For intra-Europe travel, we will do quite fine, yes. Intercontinental travel will be much harder, but at least travel to US had already declined, in part because people don't want to risk getting randomly detained.

But yes, we already had similar situations - for example when the EyjafjallajÃkull eruption closed air space. Trains will be crowded, long-distance buses will have a boom time. The night trains will be very sold out. Some people will probably drive. Some conferences may have to be re-scheduled because of longer travel times, or go digital. But we will manage. Travel within Europe can work quite OK without air travel.

Fossil gas dependency is another matter - some countries still rely on it for heating and industry, and we don't want to buy Russian gas for obvious reasons. It was replaces with LNG, imported from Gulf countries or the US. The best we can do now is probably lowering temperatures a bit in homes, starting insulating better for the winter, and in general help central Europe getting heating less dependent on gas, as we already have in Northern Europe. When we can cope with only gas from Norway / the UK, we would have better resilience, but of course zero fossil gas would be even better.

Text adventures could have some UI similarities with speech based navigation for visually impaired users, whether the navigation aid is dog-shaped or not.
"You are in a dimly lit forest groove. A squirrel sits on a tree stump one metre in front of you. The squirrel looks confused. There are exits to the north, west and east." (or perhaps 9,12 and 3 o clock)

Also, I could imagine some scepticism on the chipmakers part on whether most current "AI" is a viable business, or if they are mostly driven by investment money with disproportionally less actual revenue coming. If the current "AI" craze has elements of a bubble, chip makers won't hesitate selling to AI companies for inflated prices, but will be far more reluctant investing in capacity that may or may not pay back.

If affects us to some degree. Petrol - for those that use it - is a bit more expensive, and it probably will disturb still fossil-sources industrial supply chains after a while. There is still natural gas dependency, we don't want to buy from the invading dictator in Russia, and the supply may also diminish.

But we generally have more sensible cities, where it's rather easy to ride a bike or even walk to services, kindergarten and often to work. And public transit is much more abundant, even if of course people have issues with quality or punctuality in places.

I'm not very updated on "TDS", but I assume it's about the mindset that makes people elect a convicted felon and general con artist with a high score on false public statements?

How come blatant large-scale download of online and offline copyrighted works and reuse in derivative works is OK if "AI" corporations does it, but download by private persons of similar works for reading / viewing is classified as piracy? (OK, besides the "AI" hype that it's somehow not a derivative work, "corporate" may be a hint ...)

Interesting reading on the exuberant tuition fees in the US, and how it hinders people from getting higher education. I live in Sweden, and we have *no* tuition fees, at least if you are a citizen. College / university is free - you just have to be accepted to the programme / course, which is usually done on either high school grades, standardised test results or previous academic merits. Even travel (for example excursions when you study biology, geology, urban planning ...) is usually free.

Every student also get a small state-funded grant (around 3000 SEK / 300 EUR each month) for at most 5-6 years of studies from CSN, the central study grants board. There has been proposals from student's organistions to increase this part as it is mostly not enough even for rent, but currently most students also take a loan from the same agency or take part-time jobs.

Firefox too it seems, even if I haven't tried it.

Honest question: Could local text translation be a good use case for local ML models? Nice not having a remote translation service getting to know what text you read or write.
That said, such things can probably be done OK enough without specific NPU:s.

(otherwise, agree it sounds like buzzword of the year, with usage of rather overestimated)

No, it does not have to be a laptop - it can still be a phone with typical form factor and use cases - staying in the pocket, casual chat, phone calls and video, outdoor navigation ... Case in point: I had a Nokia N900 in 2011 - it was phone-sized (a bit thicker than modern phones but not much), and could do all phone things. With wonderful two-thumbs text input. In addition, it had a resistive instead of capacitive touch screen, so I could use it even with thick gloves - Finnish design considerations?

Yeah, you could use it as a "mini-laptop" - it even ran Libreoffice and gcc. However, that was not how you typically used it, except for exceptional cases.

Maybe the also will try product placement? Ie, making the generated results favor certain actors or products - if they pay. Given the abysmal transparency of typical LLM output, and how regulatory bodies may be insufficiently staffed, lacking suitable laws (at least outside the EU), or crippled by some madman administration, they may try ...

Climate is real. Why are you engaging in denialism? The only "scam" I see is people promising that we can ignore climate change.

And if "technology changes for the better over time", investing in backward technology like fossil fuels won't be a a path to progress. If we want the better technology to actually catch on, we should invest in it, instead of catering to lobbyists for large but increasingly obsolete business interests like fossil fuel.

This is how it works in Sweden. Employers and banks report to the tax agency, and once a year you get an overview of what they have got, and a preliminary calculation. If it's correct, just can just sign the paper version and send, or sign with e-id or one time code at the government e-service. There you can also make common deductions (like commuting expenses) before signing, and the tax will be adjusted accordingly.

The tax agency also has guides how to do different kinds deductions. They also has a mostly competent e-mail / phone helpdesk.

Besides the obvious risk of lock-in and enshitification, i have another question:

While perhaps mostly European at the moment, a non-negligible number of people have their motor vehicle needs fulfilled by shared cars instead of owning - either via an official car club, of sharing among friends. And there are of course also traditional rentals. For this, a system which you don't have to configure per user and vehicle is useful - for example plugging in a smartphone. Will this "centralised system" work for cases where you may use a different car each time?

I help non-tech friends with IT support. Several have switched to GNU/Linux distros, and I haven't in a single case had a problem that required manual driver compilation, even less using vi.

They mostly use the system without any issue for regular web-based activities + office. I have helped showing Inkscape. In one case I had to help install a Firefox plugin to make Zoom links use the web version, and helped with the sound GUI to use correct input devices. But the latter seems to be a rather common problem on all systems ... Systems used have been Devuan with Mate, Mint with Cinnamon and Debian with Gnome 3.