and it’s not like this is at all unique to china, i’m pretty sure all the western countries are seeing the same thing happen just to a lesser degree.
Think of all the small towns in the US, they used to be lively places and now most of them are one step removed from being ghost towns. Same thing has happened here in sweden, the countryside is just a big suburb where everyone commutes to work in a city and barely any businesses survive.
this makes no sense to me, aside from english we don’t teach languages because it’s immediately useful in daily life, we teach it because it’s good for your brain and it’s good for the entire population to have some ability to use more languages.
Like, how useful do you think spanish is in northern europe? Not very! and yet most people here learn it in school.
i mean… how often do you think spanish is used in the nordics? and yet a third language is mandatory, and most people pick spanish.
Sure it’s not like most swedes can speak fluent spanish, but it’s also not like they completely forget it. If they go to spain they’ll have a hell of a better chance at being able to talk to people than those who picked german.
the idea that learning languages is particularly difficult seems like an anglophone invention to me, english is a completely standard mandatory subject in most of the world and in many countries a lot of kids learn 2 more languages on top of that.
Here in sweden it’s 100% expected that you speak fluent swedish, english, and can make yourself somewhat understood in at least one other language (usually spanish or german, it’s no different than being expected to know maths and science.
just put [silkpost] in the title so people can filter it so some degree
💯
I just want to check though: Do you wear motorbike safety gear? Because you REALLY REALLY should, e-scooters are great but the one thing they are not is safe (if you go faster than a moderate run).
yes, through the magic of eliminating every expense i can.
My expenses are: Rent, electricity, internet, phone service, home insurance, bus ticket (in the winter), and food (of which i’ve been steadily finding cheaper and cheaper things to cook, most recently discovering that you can just fry the shit out of mixed frozen vegetables and it tastes amazing).
It’s slightly terrifying to see what other people spend money on, like paying 5€ for a SINGLE CUP OF COFFEE… Or, like, owning a car at all. Buddy maybe you could afford to heat your luxurious mansion if you weren’t blowing half your fucking income on a living room with 4 wheels?
An incredible amount of people, probably most people, just seem to be fundamentally incapable of recognizing expenses as being expenses. Their brain just classes that cup of coffee as something required to live and thus the cost doesn’t exist. They’ll buy it every single day, even as it doubles in cost, and i’m not sure if the act of paying even consciously registers.
there’s no point to a budget if you minimize all costs anyways, and it means i get a surprise amount left over at the end of every month which i can do whatever i want with.
Which is usually just letting it pile up because i don’t know if my welfare will be denied at some point and having that buffer means i can afford to replace things every now and then.
KDE plasma: A random contributor helped implement a nice little feature that somehow makes you 20% more attractive, nice!
Windows: We’ve killed your cat and replaced it with an AI-generated version that will forever occupy a fourth of your screen.
that’s both true and completely hilariously incorrect: There is no one “intelligence”, there are effectively infinitely many different kinds of intelligence, but broadly you can break it up into stuff like “emotional intelligence”, “spatial reasoning”, “problem solving”, etc etc.
also it’s not fair to say that cats are less intelligent when no one bothers to train them, the few cats that actually get trained as much as dogs seem to be comparably good at doing quite complex things.
and we then train the domesticated horses from a young age that letting us ride on them is something they WANT to do, because they get snacks and scritches and they get to go outside more.
while “sabbath mode” does indeed seem to be real, i cannot imagine this is something that sees any serious amount of usage, and i’d imagine most rabbis would tell you it’s kind of silly because the point of sabbath is to not do work, and these appliances specifically exist so we don’t have to do work.
If you start considering “putting food in the microwave and turning a dial to start it” as violating sabbath, you quite obviously then also can’t go around turning door handles or using keys, or taking on/off clothes, or filling a glass of water, etc etc etc
this is why i stick to cheapo devices unless there’s a specific feature in expensive ones that i want: they generally achieve the low cost by making a minimum viable product, which thus lacks all the complex nonsense and is often pretty repairable as a bonus.
Power dial, time dial. All a microwave or an air fryer needs.
what do you mean you don’t want an LLM built into the kernel that controls the scheduler?
do you own gold? if not, then it doesn’t affect you, unsurprisingly.
yeah, turns out it’s really hard to defend against someone swinging a big heavy piece of metal at the side of your head. Best case it really really really fucking hurts and makes it basically impossible to even keep standing, worst case you die instantly in a shower of gore.
The problem is just that you actually have to hit them with the mace, while avoiding the opponent (or their friends) hitting you first.
To get all that power that makes the mace so effective, you have to take a great big swing with it, which is extremely obvious and means you’re wholly committing yourself to the action.
Meanwhile with a sword or spear you can keep it in front of you to defend yourself with, and just make quick jabs at the opponent.
handle should be something along the line of you own height, and the chain should be 0cm so it’s easy to poke the bad man with your spearhead.
but that applies to literally all subjects, by this logic the US wouldn’t have any education at all, which clearly isn’t the case even if the education sucks.