Is there a generally-agreed description of "how therapy works"?

Yes, the DSM-5

A number of citizens not liking their elected representatives has form going back many many decades, but there's more than a whiff of "51 former intelligence officials" nonsense about the whole NoKings story.

Former CIA intelligence operatives helping to organise anti-government protests feels particularly weird.

Can you expound on this? First I'm hearing of it, and I can't find anything about former CIA helping to organize.

Some flavor of coup is not out of the question given our "democracy" is being run and represented (diplomatically) by never-elected cronies like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. The people's Congress and even the State Department are potemkins. In a real sense, a coup already happened.

The never-elected thing has been an issue for a while (though with Trump it is definitely more so than in the past), going back at least through Woodrow Wilson and surely earlier. I vividly remember when President Clinton gave work to Hillary for example, and the comments about the "two-for-one" deal where you vote for Bill and get Hillary as a bonus.

> So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear [..]

Genuine question: we used to simply wash our hands well before preparing food.

At what point did the wearing of disposable gloves become "better"?

It's not better, it's a lazy shortcut so they have to wash their hands less and don't feel gross touching raw meat.

> Determining progress in a therapy setting is usually a collaborative effort between the therapist and the client. An LLM is not a reliable agent to make that determination

Can anyone describe how to determine how a (professional, human) therapist is "a reliable agent" to make such a determination?

If you want to call into question the entire field of behavioral health and the training that is involved then that is fine, but if that’s how you feel then this entire discussion is really about something different and I can’t bridge the gap here.

"If the user chooses to opt-in and grants location-tracking permission, the app is then, and only then, able to track the user's location?"

You would be lying if you wrote that because you do not know if that is true.

That would allow you to see the local network IP (not actually sure you even get that, tbh). To get more detailed information about IP configuration, you need Location permission. Been there, done that. Most Android network information calls provide degraded information if you have not been granted Location permissions.

If an app can make an HTTP request, the app can know the user's public IP address and the geolocation derived from that.

This data has well-known limitations, but I think it is the fallback people are talking about here.

Good lord. So could literally any app on the planet

> Airports desperately need to be displaying accurate information [..]

Airports and airlines may have information that they deliberately do not share with passengers.

For example: a large European airport that I once did some work for ran a trial in which they announced departure boarding gates significantly earlier. The effect was that passengers went to their gates earlier.

The side effect was that retail revenues in the terminal fell during the trial. Yes, this was a metric.

Guess what? They decided not to proceed with announcing departure gates earlier and went back to the previous system.

> If you have no DRM and people can just share the install disk, they will do that and piracy will be universal

There are plenty of consumers who are happy to pay a reasonable price for an easy-to-access product.

The question is, does adding DRM onto your product push more of those consumers towards piracy than it does towards paying...?

> consumers don't generally like it

I'd prefer looking at what (potential) consumers actually do rather than what they say. "Saying" is a really weak signal.

Yes, and, op's point stands.

I am one of those people: 1. Absolutely despise the lightroom being subscription and 2. Haven't switched yet.

There are moats and capabilities and friction. Not every vote with your wallet is a ringing endorsement. I have 15 years of lightroom databases over 100k photos so switching is hard. At the same time those are from the time I did a photography side gig, now I don't so monthly cost for no monthly gains really peeves me.

So it absolutely is a successful business decision and it absolutely is widely despised by customer base. Both are true :-)

Ok mr sceptic, where are your numbers showing consumers buy more of a thing after it becomes more expensive?

Was merely commenting on the observed preference vs stated preference issue (aka "the Say/Do Gap"), not the underlying point about raising prices.

Apple has done pretty well historically walking the line between mass consumer and Veblen good. Without them I don't believe we'd see the same variety of high-end devices, they somehow convinced a lot of people that the price of a phone is a signal of it's value.

> EU laws attempt at least to restrain some of the most egregious speech online.

Isn't the difficulty that rules designed to suppress the most harmful speech often create a wide blast radius, affecting legitimate expression in ways that are hard to predict and/or contain?

> In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile.

This depends very much on where you are in the world.

Full disclosure: I have visited a lot of cities/countries, approx 70k flown miles last year. I almost always try to use public transport where possible.

The last "not nice" experience in a bus was in SFO, travelling back to my hotel from the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. Make of that what you will.