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.

It’s not at all surprising that fatcats looks at the juicy profits that Apple makes with their iOS closed garden and think “I want me some of that” - wanting to be a monopolist with captive customers makes the most business sense and is the most natural thing in a Capitalist Economic and Political environment.

Most of the economic activity around Technology nowadays is rent-seeking and only the part which isn’t at all about money - open source - isn’t about corraling people into closed spaces, removing their choices and then extracting the most money possible from people who now have no other option.

It’s kinda like 20 or 30 years ago when Banks looked at cash payments and thought that they should find a way to get comissions on those, same as they got with card payments, so already back they they were pushing things like electronic wallets (back then those were basically a special kind of card) and keep pushing it for decades (often with the support of governments, since 100% electronic payments are great for civil society surveillance), and nowadays in some countries there are pretty much no cash payments so that relentless push for controlling and getting a cut of every single trade has worked in those countries (and people in those places, such as Sweden, having traded a small hidden increase in price - due to banks now getting comissions in everything - and huge loss of privacy for a tiny bit of convenience genuinelly think they’re better of).

So yeah, these software fatcats will totally try and get together with hardware makers with a dominant market position to slowly close down PC technology - for example the whole point of TPM is to take control away from the owners of the hardware and the “trusted” in “trusted platform” (aka TPM) isn’t about it being trusted by the owner of the hardware, it’s about it being trusted by the business selling the OS, who in turn can sell access to the thus gatekept environment to software making businesses.

I believe the whole requirement for TPM 2.0 in Windows 11 even though it doesn’t actually need it is just a step in a broader strategy to turn PCs into a closed platform controlled by Microsoft, whilst as we see here other companies are trying to created closed platforms by having everything run in their servers, like Google tried almost a decade ago for games with Stadia and was also tried 2 or 3 decades ago by the likes of Sun Microsystems with the push for Thin Clients.

For a moment there I actually imagined a washing machine with a rolling drum full of dishes and glasses it …

Gotta leave your comfort zone to grow.

Interestingly I read somewhere (from a Behavioral Economics book, I think) that people who pay in cash in average spend less than people who pay by card.

Paying cash involves literally giving out something physical which you own, whilst paying by card is just a number in a screen that you say yes to, and it’s theorized that the actually parting with something physical like cash makes people more wary of spending because of the higher unpleasent feeling of losing something.

Certainly looking at myself, actually counting and giving away €100 in notes does feel more unpleasant that merelly saying yes to a screen showing the number 100.

All this to say that for poor people it actually makes even more sense to pay in cash.

Yeah, ok, that makes sense.

I suppose the only part that my post adds is that in my experience for native English-speakers the tendency to learn the language of the country they live in is less than for non-native English speakers who are also not locals, because - thanks to English being the global lingua franca, almost everybody finds it easy to switch to English when confronted with a person who doesn’t speak their local language well but does speak English well, which makes it a lot harder in the early stage to learn the language of the locals (you need to be really assertive about wanting to try to speak the local language).

Certainly that was my experience in most of Europe.

If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.

Well, sorta.

In my experience with British colleagues when living in The Netherlands (were you can definitelly get away with speaking only English), whilst some of them never really became fluent in Dutch, others would become fluent in it.

You see, even with English being a lingua franca, many if not most of the locals (how many depends on the country and even area of the country - for example you’re better of speaking broken German with the locals in Berlin than English) are actually more comfortable if you speak their language, which make your life easier. Also the authorities will often only communicated in the local language (in The Netherlands the central authorities would actually send you documents in English, but for example the local city hall did everything in Dutch).

That said, if you’re an English speaker you can definitelly get away with not learning another language even when living elsewhere in Europe plus I’ve observed that in the early stages of learning the local language often when a native English speaker tried to speak in the local language the locals would switch to English, which for me (a native Portuguse speaker) was less likely, probably because the locals could tell from a person’s accent if they came from an English-speaking country hence they for sure knew English whilst with me even if they recognized my accent they couldn’t be sure that I spoke English.

All this to say that whilst I think it is indeed much harder for native English-speakers to learn a second language to fluency levels even when living abroad, it’s not quite as bad as “likely never”, though they have to put some effort into it whilst non-English speakers are far more likely to naturally end up learning a bit of English in addition to their own language (but for any other language, they too have to “put some effort into it”).

I am from Portugal - which is a very peripheral region in Europe, bordering only Spain - but do speak several European languages, and one of my most interesting experiences in that sense you describe was in a train in Austria on my way to a ski resort, an intercity train (so, not even a long-distance “international” train) which was coming from a city in Germany on its way to a city in Switzerland just making its way up the Austrian-Alps valleys, and were I happened to sit across from two guys, one Austrian and one French, and we stroke up a conversation.

So it turns out the French guy was a surf promoter, who actually would often go to Ericeira in Portugal (were at a certain time in the year there are some of the largest tube waves in the World, so once it was “discovered” it became a bit of a Surf Meca) only he didnt spoke Portuguese, but he did spoke Spanish.

So what followed for a bit over an hour was a conversation floating from language to language, as we tended to go at it in French and Spanish but would switch to German to include the Austrian guy and if German wasn’t enough (my German is only passable) we would switch to English since the Austrian guy also spoke it, and then at one point we found out we could both speak some Italian so we both switched to it for a bit, just because we could.

For me, who am from a very peripheral country in Europe, this was the single greatest “multicultural Europe” experience I ever had.

That said, I lived in other European countries than just my homeland and in my experience this kind of thing seems to be likely in places which are in the middle of Europe near a couple of borders and not at all in countries which only border one or two other countries.

In my experience when I lived in Holland, compared to me my friends and colleagues from English-speaking countries had the additional problems in trying to learn Dutch that people would tend to switch to English when they heard them speak in Dutch (probably because they picked up from their accent that they were native English speakers) plus their own fallback when they had trouble expressing themselves or understanding others in Dutch was the “lowest energy” language of all - their native one.

Meanwhile me - being a native Portuguese speaker - suffered a lot less from the “Dutch people switching to English when faced with my crap Dutch language skills” early on problem (probably because from my accent they couldn’t be sure that I actually spoke English and they themselves did not speak Portuguese) and my fallback language when my Dutch skills weren’t sufficient was just a different foreign language.

So some of my British colleagues over there who had lived there for almost 20 years still spoke only barelly passable Dutch whilst I powered through in about 5 years from zero to the level of Dutch being maybe my second best foreign language, and it would’ve been faster if I didn’t mostly work in English-speaking environments (the leap in progression when I actually ended up in a work environment were the working language was Dutch was amazing, though keeping up was a massive headache during the first 3 or 4 months).

That said, some other of my British colleagues did speak good Dutch, so really trying hard and persisting worked for them too (an interesting trick was when a Dutch person switched to English on you, just keeping on speaking in Dutch).