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That is actually an interesting point to consider. I have been living without reading or watching any local media. I also do not follow any politicians on "social media". I do not use Facebook. I get my tech news from Mastodon and HN, some of the world news trickles through to the tech world, and I get my world news update from The Economist, mostly Leaders section (and Science&Technology).

I don't care what scandalous thing a politician said on any given day. I do not want to be advertising or voting material, to be riled up and pitted against others.

That means that I can judge the state of things by simply living in the country and watching what happens around me, comparing it to other places I visit. And that paints a very positive picture of the reality that surrounds us. Even on a practical level, living in a city that is safe and clean with good public transportation is something I've learned to appreciate. There are very few places in the world where I would consider living at this point, and in summertime at least, when the weather is nice, I simply wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

As to the OP and the blog post (impressive, btw!) — I largely agree. I don't think this is fear-mongering, these things are genuinely happening and are real risks. The OP didn't panic, and neither do I — but I do take these risks into account.

Google is the epitome of design that doesn't care at all about the user and user experience.

Finally, I would say, and I'm very happy they have not succumbed to the incredibly stupid fashion of making steering wheels square instead of rounded.

Understood, and I would definitely agree!

Yes! I've been thinking about placing a tiny camera in the fridge for such a long time. This is especially important if you have a summer house or another apartment — you never know/remember what is in the fridge.

Taking photos of the fridge is a solution, but then phones were too stupid until recently to be able to find those. Even know it's a mixed bag.

We live in a world of dumb devices that could be so much smarter.

The EU pays more than 1 billion EUR each month to Russia for their fossil fuels (more specifically, 1.2bn in August, 1.5bn in July). Countries leading are Hungary, Slovakia, France, Bulgaria and then Spain. And those are just direct purchases that we know about. Fossil fuels purchased from other countries might include Russian flows as well.

At the same time, much is made of various sanction packages, which are minuscule in comparison to these flows.

In other words, the EU finances the bombs that will be falling on EU countries in the future.

BTW, Russia will never pay any reparations.

I'm very curious about the downvoting here, which looks suspicious. I do realize that what I wrote might not be popular with a certain country (and its online trolling teams), but it is factually correct.

It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").

What we have been seeing is this gradual escalation. It's like boiling a frog slowly. Each escalation is too small to trigger a significant response, but after a while you suddenly notice that your country is burning.

I expect more of this in the near future. I wish the world stopped treating Russia as "just another business partner".

As a fellow ERP/MRP author/founder (PartsBox, specialized for electronics manufacturing), congratulations. These kinds of systems are very complex, much more so than it seems from the outside. Many people tend to think: "I could whip this up in a weekend." I also thought so 10 years ago when I started writing my own :-)

I do wonder about the value proposition of open sourcing the system, though. Apart from believing in open source and trying to do some good in the world, are there any practical reasons for you to maintain the system as open source? This is something that is very costly

I wish authorities would punish smoking in public areas more aggressively. I'm so tired of inhaling smoke or vape clouds when walking the streets or at bus/tram stops. Theoretically you are not supposed to smoke at bus stops, but it isn't enforced (EU/PL). Entering an office building means inhaling poison, unless you can hold your breath, because there is always a crowd of people smoking.

Aggressive laws and enforcement would do wonders, and also encourage potential quitters.

You didn't read the article, did you?

There are many benefits to doing it this way: reduced evaporation, reduced algae growth, reduced permitting, and also cooling for the panels which improves their efficiency.

> there's almost no reason to use MCPs if you are running a full-blown terminal agent

I disagree. Adding "https://mcp.linear.app/mcp" and having everything happen (discovery, usage, updates to the API, etc) without having to install or configure anything else locally is a big deal.

I wonder how these would do filtering my spam. I have been using 27B-class models for a while now, and they are nearly perfect at determining what is spam and what isn't. The only disadvantage is computational cost.

How do you export from a phone you no longer have?

> they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them

I bet you would not feel sick if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated. Some really are quite good.

> One reason to strongly prefer Apple over Google is that (as I understand it) you can still walk into a store with ID and recover your online identity.

Is this true? If so, in what countries? (Poland has no Apple stores, for example, for inexplicable reasons Apple has been giving the middle finger to this market)

That would be a huge difference.

How would moving your number to a new phone help? We're talking TOTP here, not SMS "auth".

> Small fender benders and sideswipes are much more frequent

Do you have any data on this? Everything I've ever read about them points to exactly the opposite conclusion. They actually reduce accidents and by a significant margin.

My only guess would be that you are referring to the US, where people are not used to roundabouts and yielding without a STOP sign.

Sorry, it was a thinko — I meant "solar panels".

Inverters are indeed expensive, so are batteries (and you will need batteries to make good use of solar; otherwise, you will be getting the ridiculously low energy company rates for what you over-produce). Being far north is somewhat compensated by the fact that solar batteries run much more efficiently when they are cold. Also, modern solar cells are surprisingly effective on cloudy days, unless it is really dark.

Complaining on HN :-)

More seriously, I have not found a solution.

Every ad system I tried resulted in nearly 100% bot traffic to my site. Google and LinkedIn give you "tools" that will show you various numbers, but I implemented my own conversion tracking, because I didn't trust their numbers.

I decided to stop burning money on these ad systems. I'm not sure if they work for anyone at this point, I'm guessing this is more of everybody being convinced they might work and trying to get them to work, rather than ads actually resulting in conversions.

Well, I guess this might be different if you are an online casino or something similar.

I find it rather sad that the original posts have been posted on an open site, where anyone can read them, while the HN post points to an increasingly dubious site that doesn't even show the post unless you create an account and log in.

I thought the spirit of the open web would be more important to this community.

I always thought it was enough to switch off the "Improve the model for everyone" setting on chatgpt.com:

"Allow your content to be used to train our models, which makes ChatGPT better for you and everyone who uses it. We take steps to protect your privacy."

But apparently there is also an entire completely different route "Do not train on my data"?

Does this mean that before I submitted the "Do not train on my data" request, my data was used for training in spite of "Improve the model for everyone" being turned off?

We are getting to facebook/meta-levels of privacy settings obfuscation.

I also have a lifetime pass, but I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with Plex. Why do I have to regularly turn off their "recommended" stuff that is just ads for movies I can buy online? Why does it appear and re-appear?

Also, the Plex app for LG TV has been buggy and broken for years: some content will not play at all, some will not play if you ff/rewind, and some will not play until you physically turn your TV off and then on. Very annoying.

I'm glad to see competition.

I have an LG TV. It has been pestering me with those licensing agreements from time to time, but interestingly enough, I was only required to agree to fairly reasonable basics, everything else I just ignored and left for later.

I'm guessing this is an oversight and the TV does record, but then this is criminal. But, nobody will bother to prosecute them I guess...

I gave up on reporting spam. Almost all of the spam I get (and I get a lot of it!) comes from Google, Amazon and Microsoft. None of them care much, none of them make reporting easy, and it seems they don't follow up, because the flood of spam never ceases.

They are "too big to fail": few people can afford to just block Google. This is why I am very happy to see people starting to do just that.

Acceptance rate is good, but MTP doesn't help in my case because of my machine's memory bandwidth constraints (M4 Max). Turn out it's better to turn MTP off.

I would (tentatively) agree — but that doesn't invalidate my argument: qualia are not objectively measurable, so you still can't tell if a machine is conscious.

If there is any company that can "ban your account" which would result in big problems for you (because, for example, they host your E-mail which means you've just lost access to password recovery for every account you have) with no recourse or due process, you should seriously rethink your approach to your online life.

Host your own E-mail, people, or use reliable E-mail providers that are not huge corpo-behemoths that sell you to advertisers. Those smaller E-mail providers will have actual support that you can contact in case of problems and will not "ban you".