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> I guess cars really stick to the rules because they know they have to

I’d love to know where you live, because it sounds like Arcadia.

Where I live, at least, cars also ignore speed limits, don’t stop for pedestrians crossing, often cruise blithely through red lights, drive the wrong way on one-way streets…

For a while (when I was still cycling to the office) I was doing my best to film or photograph this type of behavior - which was difficult when it was over in a couple of seconds. I got quite a few films of cars driving on cycle lanes and the wrong direction, with the intention of somehow reporting it. But in the end I realized it was just a waste of time.

Anyways - at least I never find a car dumped in the forest. That’s something over scooters, I guess

I feel very ambivalent about scooters. On one hand I hope they do actually take some cars off the road, on the other, I think they’re mostly used by people who would otherwise take the bus, bike or even walk instead.

And in the meantime the scooters are dumped everywhere around town: on sidewalks, in cycle lanes, in the parks and forests, thrown into the lake at the north end of the town. It’s always extra dispiriting to find them discarded in the undergrowth out in the countryside - presumably at the very end of their range. One time I found a scooter that someone had either intentionally or accidentally left so that it fell over and smashed a ground floor window.

I’ve personally seen so many accidents and near-misses, including some too-young kids who must’ve hacked a scooter and crashed it into a parked car, a colleague who fell head-over the bars after a drinking binge and cut up his face, a friend who broke an arm, and a young woman who was walking across a plaza in town while reading her phone and tripped over a scooter that someone had just thrown down there and landed smack on her face.

Also the strange behavior of people riding who seem not to consider they’re bound by the rules of any other transport system - cars, bikes or walkers - and simply sail unconcernedly across junctions with red lights, or in the midst of walkers on the sidewalk.

I’d love to see them work better - I hate cars way more - but the anarchic spirit of their introduction hasn’t been the best for everyone living in the city.

> DeepL was genuinely good for English/French. I can't speak to other language pairs.

I use it whenever I need to write any long-form English->Swedish - it simply cuts out the labor of thinking about grammar and spelling, and even handles idiomatic phrases perfectly. Also works perfectly in the other direction.

Also great with English->Spanish and the reverse.

I even used it to translate some official documents from Spanish into both English and Swedish for the tax authorities in both countries - no-one thought the translated documents seemed unprofessional, in any way, or questioned any of the complex legal terminology.

I barely try Google translate anymore. A couple of times when I've thought the DeepL translation was slightly 'off', I've tried Google and the result is usually comical garbage.

> Imagine the person who cannot afford a book or paper on a particular topic. Should they not have access to the information?

Imagine I want whatever you do for a living? Should you work for me for free?

I know this won't be a popular take on HN, but while I can understand and to a certain extent sympathize with pirating movies (the intentional friction and arbitrary geographic limitations on access imposed by the multinational movie-industry conglomerates), I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light.

Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world. I'm in Sweden but buy most of my e-books from the US. But often buy books directly from publishers (hopefully they, and the author, get a better cut that way).

The fact these people were trying to personally profit (some other HN:ers have documented this), while trying to present themselves as some sort of "information wants to be free" info-warriors doesn't make the whole thing any better.

An enormous amount of work goes into producing a book - through a close friend who works in book-publishing I know a couple of authors who pretty much starve for a year or two to produce their work - and then the editing, typesetting, designing, proof-reading etc is all an enormous and personal investment.

In spite of what people think, authors are not all budding J.K.Rowlings with movie-deals and a couple of billion in the bank, and if we don't buy their books, they won't be able to produce the next one for people to pirate.

> To me it's very simple: nation states should have their own layer that uses the national registry for companies to verify a domain.

I think this can just add layers of bureaucracy that don't address the problem anyway.

In the early days of widespread internet use in Sweden it was quite difficult to register a .se web-address: not only were company documents needed, but the authority that granted use of the address also split your right to it geographically within Sweden, so that if you wanted the address to stretch across the whole country you needed to make multiple applications (using a subdomain system).

This process just made it almost impossible for a small personal startup to own a Swedish domain, and it was completely impossible to register a domain on a 'try-it' basis, to see if a nascent business idea would take-off.

In other words it just entrenched the dominant position of incumbents.

What happened instead, was that Swedes registered .com addresses, or .nu ('now' in Swedish), or other variations. And the same sort of thing would happen now: the international fraudulent sites would still be possible - just legitimate registrations would become much harder.

A little like what happens with pirating, where people using pirated software often have to jump through fewer hoops than legitimate users, who've paid for their installs, but need to constantly dial-up to be allowed to keep using the tools they've bought.

tldr; more bureaucracy for legitimate businesses, but doesn't address the core problem for end-users.

> Living in London, I cannot really remember when was the last time I talk to a stranger

I lived in central London (Camden) for 15 years before moving to Stockholm, and almost every day was full of small encounters and discussions with strangers: about the weather, bemoaning our politicians, whether the food was any good, and so on.

London is a super-chatty town, and people constantly want to engage each other - even sometimes when you’re not in the mood.

If you want to see a place where strangers NEVER speak to each other (unless you’re obviously a tourist and the locals want to give you a good impression of their home-town), then come here to Stockholm. Right now there’s a big ad campaign running, encouraging people to say “hello!” To their neighbors (campaign is called “Hej granne!”)

Yep people don’t even say hi to the person they meet in the stairs.

> Noone locked their bikes!

Wow this is a surreal comment. More than 65,000 bikes are reported stolen each year in Sweden [0] - but this is just the tip of the iceberg, as a stolen bike is so common that hardly anyone even bothers reporting it.

[0] https://bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran-brottstyper/cykel...

> that was literally front page news and was an incredibly unusual event.

My point wasn't about the specific case (obviously multiple horrific murders are not a common occurrence), I meant the general milieu of drug addiction, law-breaking, prostitution; the disgustingly dirty slum conditions that people lived in - all of which was accompanied by police corruption and brutality.

Naturally none of this is popular to bring up in front of Swedes nowadays.

As I see that the downvote of my Swedish-negative comments speaks volumes about how much you guys value freedom of expression.

> My grandmother never locked her door when she was at home

This whole 'golden age' of Sweden is just such a bunch of bs.

Take a look, for instance, at this article about a part of central Stockholm which is now extremely expensive real estate:

https://skarn.se/hans-marmbo/ (in Swedish)

I thoroughly recommend running the page through Google translate or DeepL for an insight into the reality of Stockholm just 50 years ago - it's a fascinating and horrific account of drug addicts and lowlifes brutally murdering each other in terrifying and depraved ways.

(DeepL translation:) "Prostitutes, alcoholics and drug addicts moved in next door to students and underpaid casual workers. Pickpocketing, knife fights and burglaries became commonplace, and neighbourhoods once considered stately could now have been lifted from a Dickens novel. In the press, the area was called the swamp..."

It can hardly be said to benefit 'ordinary people' that anyone can find out a person's home address, birthday, salary, workplace, the size of their home, their family, children, and so on.

These databases are generally available not to benefit 'freedom of expression', but so that neighbors can easily spy on each other, or the newspapers can print-on-demand lists of "The richest people in YOUR area!".

Whatever else, the truly richest people have fixed the system so that their wealth isn't accessible in an online database.

Aside from the fact that Sweden is the most opinion-conformist country I've ever lived in (so that 'freedom of the press' is farcical at the best of times), when it comes to true freedom of speech the police will crush it mercilessly: literally shooting people in the streets, followed by kangaroo courts that rubber-stamp fake police evidence to convict peaceful protesters with draconian sentences.[1]

Governments, police and the authorities are all protected by extensive secrecy. It's only the ordinary 'sucker' who has the 'freedom' of exposing all their most private affairs for everyone to pry.

[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göteborgskravallerna (in Swedish)

PS: for once the multiple downvotes are themselves an artifact of the discussion- I'm betting from affronted Swedes lol - because being negative about Sweden isn't allowed to be stated. But Swedes are all very proud of freedom of expression

> So much money goes into solving non-problems like […] cryptocurrencies…

More to the point: so much of this human suffering is dependent on the existence of this technology.

In 2020 only 10% of plastic was recycled in Sweden. [0]

The rest was burnt to produce heating and electricity - which releases an enormous amount of CO2 gases and other pollutants.

Not just a US problem.

[0] in Swedish: https://www.ivl.se/press/nyheter/2020-02-21-lattlast-rapport...

> If I remember right their mac-thing was around 5 years old?

My 2015 MacBook still runs absolutely fine.

For that matter, I'm considering (but probably not) buying a new iPad to replace my TEN YEAR OLD iPad that I'm still using every single day, as it can no longer update to the latest iPad OS.

But my 7 year old (soon 8 years old) laptop is as good as the first day I bought it.

I think this is essentially the major theme of this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production...

I think a lot of people are being kept awake worrying about these types of articles.

> It's quite normal in Europe and Scandinavia

I live in central Stockholm and indeed walk to school with my youngest kid.

But every single day I’m amazed and frankly enraged by the massive number of cars leaving kids right outside the school gates.

And often driving off at high speed, checking phones for that “important” morning meeting.

Frankly sick of reading this mythical ‘car-free’ Europe thing. Neighbors as close geographically as Sweden and Denmark can be light years apart in their cultural values.

> Except substitute “down the street” with “30 km away on the other side of a river”, and notice that everybody who got sick initially was next to the market, none of them anywhere near the lab. > So the lab-leak hypothesis is: this virus created at the lab accidentally escaped to someone who subsequently only infected people on the other side of town.

But this isn't necessarily how it works, at all.

The Wuhan market is one of Wuhan's most population-dense areas, in close proximity to three hospitals where the first cases were identified, and was therefore the concentration for infection-tracing.

In other words, the dataset for early cases was based on a belief that the market was where the infection was spreading, rather than the location of a spreading event that came from elsewhere in the city. Even pneumonia cases that were reported were only post-hoc assigned as probably covid if they were in close proximity to the market.

> It's much easier to believe that someone you don't like created covid maliciously than that it evolved naturally

Ah! and there you did that thing to make an accidental lab-leak a crazy nut job conspiracy theory.

Pretty much everyone here knocking the iPad Pros for being consumption-only passive entertainment devices.

But I guess the artists, musicians, video-editors and photographers using them professionally would disagree, if they ever came here.

> I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos.

I think HN forgets the 'pros' using the iPad Pros are video, photography, visual-arts and music professionals.

I'm as disappointed as the next dev on HN that iPadOS still doesn't allow me to run a full version of Xcode. But then I remember there are perfectly good laptops for that, and I'm not the target audience for these devices

> Important underline: the lab database is not available to us

Genuine question, as I'm not aware that it's been made externally available to anyone - do you mean it's available to researchers around the world but not the general public? Or do you mean it's available to Chinese labs?

> There is a lot of evidence that points to the virus spreading from a wet market in the city, not the Wuhan lab. But proving something didn’t happen three years after the fact is a challenge that may be impossible to meet.

I find the anxious disclaimer about the Wuhan lab interesting, because of course there were a lot of things the lab itself could have done to clear any doubt at the time, including not muzzling researchers who worked there, and even releasing their virus database (which had been taken offline a couple months earlier, under the pretext that 'someone' had attempted to 'hack' it and has still not been made available three years later).

> what is with you people thinking like nothing else other than Apple products exist?

I was addressing the specific claim that “everyone” had to give these permissions.

> access to read, delete or change all content on the phone

The article is pure fiction, as no app has any possibility of ever being granted those permissions on iOS.

No such capability even exists for any app on an iPhone.

Interesting to see all the negative comments on the article over on PetaPixel, and quite often the same cynicism towards film shooters here on HN, usually along the lines that it’s just a fad or only a passing phase for hipsters.

But exactly this sort of internet ‘wisdom’ was putting me off trying film around 15 years ago, and yet these days I see more people carrying film cameras than dedicated DSLRs.

If you’re shooting color-reversal film - say, something like Portra from Kodak, then believe me, digital cannot match that exposure curve, and the beauty of those colors.

I shoot about half digital - half film these days, because of the cost. But it’s the film images that are truly special.

One of the things I hate about IKEA is all the virtue-signalling they're always doing recently - including a lot of bullshit about not encouraging over-consumption and all the usual 'planet-care' stuff - and yet excellent articles like this lay bare the lie.

I've worked on some IKEA advertising campaigns myself in the past, and have had colleagues and friends who work there, so I've heard enough 'back-story' to have other reasons to not like the company [0] but when caught in the seemingly endless labyrinth, I've behaved in exactly the way described in the article. Particularly annoying is how much extra stuff I buy just to avoid needing to come back some indeterminate time in the future.

[0] one example was their ruthless negotiating when encouraging developing countries to open production-factories in poor areas, so that local or national government would contribute large sums to the setup costs in return for an IKEA contract, which they would then just use until the contract expired and move on to the next desperate place.

> It does affect your visual impression in the eye, though. If you're using a bright screen in a dim environment, your eyes will be hurt by the bright light, you flinch and that will reduce the perceptive contrast.

See a few posts above where someone did the hard work of taking real screenshots instead of the totally bullshit fictional ones the author has in the article.

Exactly - the author fictionalized some examples for his phony thesis.

Ye article is complete bullshit and makes-up some fictional examples: for instance the bubbles supposedly on a “brighter screen” are shown as totally desaturated and ‘blown-out’ but unfortunately for the author’s thesis, screen brightness does not affect UI elements in this way, at all.

Edit: Haha thx for the downvotes but the article is still lying with phony made-up images.