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.

It does not even have to be mountains, or a location at land. You could for example construct a dike at sea to create a polder (as done in the Netherlands) and use the potential of different water levels inside and outside the dike for energy storage. Cost of dike building should be roughly approximate to circumference of the polder, while energy storage potential is proportional to area of the polder - thus a technology that scales well with large storage requirements.

Or you could possibly use the water pressure at depth, without having a structure going all the way to the surface, as in this project: https://www.iee.fraunhofer.de/...

"we're no longer able to sustain the development and support of the cloud infrastructure that powers this older generation of products" - translation: "We are only interested in selling things, no ensuring customer have working products. The warranties are not valid anymore, and we thought we can end support without a backlash large enough to make customers not buying other stuff from us".

Devices like this should at least a have a published and open hardware specification, and avoid DRM or any technological measures to prevent users modifying their product. Ideally also sources provided for software used, at least when discontinued. Perhaps the EU or other progressive unions / states could do a bit for this.

And it's rather silly requiring internet connectivity for controlling things in your home.

You don't have any other storage options?

Especially hydro can scale really well. Existing dams can often be re-purposed to a higher degree of load regulation, saving stored water for periods of neither wind nor sun enough. Pumped storage may also be a possibility. Either in an existing hydro installation, or in a "pure" pumped storage solution, were water is moved to a higher reservoir only by excess production in the electricity net, without any existing river doing resupply.