Nils Bejerot was a total hack. He tried to ban comic books, and later transcribed that same energy in a war on drugs that has resulted in some of the worst health outcomes for drug users in Europe. Unfortunately his ability to be confidently incorrect swayed a lot of gullible rubes, and his legacy still casts a shadow over Sweden to this day.

I mean insulin is about 10x more expensive in the USA compared to other Western countries. It’s cheaper still in lower income countries. Many European countries also have a price ceiling for medication, so your monthly cost for life-saving drugs is capped.

I don’t know exactly why a manufacturer doesn’t set up production for much cheaper generics in the USA, but for whatever reason Americans are getting price gouged like Satan doesn’t believe in tomorrow.

I don’t want to insult you. You’re very pretty petty.

Cool! Community-specific defaults is actually not a bad idea.

Exactly, threads that get new activity should be bumped. Maybe they don’t need to be super-visible for people who ignored the thread in the first place, but they could at least go to the top-50 posts.

I think it would be cool if conversations that link to the same URL are all automatically grouped, so that reposts just become bumps with a new context/title.

This really is a problem with expectations and hype though. And it will probably be a problem with cost as well.

I think that LLMs are really cool. It’s way faster and more concise than traditional search engines at answering most questions nowadays. This is partly because search engines have degraded in the last 10 years, but LLMs blow them out of the water in my opinion.

And beyond that, I think you can generate some pretty cool things with it to use as a template. I’m not a programmer but I’m making a quite massive and relatively complicated application. That wouldn’t be possible without an LLM. Sure I still have to check every line and clean up a ton of code, and of course I realize that this is all going to have to go to a substantial code review and cleanup by real programmers if I’m ever going to ship it, but the thing I’m making is genuinely already better (in terms of performance and functionality) than a lot of what’s on the market. That has to count for something.

Despite all that, I think we’re in the same kind of bubble now as we were in the early 2000s, except bigger. The oversell of AI comes from CEOs claiming (and to the best of my judgement they appear to be actually believing) that LLMs somehow magically will transcend into AGI if they’re given enough compute. I think part of that stems from the massive (and unexpected) improvements that happened from GPT-2 to GPT-3.

And lots of smart people (like Linus Tordvals for example) point out that really, when you think about it, what is intelligence other than a glorified auto-correct? Our brains essentially function as lossy compression. So I think for some people it is incredibly alluring to believe that if we just throw more chips on the fire a true consciousness will arise. And so, we’re investing all of our extra money and our pension funds into this thing.

And the irony is that I and millions of others can therefore use LLMs at a steep discount. So lots of people are quickly getting accustomed to LLMs thinking that they’re always going to be free or cheap, whereas it’s paid for by the bubble money and it’s not super likely that it will get much more efficient in the near future.

This is unironically a huge issue, and it’s just fascinating how the psychology of pricing and valuation works.

Semi-large company needs something. They make a budget for €100k and start looking at different alternatives. They find alternatives a) €120k, b) €80k, c) €15k. I bet you they’ll try to ask their superiors to expand their budget in order to buy the premium €120k solution, and they will not in any way consider the €15k one.

Come to think of it, it goes beyond software as well.

My biggest issue with PDF it’s hard to read on screens. On top of that PDF forms are notoriously buggy, tables are almost impossible to machine-read without specialized software, and even copy-pasting can be a hassle.

I get that print will continue to be a thing to some extent, but I don’t think that business or government documents need to be typeset with static pages. I think it’s time we move on to a much simpler standard that is made for free-flowing text.

PDF has also been problematic as a standard format, since it referred to proprietary features up until 2023.

Add to that the beauty of bookmarklets.

It’s silly that IT departments forces us to resort to techniques used before browser extensions became a thing, and it’s ironic that it’s because they don’t know how to code, but here we are.

I wonder if this collective loss of reasoning skills resulted in any extra wars, as a parallel to the lead-crime hypothesis.

Digital sovereignty. Even Europe is looking at replacing Windows now. I know that attempts have been made before, but there are stronger pressures now and there are better alternatives for Windows-only workflows.

Most new apps are web based nowadays. Many companies are even ditching the desktop Office apps now (which is insane for its own reasons, but still). Engineers under 40 prefer Python over Excel. Word is good for WYSIWYG printing, but with a small government program it should be possible to make that irrelevant quickly and ditch PDFs along with it.

I’m hopeful.

Yep. It was also around that time that swarms of dodgy new accounts started shitting on Sweden in every reddit thread. Lots of real people are still brainwashed from that time and bring up the same talking points to this day.

I guess the exact same thing happened to London exaggerating knife violence.

Alamaailman Vasarat - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk8rHXLLFdw&list=OLAK5uy_lYZj_YUq87l-FS9wF8anChzP4jOXXMxTA

Heads up it’s an acoustic band, not some dude with a synthesizer.

She’ll just go independent on YouTube trying to ride the same wave Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are cruising.

So KDE Plasma is just a graphical environment that you can use on any distro. It’s my preferred desktop environment, but Gnome and XFCE are famous ones, and lots of nerds/programmers love i3 (a tiling graphical environment which encourages you to use keyboard only).

So when choosing a distro, we’re looking at other qualities.

A Linux distro is basically a collection of tools that constitute your OS. The most notable difference between distros is package managrment – how do you install new packages?

This might sound weird but the reason is that open source software comes with tons of different options that can be toggled before compiling to binaries, and at the same time we need our ecosystem of software to play nice accross different packages. They often depend on each other! So that’s why different philosophies split the community into so many different distros.

When installing new software, you essentially run a specific command from the terminal. Your package manager (which is a core part of your distro) then downloads and installs all dependencies. There are graphical tools to help beginners with this, but in fairness I think you should be prepared to learn to use the command line to search for applications and install them. You won’t avoid the terminal as a Linux user.

A really common distro is Debian. It’s the basis for tons of other popular distros, including Ubuntu. My problem with Debian is that they are a bit conservative, which means that they’re often slow with rolling out updates for KDE.

Since I’m also a KDE Plasma person, I run Neon https://neon.kde.org/ which is based on Debian but focuses on rolling out stable updates for KDE packages.

I do not recommend starting with a hobbyist distro like Gentoo, Nix or even Arch if your focus is productivity or gaming. If you want to learn about computers, then those distros can be incredibly rewarding, but they are time-consuming. Go with something Debian-based, or alternatively OpenSUSE or Fedora.

Regarding your other questions, you likely do not need to swap out hardware. But some graphics cards have poor support for Linux, so research your model in advance. You can also try running a distro of your choice live from a USB stick (most distros support this). It’s slower than running from hard drive, but you can get a feeling for what works out of the box and what may need further configuration.

Many games will not work properly on Linux, at least not without extensive tinkering. If you’re serious about certain games, I’d say Windows is unavoidable. I detest dual-booting but if you only have one computer then it may be your only option. However games that work on Deck should work fine on any Linux machine.

Hope this helps.

The Sands of Time series and Beyond Good and Evil are incredible, and they’re on gog. I’m thinking of getting them, but I have no desire whatsoever for anything that Ubisoft, EA or Activision makes.

I have pretty strong judgements of lots of things that I think should be legal despite how I feel. I despise gambling, I hate cosmetic surgery, I’d never get a tattoo, I don’t even like perfume, glitter… you get the idea. I’m not saying that you’re a criminal for buying a lottery ticket, but I’m totally gonna judge you an immoral moron in my mind.

I can certainly understand the argument that prostitution should be legal in order to protect sex workers. I’m not sure if that’s the best policy, but I can see where it’s coming from.

I do not believe that sex workers are categorically bad people, neither do I believe that people who hire sex workers are beyond redemption. I still find it disgusting and I don’t think it should be normalized.

However, to clarify: in this case we’re talking about a powerful person seeking out a young girl to have sex with. He pays for sex. He does not in any way verify age. I think it’s safe to say that he doesn’t give a shit about the well-being of this person, and if it was legal to have sex with a younger girl he would have done that openly. No internal moral compass whatsoever, just the narcissistic playbook of how he’s perceived by others. His followers are only backtracking because he got caught.

I don’t think socialists like Joseph Stalin. I’m saying that it’s a really unhinged thing to say.

I’m not an American so I’m not following FOX or any other American media that closely. But yes, I do remember him on FOX, and that he used a lot of extremely aggressive faces and language when talking about the liberals. I’m not sure if he’s actually changed his tactics, he just shifted targets.

Doesn’t really matter, at least not morally and probably not legally.

If you pay for sex you’re a sleazeball. If you pay someone who says they just turned 18 you’re a moron. In addition to being a pedophile.