distances

I can't allow LLMs write my messages in any language I'm fluent in. They just don't sound like me at all. It would feel dirty and dishonest to send that slop out.

They can be good at grammar checks, but even then I wouldn't fix quite everything, it's better to let some of my natural flaws go through.

There are very good map alternatives, like Organic Maps and HERE WeGo. But Google's place data is such a good moat that I'm also still using it.

I disagree. Their spam filtering has been top notch for me. Sometimes spam does get through, but marking that as spam has made sure the next ones of the same are flagged correctly.

Lately LLM generated spam has fooled it more often, though. Let's see if that becomes a problem.

Not at all my experience of consulting companies. What I saw was that they were very useful training pipelines for juniors.

The companies would staff projects with a mix of seniors and juniors. Seniors to get started fast, in the right direction, and actually guarantee the delivery; juniors to keep the costs lower and to have a pipeline of new people. Hands-on from day 1, sitting with seniors in a project with clear timelines and deliverables, with projects and technologies changing regularly, tended to level up the newcomers fast.

This was in small to midsize (50-500) consulting companies where the projects did not come via CEOs being buddies with others.

Scania is Swedish, too.

The review needs to be done with clear context, or another LLM altogether.

EU is gradually stopping all energy purchases from Russia. Long term contracts for LNG purchases stop end of this year, pipeline gas late next year. Oil imports from Russia are planned to come to end late next year, too.

The days of Russian energy exports to EU are basically permanently over, and will not be reinstated even after the war has ended.

Solar works also in the north, except in the winter of course, and it complements wind pretty well. So solar does make economic sense and is actively built in the north too.

Yes yes, sure. Just be Putin's puppet dictator and you'll get free oil. There's nothing worth discussing here.

Russian propaganda is really running out of steam if Belarus of all countries is now the success case. What's next, statistics of how happy the North Koreans are?

Russians are always conveniently forgetting that they were the other major aggressor of the European WW2 theater. Heck, the so-called "Great Patriotic War" starts in 1941, skipping over their alliance with Nazi Germany and invasions of neighboring states.

De-russification didn't really start until the Orange Revolution, though. It's a long and painful process for Ukraine as reducing corruption requires shedding all the Russian influence. Before that, a lot of the problems genuinely are because of Russia.

All states escaping the Russian curse improve speedily once they join the EU, and I expect the same to happen in Ukraine.

Yes it is.

What do you do with that many lemons anyway? Lemonade?

Asking as a person who buys about 4 lemons per year.

Well, the main hurdle was that we were 7-9 years old iirc and didn't know any English at all, beyond the memorized "knock knock" etc. So the topic of the questions wasn't on the table :-)

> I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess.

I'm from a non-English-speaking country. We didn't understand the questions at all, but all us kids in the neighborhood got into the game just fine with some brute forcing.

Also, coming up with the expected commands in the game was way beyond our skills so we'd only advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.

Yes it was a bit weird how the latest generation AMD laptop chip was a sideways step. I blame the useless NPU wasting silicon, but what do I know.

I still got it as it was better than Intel's last year's offering, and it's still a fine chip. But kind of highlights how good the previous 7000 series chip was.

The investment taxation was already discussed in a sibling comment. As always in Europe, it depends on a country. Good for you if that's possible in Netherlands.

Of course some roles can earn six figures or more, hopefully everyone knows there isn't a hard cap on earnings. Should've been obvious that wasn't my claim.

Yes, as always it depends on the country. Germany and a bunch of others have nothing except completely useless insurance/capital guaranteed options.

For investments, you invest post-tax and pay capital gains when withdrawing.

My reading was that nothing of that applies in Europe. No earning 6 figures, no way to invest pre-tax or in any other tax advantaged way, no way to optimize healthcare costs, early retirement unlikely.

I don't see any value in chat history. I delete all conversations at least weekly, it feels like baggage.

Last summer it was good for certain tasks, but letting it run wild was a recipe for a huge mess where you'd spend more time unraveling it than writing the whole thing by hand. That was my experience, at least.

Looking back, I understood with Windows XP that I wasn't in the target group. Win 95/98 had a simple but functional file search. Being naive, I was expecting some power user features in the future, like regex search.

Win XP replaced the classic file search with one that had an animated dog in it.

The dog search was completely, utterly useless. You would not find anything with it. It was so bad I still vividly remember my bafflement about it.

Just as a data point, depending on a country of course, the European public healthcare systems don't cover some/most/any of these either.

For example the eye exams for glasses are usually done at the store where you buy the glasses and included in the price, dental might be covered only for children, routine physical exams may not exist as a concept, etc.

> It is probably easier these days when you have a phone to fall back on

Most definitely. The old lessons were hard learned, and they stayed with you. Going through everything, trying all the combinations, and reading obscure materials for any hints.

I don't want to glorify the old hard way of spending perhaps days on problems that ended up being trivial, but it's obviously different now when one can get all the answers and helpful scripts directly from LLMs. Much less is retained.

This is what I used! At some point I managed to block DHCP lease renewals on my computer, and Internet would always stop working after a given timespan. Took a good while to figure out I caused the problem myself.

Yes, the buildings will be renovated in time. For me it seems like a generation-long undertaking, though, and we get back to my original question.

I think we're talking past each other, so let's leave it at this.

In effect they are, even if not directly. There are requirements to stay aware of your surroundings. If you cause an accident by blocking all sounds, I totally can see insurance companies claiming this is your own responsibility and refusing to cover.

No, 47°C to 67°C is way too low. The buildings are not actually circulating boiling water, but not too far either:

> Typically, heating systems in Europe use water flowing through pipes and emitters (radiators) heated to high temperatures (70-90°C). [0]

The radiators are often designed for these temperatures. Supplying with lower heat will not work without replacing the radiators and/or renovating for better energy efficiency.

And heat pumps, AFAIK, can't supply 70-90°C. Thus my original question of what is the current plan to solve this problem.

[0] https://www.ifeu.de/fileadmin/uploads/Publikationen/Energie/...

The problem is the old building stock (say, large apartment buildings from early 1900s) which isn't energy efficient at all, and on cold winter days require very hot water to keep warm. The radiators were designed with assumption that the water can be boiling hot (coal/gas).

It doesn't seem feasible to renovate everything, so I'm wondering what are the practical options. A hybrid system where a gas boiler is kept for the peak demand?