Not only are the LLMs quite excellent at emulating the valet, the actual dynamic fits fascinatingly well. Jeeves was always both perspicacious and enthusiastic about whatever task he was given - be it ironing a shirt or seeing to Bertie's continued wellbeing.

The problem is I put like 70% as Chinese, because I guarantee there's a Chinese person in the world who looks exactly like the portrait. China is so mixed that it's a total wildcard.

Looking at it dispassionately as a European living in the US, if you wanted to foment the sort of mistrust many Americans have of Europe, I don't think you could have created a more invidious policy.

You don't need an A+ protocol to get great if your product is good enough / dead simple to use but neither of those things apply to Mastodon, as much as I'd like them to.

Our reward would be a bacon/sausage and egg butty and a stiff cup of builder's tea.

Good times

Functionally they could get there by just building a few more reactors.

It's probably one of the dumbest things we do as a society, although that might be a fairly California centric perspective.

I had already steeled myself for the experience but it was still mind-numbing, until the appearance of one glorious stroke of luck.

The official in our consulate had incurred some minor peccadillo in the filling out of a form - their stamp was in the wrong part of the document, and because of that, their counterpart in Roma had officiously refused the document.

Suddenly, what had been a grinding war of attrition between us and the establishment, turned into a civil war within the machine. A principal adversary had flipped to our side.

We had serious firepower and the rest of the process was made incredibly easy, as our slighted new friend slashed through the red-tape and bulldozed our application through.

It ended with the final document being stamped at least a dozen times out of spite. I wish I had that copy (it probably rests in an aging manila envelope in the comune somewhere.)