Only in “international university rankings” that treat essentially classes being given in the English language as about 1/3 of the score or as they call it, “easiness for international students”.

Or in other words, “for international students” they’re one of the best in the World, to a large extent because all lessons are in English so all else being the same, universities in English-speaking countries will always come above universities in non-English speaking countries because English is the main Lingua Franca at the moment.

Also a lot of the other quality metrics (such as number of published papers) actually measure research proeficiency rather than teaching quality, which whilst relevant for post-grads, isn’t quite as relevant for most students.

Whether if measured from the point of view of the main student community they serve rather than “international post-grad student” MIT is the best in the World, is unclear.

Curry is the greatest dish of English cuisine.

Like when the coach of a big sports team is interviewed on the half-time break of a game they’re losing, this guy will of course going to say they’re still going to win.

It would only be news if he confessed they were fucked.

In Portuguese from Portugal, one of the words for “queue” is “bicha”,

In Portuguese from Brasil, “bicha” is a slang word for homosexual and has nothing to do with queues.

So the common Portuguese expression to tell somebody one’s going to stand on a queue - “vou para a bicha” (literally “I’m going to the queue”) - has a whole different meaning for Brasilians.

He has blood on his bloody nose.

The obligation to obbey the Copyright of others is only for the riff-raff.

Try Lutris or Heroic Launcher as those two wrap around Wine (and everything else needed to run Windows games in Linux, such as DXVK) and manage the whole process for you, with only a few games which might need tweaking the config to run (and the fraction of games like that is no worse there than it is in Steam).

I use both Steam and Lutris and in my experience Steam is not at all a good launcher for anything other than games from the Steam store, mainly because it is less configurable and because it doesn’t directly expose the tools you need to use to fix those few games that won’t just run and limits the launch options you can tweak, whilst Lutris follows the Unofficial Open Source Credo of pretty much making it possible to configure everything (though Lutris specifically defaults to the best configuration for each game, but it definitelly gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself with)

Steam is very popular because of the Steam Store market dominance so tons of people swear by it (never having used anything else), but it’s not actually the greatest option for anything but steam games and even for those, sometimes it’s worse that getting the same game from GoG and using Lutris or Heroic, mainly because the DRM in the non-GoG version of some games interferes with running them in Linux.

Don’t use Wine directly, just use launcher UIs, such as Steam for Steam store games and Heroic Launcher or Lutris for games not from the Steam store.

You do need Wine installed, but if you use launchers you don’t actually need to figure Wine out or manage it to install and run the vast majority of games unless you’re doing unusual stuff like running pirated games.

Yeah.

Whilst I didn’t explicitly list that category as such, if you think about it, my AI for video surveillance and AI for scientific research examples are both in it.

AI isn’t at all reliable.

Worse, it has a uniform distribution of failures in the domain of seriousness of consequences - i.e. it’s just as likely to make small mistakes with miniscule consequences as major mistakes with deadly consequences - which is worse than even the most junior of professionals.

(This is why, for example, an LLM can advise a person with suicidal ideas to kill themselves)

Then on top of this, it will simply not learn: if it makes a major deadly mistake today and you try to correct it, it’s just as likely to make a major deadly mistake tomorrow as it would be if you didn’t try to correct it. Even if you have access to actually adjust the model itself, correcting one kind of mistake just moves the problem around and is akin to trying to stop the tide on a beach with a sand wall - the only way to succeed is to have a sand wall for the whole beach, by which point it’s in practice not a beach anymore.

You can compensate for this by having human oversight on the AI, but at that point you’re just back to having to pay humans for the work being done, so now instead of having to the cost of a human to do the work, you have the cost of the AI to do the work + the cost of the human to check the work of the AI and the human has to check the entirety of the work just to make sure since problems can pop-up anywere, take and form and, worse, unlike a human the AI work is not consistent so errors are unpredictable, plus the AI will never improve and it will never include the kinds of improvements that humans doing the same work will over time discover in order to make later work or other elements of the work be easier to do (i.e. how increase experience means you learn to do little things to make your work and even the work of others easier).

This seriously limits the use of AI to things were the consequences of failure can never be very bad (and if you also include businesses, “not very bad” includes things like “not significantly damage client relations” which is much broader than merely “not be life threathening”, which is why, for example, Lawyers using AI to produce legal documents are getting into trouble as the AI quotes made up precedents), so mostly entertainment and situations were the AI alerts humans for a potential situation found within a massive dataset and if the AI fails to spot it, it’s alright and if the AI incorrectly spots something that isn’t there the subsequent human validation can dismiss it as a false positive (so for example, face recognition in video streams for the purpose of general surveillance, were humans watching those video streams are just or more likely to miss it and an AI alert just results in a human checking it, or scientific research were one tries to find unknown relations in massive datasets)

So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it, investment money sunk into it or the huge amount of resources (such as electricity) used by it.

Specifically for Microsoft, there doesn’t really seem to be any area were MS’ core business value for customers gains from adding AI, in which case this “AI everywhere” strategy in Microsoft is an incredibly shit business choice that just burns money and damages brand value.

Reading your post and looking back makes me realize that some of my best travel experiences were when, for some reason or other, things got out of control.

Yeah, well, there’s no Oil in Europe either, so ICE cars are even worse for a self-sustaining Europe (at least Lithum is only consumed once for an EV car, whilst Oil is consumed all the time for ICE cars)

If Europe can constantly source Oil from abroad to keep ICE cars going, I’m sure it can also source (a far lower quantity of) Lithium from abroad to make cars that can then run on electric power produced right here in Europe.

Your entire “argument” is one big cherry picked excuse.

In my experience, how many people think like that really depends on the country of Europe: my own native Portugal is far more shit when it comes to Environmentalism in general - especially around cars as the country has a very 1980s mindset on them and a car is still seen as symbol of status - whilst for example The Netherlands is almost the the opposite.

Well informed people knew that it wasn’t safe already for quite a while.

Most people did not, most companies did not, most public institutions either did not or could make believed they did not.

That’s changing (as are lots of other things) because Trump is being far more loud about how Europe is an adversary of America than previous administrations (it was too for Democrats, though only on business and trade terms)

There was quite a lot of fighting against treating America as a safe haven for the data of Europeans from people in the know in Tech and IT Security in Europe but we lost, but now crooked politicians can’t make believe America or American companies are safe for the data of Europeans anymore.

Explanation

Mullvad just gives your machine an IP address from a range reserved for internal networks and which is not valid to use as a public IP on the internet, and then does NAT translation like your home router does.

NAT translation just uses a gateway/router as a front on the Internet (thus, with a public IP address) for a bunch of machines with non-public IP addresses: if a connection comes from an inside machine to a machine on the internet it just replaces the source IP & port address on the outbound connection with its own public IP and available port so that if the external internet machine connects back, it knows which internal machine is supposed to receive that connection.

So if you machine on the internal network side connects out to another machine on the Internet, at least for a while (until it purges than information from memory because it’s not being used) the NAT server will treat connections from that machine to it (remember, the NAT server is the one with a valid public IP address) as actually meant to go to your machine.

However if a connection comes from a machine outside which your own machine has never before connected to (which is the case when you start seeding and you machine ends up in the list of seeders of a torrent), since your machine never connected to that one in the first place the NAT server doesn’t know which internal machine that connection is supposed to go to, so it never gets to that machine.

The way to have your machine reachable by any random external machine when you’re using NAT is called Port Forwarding which is a mechanism to reserver one of the IP ports on the NAT server so that any connection to that port is always forwarded to a specific internal machine.

Mullvad doesn’t support port forwarding, hence the problems with seeding.

TL;DR What you can do

After downloading a torrent, leave it seeding. Since during the download stage your machine connected with pretty much all machines in the swarm (even if just to check what they have available) the NAT server has them associated with your machine in its list so that if any of those machines tries to connected back the connection gets forwarded to your machine, hence requests from any of those machines to download blocks come through and get served by your machine.

However new machines that join the swarm won’t be able to reach your machine because Mullvad’s NAT server doesn’t know them hence doesn’t know it should forward their connections to your machine.

This is the same reason why if you just start seeding from scratch nothing ever manages to connect to your machine - none of the machines outside trying to reach yours is in the list that the NAT server has of machines your own has reached earlier so their connections to the public IP of the server don’t get forwarded to your machine.

In my experience just leaving it seeding after downloading is enough to have at least a 2:1 seed to download ratio in most torrents, so if your objective is to give back to the community as much or more than you take, that’s enough IMHO.

If however you just want to seed for other reasons, then you won’t be able to do it with Mullvad. Either get a VPN provider that supports port foward or rent a seedbox and use that.

Europe just did a 180 on the commitment for no ICE cars to be sold from 2035 onwards under pressure of just a handful of big automakers.

And when I say Europe, I actually mean crooked European politicians rather than the public in general.

I mean, even if one puts the aside the whole strategical point of Europe delaying even more commiting to the first big tech revolution of the 21st century so that a handful of large automakers make a little bit more profit, there are actually lives as stake: fumes for diesel cars are estimated to kill more than 10,000 people a year in Europe.

Corruption in politics is both killing people and fucking up our future prosperity.

Yes, China has very purposefully put itself at the forefront of the first technological revolution of the 21st century and done this at multiple levels (solar panel production, battery tech, EVs)

Meanwhile the American elites have decided that 19th century technology is were they want to be. Well, that and dead ending killing the country’s lead in the Tech revolution by going down a branch with no future in the form of LLMs and making everybody lose trust in keeping their data in anything owned by American companies.

And, of course, the crooked politicians here in Europe are actually following America more than China in this.

“I don’t like the most outspoken people who like it” isn’t exactly a rational reason to inform one’s choices in Tech, more so given that you don’t actually have to be in contact with such people to use that Tech.

It’s like refusing to play a single player game because there are fanboys for that game on the Internet.

If making your choices by following a random crowd of people you don’t even know personally and don’t even have to talk to is the most low-self confidence imature thing one can do, making your choices by setting yourself in opposition to a random crowd of people you don’t even know personally and don’t even have to talk to is the second most low-self confidence imature thing one can do.

Why the fuck should you care about their opinion either way? They do they, you do you.

It would be great if they contributed to open source projects like the Heroic Launcher, Lutris and even Wine and DXVK.

IMHO yet another store-exclusive (even worse if closed-source) sales + launcher application for Linux wouldn’t really be a step forward for Linux.

I expect that anybody who doesn’t have a fanboy relationship towards Steam already does or will if they just think a little bit, see that an open-source store-independent universal games launcher is way more free and open (and hence aligned with the Linux ethos and immune to enshittification) than any store-exclusive sales + launcher app.

As it so happens, given that freedom in gaming is GOGs unique value proposition, business-wise it’s IMHO more advantageous for them to (very loudly and very visibly) support open source universal launchers (and maybe even some kind of open games store front protocol and open source implementation) and windows gaming adaptor layers (like Wine) serving a community with a higher awareness of the need for Software Freedom, than pushing yet another proprietary (even if open source) launcher that only works with their store - a seamless universal launcher is far more likely to pull people away from the Steam App than a GOG App.

Under such a strategy some soft marketing of in their store website promoting Linux Gaming Distros for Windows users and of promoting those universal launchers for Linux users, might help pull more people away from the closed-source store-specific application of their biggest competitor.

I’m doing my part by replacing the aging PCs of my close family with Mini PCs running Linux.