I've been to Georgia 10 years ago and there were a lot of tourists from Germany and France. Both the buses with organized trips for retired people and youngsters renting AirBnbs for cheap.
The problem we faced was with the inconsistency in price/quality in restaurants and services. Some places are really cheap - a huge dinner for two in a "I want this, this and this and two bottles of wine" manner costed 25EUR, while a 15 minute transfer could cost 50EUR. This inconsistency is something that leaves a bad aftertaste for many tourists, who would otherwise want to go there again and again to enjoy the beautiful nature, food, wine. And the tap water is literally Evian. That was in Kutaisi.
If it wasn't for the sudden grab of power fueled by Russian money and the influx of people fleeing from Russia because of war, give Georgia another 10-20 years, and the living standards would rise dramatically. Similar to how it happened in early 2000s.
What did the ratio of European tourists to Russian look like?
Not sure what grab of power you're referring to.
The inflow of Russians was a boost for Georgia. These are whole IT companies that moved with workers, high-paying jobs and taxes. Many of pro-Western views and European expectations of living standards (because they're from Moscow and St. Petersburg). Check specialty cafes in Tbilisi today and see when they opened. These are the white people with guilt syndrome who will sign up to Georgian language classes to show respect to the local culture. Hell, I'm sure you can see a change in people's average views on LGBT rights since 2022, since Georgia is known to be quite patriarchal homophobic.
There were not a whole lot of Russian tourists 10 years ago because the memories from Russian invasion of 2008 were still fresh.
I'm not saying that inflow of Russians is particularly bad, it just raised the prices of everything very significantly, and together with the pro-Russian government and reversal in pro-European development, the European tourist influx is stagnant at best.
Oh sure, I can believe that. It still seems to me like a sign of Georgia's economy strengthening. Many people with buying capabilities which actually settle, not just come occasionally for cheap stuff. (Looking at the thread's context broadly) plus one for closer ties with Russia.
I recently tried an orange wine from a very good maker in Austria, with excellent whites and reds. I don't like the orange wine though, not my taste. I wonder why it is so popular.
Every orange wine is different, so one is not representative.
For example I like the funky, wild ones.
But besides the taste, one thing people tend to like about those wines, although it's not reserved to orange wines, is the natural manufacturing process that for example also often means less or even no added sulfites. For example my wife can't drink wine with a lots of sulfites, she gets stuffed nose immediately and a headache later. While I'm not that sensitive, even I can feel it's easier to process for my body.
I like it because it differs a lot from whites and reds and allows to get a different perspective on how wine can taste. While the difference within whites and within reds can be huge, the orange wine tastes like something completely alien, yet it can be very tasty.
God damn it. Can people write interesting articles in NORMAL writing style nowadays? Why is everyone writing in these stupid short "punchline" sentences?
Seriously. This is trash. It presents no evidence, contains no original ideas, it’s just written—excuse me, generated—to be as provocative as possible.
I think I’ll just start flagging these. They’re just a new kind of spam.
I can't quite put my finger on it; obviously the "it's not this. It's that." is part of it, but even without the obvious tells that writing was AI-generated/improved, it's just so tiring to read?
Maybe a linguist can chime in why all these texts are so samey, cloying and annoying to read? Is it (just) the pacing?
I wonder if part of it is that we're mentally trying to get the actual meaning and thoughts out of it. It's inflated like trying to read a bad students essay that's struggling for word count? I wish people would just post their prompts directly.
It reminds me of the "overenthusiastic youtuber" presentation style, with jump cuts etc., just in written form. From its prevalence I can only assume that some audiences prefer it - I'd be more interested to know why that is.
This is just myth and faith. Even if all AI wrote like that, it doesn't follow that all writing in that style is by AI, hence the belief in the style. Focus less on the aesthetics, more on the message. After all, for this article to have been written in the form of a sonnet was just a prompt away.
It reads more like a transcript for a podcast. Somewhere along the way, we no longer favor illustrative anecdotes, logical arguments, or dialectical arguments. Everything is a podcast now.
All of a sudden everybody is a writing style critic. The only question that is pertinent is if the message of the post is relevant.
Think about it. You wouldn't give someone crap for writing in broken English because there are many really smart people that are non English speakers. So why are we giving crap for people using AI to write better posts? If the idea is relevant, what's the point in criticizing the style?
A fair question would be "is the idea in the post actually the writer's or was it entirely done by AI"? However how can one actually tell if the idea, not the style is original? You can't. So it's pointless to be angry about style. Focus on the message.
No. I have a lot of respect for people who write in a second language. You can often tell because the content is thoughtful and some of the word choices or grammar is quirky.
This is a bozo who prompted the machine for a viral essay. He did not write anything. He does not know anything.
But I’ve spent enough time with these tools and coaching people on writing over the years to recognize the extremely low signal to noise ratio and prompted style instructions. I’m equally confident the gentleman in my spam folder is not a Nigerian prince.
Not talking about this post anymore, because it being flagged is more reason it's just click bait.
But in all honesty, for some it's extremely hard to write concisely in English. Maybe what you call worse is actually better in comparison to what the person could write by himself, insights notwithstanding.
"is the idea in the post actually the writer's or was it entirely done by AI"
Look. If you don't want your readers to worry that your hard-written article is AI slop - just don't run it through the slopifier. Or at the very least, spend 5 minutes tweaking the output.
If you can't be assed to do that, then it's very likely that you don't have valuable insights to share.
I started working on a simple Telegram bot with llm backend and .md knowledgebase that would help me organize, track and research my long-term hobby projects.
The problem that I am repeatedly facing is that I am trying to build a home server and I keep asking chatgpt questions, but it is hard to keep all the little details in one place. The way I see it is that I can just text my assistant bot and ask it something like "hey, can you research which NAS setup would be the best for me given x and y". It will offer some setup and I would say "can you add it to the plan" and "can you plan the next steps for me?". The bot will also update the knowledgebase and version control it.
You might also want to use it for something like planning a trip to Paris, where at some point you might say "hey, given my schedule, can you squeeze a tour to top5 croissant places in the center of Paris".
The whole thing sound really vague and sounds like something solved long ago, but I cannot find solutions that will be guaranteed to stick to a very precise plan that I can review at any given moment. If you happened to know existing solutions, please let me know. I really don't want to build this thing.
I ran into the same problem. Tried using ChatGPT as a scrum manager. It was really good at checking off todos through conversation, but as I fleshed out the details of the project it would forget critical information - not necessarily todos, but critical information constraining the implementation of the project. In the initial stages, it was great, but it lost usefulness over time.
On a sidenote, what is this new style of writing using small sentences where each sentence is supposed to be a punchline?
"And most of those sequences? They don't fold into anything useful. They're junk. They aggregate into clumps. They get degraded by cellular quality control. Only a TINY fraction of possible sequences fold into stable, functional proteins."
Short sentence are good. Especially when you interact with low attention individuals. Make sure they stay engaged. It's not just a style. It's a game changer for your blog.
Any information on how comfortable the strap is? I am wearing a Garmin HRM Pro for one hour a day during workouts and it is not very comfy. I know a lot of athletes are moving to way less precise optical hand straps just because of the comfort issues with chest straps. I would not wear a chest strap for longer periods of time, unless I absolutely had to.
sadly, comfort for chest straps compared to hand straps is a known issue and ours is definitely no different. Wve done a bunch of tests, tried different materials/custom solutions, and honestly we're still clueless how to make it significantly better (if anyone here works in textiles or wearable fabrics, I'd love to connect). So yeah, if wearing your Garmin for more than an hour already feels uncomfortable, ours probably won't be much better in that regard
Great idea! Great website! Terrible video. The 90 second format is great, this is how much I would like to spend learning what exactly your product does. But the whole video is just clicking some user interfaces with no result. After watching the video, I have even less idea of what it the product is for. I would love to see a video that goes through the "next, next, next" in the wizard and then shows the actual outcome.
Great feedback, I'll work on the video ASAP. I intended to immediately create a follow-up video that steps through each component of a newly created decision, got distracted, never circled back.
I am not saying it is, but it sounds like the first paragraph of every Gemini deep research.
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