party politics often avoid acknowledging that there has been a lot of policy continuity from 2004 to 2024).

pterry agreed with you that chronic conditions like Alzheimer's and dementia are underfunded relative to cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett  I don't really have any expertise in this area though.

Biomedical researchers such as Derek Lowe seem to think that a lot of medical research funds are not spent very effectively https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline

The CBC has some urban archaeology and the story of the time only 55 years ago when contraception was restricted or illegal in Canada https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/condoms-decades-old-found-in-london-ontario-reno-1.7294705 (the linked museum catalogue entry talks about the origin of a romance-novel trope, the Sexy Sheikh and his Reluctant Bride)

Pot is legal in Canada, and British Columbia decriminalized small amounts of some other substances but did not bring in a safe supply and there is pushback.

Zeynep Tufekci tries to use GoT to talk about sociological and psychological storytelling? Does that make sense at all to you?  I only saw two or three episodes and read two or three books. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/the-real-reason-fans-hate-the-last-season-of-game-of-thrones/

This Psychology Today brings in the concept of Fundamental Attribution Error (we tend to blame our own mistakes on transient circumstance, but others' mistakes on innate traits) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-like-everybody-else/201908/the-person-and-the-situation-in-game-of-thrones-and-society