rhblake

In France firefighters are also paramedics. They provide ambulance services and are usually first responders for any medical emergency.

In 1996, with a typical 28.8k modem, that page would've taken more than 20 seconds to load. I'm quite sentimental and nostalgic about the web of yore but let's not pretend everything wasn't a lot slower for most people back then.

Even better, with Mullvad you can now use WireGuard instead of OpenVPN, for considerably better performance and possibly better security. I've configured my EdgeRouter Lite to route all wifi traffic on my default home network through WireGuard for a couple of weeks and it has worked very well.

https://www.mullvad.net/blog/2017/9/27/wireguard-future/

Compared to the Nordic countries or Netherlands, 'exceptional' might be the wrong word. But certainly compared to, say, Germany or France, the level of English is in my experience considerably higher in the Baltics (and in Poland too). I say this having lived in both Germany and France and visited all the Baltic countries.

"Even doctors may not have good English" -- in Paris I'm happy to find one that will speak English at all. Do not underestimate how unwilling or afraid to speak English a lot of people are even in places like Paris and Berlin.

`apt install ifupdown net-tools` and you have those tools again.

Just to be clear, you don't pay the gov't €5000 to start a Swedish AB, but you need a minimum of €5000 share capital.

If you want to be a sole trader (enskild näringsidkare/enskild firma) you need zero capital and the registration cost is zero (costs about €100 to register a company name but that's optional) and everything can be handled online, although if you're not a Swedish resident you'd need a temporary personal number from the tax agency first.

Would be better if they weren't straight-up lying. Without DNT and uBlock (i.e. the settings of an average user) that page results in more than a hundred cookies and hundreds of requests to more than a hundred third parties. A great deal of those are certainly not about improving the site or helping people click around.

Re: "bunch of weirdos hanging out in the foothills of the sierra nevadas", part three in Steven Levy's excellent book "Hackers" is about this -- mainly about Ken and Roberta Williams and Sierra in the 80s. Very much recommended.

I don't think Outlook.com supports catchall/wildcard aliases though, which makes using unique addresses for everything a bit annoying, which makes address reuse more likely.

Same here. I simply set up a catchall alias so <anything>@somedomain forwards to foo@regulardomain; very convenient. The fact that FastMail supports multiple custom domains, at least with standard accounts, is also nice -- even more so since you can (optionally) use their own nameservers and set up whatever DNS records you want (I use that for some personal websites), while they make sure SPF/DKIM records are always correct.

(Having a separate domain is not really necessary, but I registered it through nearlyfreespeech.net and use their WHOIS privacy service; at least J. Random can't easily figure out my identity based on the email address alone).

Both Hack and Menlo are based on DejaVu Sans Mono / Bitstream Vera (the DejaVu family extends Vera). Very little difference indeed.

But there were some discussion and reasoning behind the changes. For e.g. RSS limit, see https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/3145. Nobody was against it, as far as I can see. If someone think it's a mistake, I guess opening an issue on GitHub (where devs can see it) would be more useful than complaining elsewhere?

Hugo is still at 0.x. Hasn't stabilized yet. Breaking changes are to be expected.

It's an Electron app so the source code comes with the package. They've also tweeted "We have a plan release it for Linux with the first stable version" [0] and that a proper source code release is planned. [1] Haven't tried it myself.

[0] https://twitter.com/GetPublii/status/878563554118561792

[1] https://twitter.com/GetPublii/status/871670397145665537

I believe Klarna (dominant payment service provider in Sweden, handling >$10B/yr) is starting to do some stuff in Elixir (having already invested heavily in Erlang).

The police identified 53 exposed zones, of which 15 are in the most serious category. It's indeed a big problem (hence this report and a lot of talk about it in Sweden).

At the same time I think a lot of people from countries where you really have areas you avoid as a citizen (say, the US) often get the wrong impression when they read about so-called "no go" areas. There's no area on this list that I would avoid going to. And I've been to many, many of them, and have friends/family living in many of them (nearly all violence is between criminals).

Again, not saying it's not a problem. It's a big problem. The police were given more resources in the latest gov't budget to deal with exactly this and will surely get more next year and it'll surely be an important topic in the 2018 election. We'll see how it goes.

What are some other things you think have quickly deteriorated? I'm interested in this outsider perspective.

Are you sure you're not looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses? Not trying to coat anything, but I very well remember people talking about the country going down the drain 15-20 years ago too, following various incidents/attacks/scandals.

For sure some things have deteriorated (and others improved). So it goes. What are some of these things you believe have "quickly deteriorated"? (Genuinely curious)

Not saying problems don't exist. Just trying to be realistic. Shouting about how everything has gone to hell and the country has become a joke can also be a dangerous theme feeding populist movements. Let's focus on what's actually broken.

But crucially not intent to commit treason. Gross negligence, sure (this she also admitted to). And I agree that she - and several others - ought to be punished much harder. But being naïve and incompetent (basically "yeah this is a problem but IBM can't provide people with security clearance yet, it takes too much time, and we're too far into the process and if we stop now many things - such as giving out driver's licenses and checking them - won't work for a while")... is, again, not treason.

Just like involuntary manslaughter is not murder, and so on.

Here's the definition by the way, 19 kap. 1 § brottsbalken: https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K19

It's a "soft" paywall - the content is still there. Use uBlock Origin or similar, and don't let the site set cookies, and everything will be fine (Firefox: right click -> View Page Info -> Permissions -> set "Set Cookies" to "Block").

Straight from the source, in English: http://www.government.se/government-policy/a-feminist-govern...

Well, she was also fired (finally) and her career is finished. I agree it was monumentally stupid. But "punished as high treason"? Treason requires intent. She most certainly did not intend to be criminally disloyal to the country. Merely being ignorant and incompetent is not treason.

This is a major fuckup but let's be real. Our country is a "joke"? I know complaining is a national sport in Sweden, much like in many other countries, and I can rage about plenty of idiotic things going on. But on the whole, things are in general pretty good, relative to most other countries in the world. Move elsewhere and you'll just find a different set of things to be mad about (perhaps more, perhaps less; and there's always a bunch of Swedish expats who complain that things don't work like in Sweden).

It was reported by DN who received a copy of the Swedish Security Service's (Säpo) preliminary investigation [0]. My translation of a few paragraphs from the article:

"Swedish IBM used up to 11 subsidiaries and subcontractors in different countries, among them Romania, Croatia, Czech Republic and Serbia. ``But how the data would flow she did not understand'', witnesses a consultant who evaluated IBM's offer before the contract signing.

The ones who got "the keys to the kingdom" where three IBM administrators in Czech Republic, with full access to all data and logs. It meant the possibility to copy and distribute data and then remove all traces.

The computer systems' various firewalls and all communication were handled by a company in Serbia where 14 named persons became administrators, they, too, without a security check."

[0] http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/statliga-hemligheter-kunde-...

I don't know how much blame you can put on IBM here.

- The Transport Agency decided to outsource operations, and IBM won the contract (April 2015)

- The following month, the head of the agency decided to ignore certain laws about privacy, secrecy, etc., as well as the agency's own requirements about information security

- The Swedish Security Service, Säpo (basically our FBI), immediately got wind of this and started investigating, ultimately recommending - in November 2015 - to put an immediate halt to the outsourcing

- The Transport Agency decided to ignore the advice of Säpo and handed over operations to IBM in December 2015

Here's a good timeline: http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/detta-vet-vi-om-transportst...

It's the latter: (intentional) use of (illegal) drugs is illegal, and having THC in your blood is proof enough to convict you (even if you've consumed it in a different country where it's actually legal; there's precedent). Typically you'd just get a fine though, if you admit guilt and don't go to court. See § 1 here for the exact law: http://www.notisum.se/rnp/sls/lag/19680064.htm

Depends on the country. In Sweden it's illegal to have certain drugs in your system. E.g. if THC is found in your blood you can be convicted for a minor drug offense. We're sadly pretty extreme with regards to drugs though.

For any fans of Moriyama I'd also like to recommend Ko-Ji Yamasaki, who's been documenting his life in Osaka for more than twelve years now and publishing everything online: http://www.yamasakiko-ji.com/

The book "Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers" (Aperture 2005) is excellent and contains essays and photos by many of the greats (including Moriyama): http://aperture.org/shop/setting-sun-books/ -- however it's out of print now and used copies seem to be quite expensive, but libraries might have it.

I think GNOME 3 has come a long way but years later I'm still bothered by their killing type-ahead navigation in the file dialog and replacing it with search -- however useful searching may be (and despite recent improvements), it slows me down greatly, and often leads to mistakes, when I know where something is and simply want to navigate to it.

Plenty of discussion about this [0] [1] but the GNOME devs don't want it back, for various reasions.

Ubuntu has always patched it back in, but it looks like they will drop it in 17.10 if nobody steps up to maintain the patch [2].

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1164...

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721968

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1666...

I upgraded from Fedora 25 to 26 alpha a few months ago and even then the process was smooth and the resulting system stable.

Haven't tried the KDE spin but I did try KDE neon briefly earlier this year. Quite slick but I quickly ran into broken package dependencies when trying to install some random stuff I needed (QGIS and sqlitebrowser IIRC); apparently it's been an open bug since September last year [0]. Didn't leave me with a good first impression but I'm rooting for the project - KDE is fantastic these days.

[0] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368792

David Kushner's excellent book "Masters of Doom" certainly paints a picture of Carmack being mainly interested in solving problems above everything else. Made me think of this passage from the beginning of chapter 4 (before becoming rich, when they were just starting up id Software):

> Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.

Eleven years later, in Time in 2001, commenting on the infamous split with John Romero:

> John Carmack doesn't disagree with Romero's description of their clashing priorities. "I'm doing what I want to do now, and it happens to be making us millions of dollars," he told TIME last week, in one of his first public comments on the split with his former partner. Carmack doesn't want to grow id into a big company. "There's only so many Ferraris I want to own," he says. But he takes issue with Romero's version of their breakup. "John's a good designer, and he's got artistic talent. But the fact is that after he got rich and famous, the push to work just wasn't there anymore." Romero didn't quit last fall, says Carmack. "He was handed his resignation." [0]

[0] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,137916,...