SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
Which would make even such trivial things as using Lightroom / Photoshop generative erase to remove wires or small objects ”illegal” as they use a diffusion model to inpaint the selected area.
I used to bike all the time until the end of high school in the mid 90s when I got a job in the neighbouring city and started my university studies here in Finland. What strikes me as the main difference and not something covered in comments is that back then cycling was mostly an improved alternative to walking or short bus rides. You could travel faster and cover longer distance than by walking. The speeds were moderate and not particularly important and having to stop at a crossing was barely more annoying than as a pedestrian. You might go for a longer ride the same way you’d go out for a long walk / run. Some people would bike to work if the weather was good but considered that a hobby. If the weather was shit, you took the bus (or drove a car). Nobody sane would bike when there was any significant amount of snow and ice on the ground. The only way anyone considered being a cyclist as an ”identity” was the same way some people were tennis players or runners.
Today there are people who ride bikes as back then but the public discussion is dominated by a new group who are Cyclists. Ie. people who make cycling a replacement for a car and a core part of their identity. They demand that everyone accommodate their wish to be able to get everywhere by bike fast. Speed is of essence. If cars or pedestrians get in the way, that’s their problem, not the cyclists’. Having to slow down and stop for crossings is considered a travesty and insult towards cycling. The same goes for having the bike lane change to the other side of the road. The unofficial uniform is tight spandex clothes.
By and large nobody over here has a problem with people who just casually ride a bike. Cyclists OTOH get well deserved hate.
Scandinavian working class or small business types spend huge amounts of money importing and fueling pick up trucks
These are extreme outliers and really rare for the simple reason that US style pickup trucks solve the problem of hauling stuff or people around in a very poor way. They’re expensive, huge & heavy (a major problem when trying to drive or park them) and don’t protect the cargo. People who need to haul large amounts of cargo buy either a van or a trailer. People who need to regularly carry people and regular goods buy a station wagon.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
In a similar vein I needed a USB isolator. The price from Aliexpress including postage was 7e. From western stores the same product (marginally different plastic case, identical innards using ubiquituous Analog Devices isolator IC reference design, almost certainly produced in China) would have cost me 40e and 10-20e postage. People can talk about undervalued currency but that doesn’t explain the nearly 10x price difference.
That really depends on what you mean by "non-toy AI".
Do things like AI noise reduction and music stem separation count? I use both regularly. DeepL is very convenient for translating random languages to English.
I don't use LLMs as I have little use for very limited tools that require massaging long prompts that might or might not kinda-sorta do something helpful if I spend a lot of effort at it.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
Have you looked at how much China’s GDP has risen?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
I doubt anything particularly serious will actually develop from this but if it does, it will be glorious. I'm going to need to stock up on popcorn.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
How dare you suggest anything like that?!
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
Why would the ukrainians do that? They must have ulterior motives.
Indeed. What possible reason could the Ukrainians have to make the war more costly for Russia by striking against targets that Russia can't easily replace. It truly boggles the mind... /s
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
Chatgpt is my worst enemy. Chatgpt is every woman in HR I've ever interacted with.
Rather fittingly my boss in my previous job would use ChatGPT to translate our performance reviews to hyped corporate speech that HR drones would understand on the assumption that nobody important would ever care about the real contents.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
So would you say they should be renamed to something like MSLTATAH (Make Sweet Love To All The Asian Hoes)?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
Same here in Finland except from 7-8 years old unless one parent was stay at home or had only a part time job. We were surprised when we found out kids in US stayed so late at after school activities and figured it’d be very exhausting if we had to also do that.
I think you’re mixing two things under one label: the so-called ”vapaa kasvatus” where no limits at all are placed on the children ("to not stifle their creativity" or some such bullshit) and the one where you allow kids to come in and go out as long as they’re back for dinner and you have a decent idea of where they are (with a neighbor’s kids / school friend / nearby forest) but do your best to teach right from wrong and how to be responsible. The first was derided by the very early 90s when I was a teen and old enough to be aware of the public opinion. The second was how I and pretty much all of our neighborhood and my school friends were raised in the 80s and early 90s. The idea was that parents taught their kids how to behave but didn’t have to watch after them every waking moment (and other parents would report to yours if you got into trouble). A sort of trust but verify kind of thing.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
The list of reputable publications quickly gets very small when you raise standards to expect at least good faith reporting and quality. I can think of only two Finnish publications that I consider to do actual journalism today.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
Pick a suburb in Ohio and compare it to one in Florida or Texas.
What if you compare it to one in say Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi or New Mexico?
Granted, I don't live on that side of the Atlantic Ocean but Florida and Texas have never seemed to me to be modal examples of "the South".
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
Because the research is limited by both funding and competent people. Unless the first gets transferred more or less immediately, the competent people will disappear because they don't want to wait years in a limbo before getting on with their career. Sure, you'll eventually get replacements but those are effectively brand new research programs and it takes years to get them off the ground.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
Linux development is heavily biased toward prioritizing server requirements over desktop requirements when they conflict.
Often to a ridiculous extent as seen in all the schedulers where huge benefits in desktop use are rejected from mainline in favor of 0.1% throughput increase in servers.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
And he does it using the infamous Beat Kangz Beat Thang!
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
I'd put Greek civil war as a result of WW2 given that it already started during WW2 in practise. Spanish civil war counts, tho.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
The point is that US isn't / wasn't recently a part of a larger state breaking up, is not engaged in a major war nearby, has no direct ethnic conflicts that would map to side A vs side B and there isn't a more powerful state meddling and intentionally triggering a civil war in US. The civil wars that come to mind were all driven by one of those four factors (which don't apply to US) or are / were in countries that aren't by any meaningful definition "modern and industrialized" (ie. various African conflicts).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
it's just very hard for an urbanized, industrialized, well-developed country to have a civil war.
Have there even been civil wars in modern industrialized states that weren't linked to the larger state breaking up (Yugoslavia), another war, clear ethnic conflict or another more powerful state meddling and triggering the war?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
In related news Trump administration just revoked Harvard's ability to enroll international students by terminating the Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification. Apparently this will also force their current exchange students to transfer to other schools or lose their legal status.
Feel free to substitute a better term for "clear detachment from factual reality on some issues where the person was before well aware of the reality". Tesla's idea of wireless power transmission fundamentally cannot work because of the interaction of inverse square law and Maxwell's equations. Tesla, having invented the AC induction motor, was well aware of those equations and his inventions relied on them. Thus to later pivot to "No, that's actually bullshit and I'll just transfer power wirelessly without direct beaming" is a sign of either that or generally losing his wits (ie. senility).
As @TeknOSheEeP mentioned, you can beam power but that's fundamentally the same as just pointing a giant flashlight in one direction, only using microwaves in the hope of better conversion efficiency. A key fact is that it relies on a tightly directional beam, something which requires wavelength much shorter than the dimensions of the transmitter. Otherwise you've just built a plain old radio transmitter which (again because of inverse square law) are extremely inefficient as far as the received power goes.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4mo ago
wireless power transmission like Tesla always dreamed of
Tesla's dream of wireless power transmission was mostly just him going senile / developing schizophrenic symptoms. His earlier inventions that he made his fame from relied on the same laws of physics that were well known by then to make such long distance wireless power transmission inherently extremely inefficient (there's a reason any modern "beamed power transmission" concepts use parabolic antennae and microwave wavelengths).
There’s a very simple trick to making acceleration less of a faff that was ubiquituous back in the 90s where I live: Drive slower.
It only takes a few pushes of the pedals to get back to speed that’s still much faster than walking.
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