throwaway3b03

I'm that hoarder, and granted, not in terminal stage, but enough to severely impact my quality of life. And I disagree, I think it would take me two days to clear out the house, but mostly lack the energy and motivation to do it. So no, burning down the house would be way way worse.

Wow, it even survived the HN hug of death.

I disagree. I spent about 2 years in Romania without healthcare of any kind. I was on a career break/sabbatical. And in the 4 years I've spent in the Netherlands, I've only went to a doctor's office once, for some abdominal pain. I was sent home by a receptionist, telling me to return the next day if it doesn't get better.

And I think that's my only interaction with the medical establishment for the last 6-7 years. The one before that was for some document I needed for my driver's license.

Of course, here in the Netherlands you can't avoid having health insurance, but it's technically free for low income people and not that expensive otherwise. In Romania, and I presume that a lot of other places, you can.

So is it that hard to stay uninsured? I do have some gripes to pick with the medical system, but yeah, I do think taking health into your own hands is a better choice (and a lot more is psychological in nature than the medical system would suggest, which is focused on symptoms and not causes).

I remember in my younger years, I would get a cold probably twice a year on average, and I would always get prescribed antibiotics by an overzealous GP. All of that stopped all of a sudden, and I haven't taken antibiotics in about a decade. I've caught a cold, maybe once every two years, but much lighter and goes away by itself in 2-3 days at most.

I live in The Netherlands and my yearly expenses are less than 20k EUR per year, and also have a car (major expense around here). But I don't pay rent. Several years ago I used to live in Romania, and similarly, had expenses a lot lower than 10k EUR per year.

So I think it's possible just about anywhere in the world, if you're ready to do a lot of things yourself (don't rely on services such as a car/bike mechanic, fix plumbing, house issues yourself, don't pay a lot of money on going out etc).

Now that I found out about him, and saw an [interview](https://index.hu/video/2018/07/23/rejtett_motoros_kerekpar_b...) he gave years ago, an old thought of mine came up.

I was always thinking this was a really underserved market. Ebikes have been really in demand for a long while, but most of the offer was based on very heavy city bikes. I was always thinking that a much sportier, more efficient race ebikes would be a huge hit. I saw some prototypes on kickstarter but nothing that sticked.

I wonder why. If I had the energy and resources I think I would try going into that product space. Seems like ripe for disruption.

I ride ebikes a lot, and I used to ride race bikes a lot as well, years ago. For a long time I thought that a heavy city ebike is similar to a very efficient race bike that in terms of effort required. After I started to ride them simultaneously (more or less), maybe an ebike is in fact more helpful over longer periods, but a light race bike isn't far away. So a product that captures best of both worlds would do great IMO.

LE. Apparently I'm late by around 5 years. When I last had this thought there was literally just a kickstarter project. Now I see most big brands have electric road bike offerings. Still, at 4-5k EUR price points, there's still a lot of value to capture.

Except that the recycling ... cycle is not perfect. Far from it. I'd reckon maybe half of all lithium ends up in recycling. Other half probably ends up in the landfill. For instance, I picked up a broken ebike from the trash not long ago (Amsterdam). Battery still in it. Same goes for lots of smaller electronics.

Well, years ago, I was running my indirectly injected diesel straight off sunflower oil, so that was plant based too.

But your point is valid. Comparison is still useful for getting a grasp of the quantities involved.

Lately blablacar has been charging hitchhikers/travelers up front. So you as a driver know for sure you won't end up with nothing. This is really useful IMO, but also mostly significantly reduce the popularity of the service in places with low reliability among members.

In western Europe, particularly Germany, it was still very easy to find people, in eastern Europe, not so much. Even though before this change, years ago, blablacar was very popular in said eastern Europe countries.

For comparison, a small ICE car produces around 100g of CO2/km, so with the same carbon budget you could drive 10km.

Alternator delete is a very common hack in the ecomodder community (usually coupled with LiFePo or Lithium battery instead of the regular lead-acid). It reduces the complexity and load on the engine, and does give a few percentage better fuel efficiency. But if you mostly ride at night, yeah ...

> YMMV, I am answering the OP not evangelizing. Counter arguments will be ignored.

Reminds me of the Monty Python Arguing sketch.

> I can't believe that they wouldn't take cash?

What's so hard to believe about that? Lots of places in the Netherlands don't accept cash (probably out of convenience).

Still, I bought a rental sometimes around 2016-2017 IIRC, and it's still one of the best investments I ever made. Doubled in price, nominally, and took in almost a decade of virtually non-interrupted rent. On paper, it's roughly the same performance as S&P500 in that interval, but still, diversification is useful.

Isn't it completely obvious that those are AI-generated images? To me, it is.

Also, account is new, everything is very fishy to me.

It's unlikely you can make 2.5 billion with a single unleveraged trade. The market went up by what, 6-7% that day? Nobody bets his whole net worth on this to make a profit like that. So I think leverage was definitely involved, which just shows that insider info was definitely there.

I've also been away from the tech (and AI scene) for a few years now. And I mostly stayed away from LLMs. But I'm certain that all the content is baked into the model, during training. When you query the model locally (since I suppose you don't train it yourself), you get all that knowledge that's baked into the model weights.

So I would assume the locally queried output to be comparable with the output you get from an online service (they probably use slightly better models, I don't think they release their latest ones to the public).

What's the source of the words/dictionary? Where are you storing them?

I appreciate everyone offering to help. Since I can no longer remove the comment, I removed my email address from my profile.

May you also have help available when needed.

I don't really need money but I guess I could use some sort of assistance, or personal advice, or free therapy, or a friend. Or something along those lines. I don't know for sure. I'm struggling with a lot of worrying. I'm also fairly lonely, even though I don't live alone.

Well, it's a halfway throwaway account. I don't know if this will get me anywhere, but it's worth a shot.

I appreciate the initiative, I hope to be able to return the favor at some point in the future when my waters become a bit calmer.

This is much smarter than what they did in the Netherlands, where the panels are literally underneath the bike path, so bikes ride on them. They are constantly covered in filth and are not running anywhere close to their full capacity, irrespective of weather.

The Netherlands has such a speed limit on its highways and it's quite effective.

When I think of my E-Bike battery of ~400Wh that can keep going for ~100km (admittedly, with some assistance), I'm surprised this laptop can only go for 16h on that.

The energy required to move 80kg (me+bike) 25km is significant.

Interestingly enough, there are a lot of books on archive.org that are not on LibGen, usually high quality scans. That's another source that should be mirrored, given the legal trouble surrounding archive.

> Stop pretending like climate change is created by consumers

But it is actually created by consumers. By human beings consuming resources and emitting greenhouse gases in return. Simply because there's nothing else even close in scale as a source of global warming. What else could there be, wild herbivores?

It follows almost tautologically that it is human beings that is causing the warming.

You blame "industrial production processes". But those are completely funded by human consumption in a mostly on-demand action.

So what else is there to blame? The transportation industry? Again, completely funded by, and a direct response of consumers buying stuff. Consumption is at the beginning of the chain. It's the cause.

So your argument sounds wrong to me. It sounds like you want to shift blame to wealthy industrialists. Guess what, a fat bank balance or stock ownership like that of Elon Musk or Bezos does not emit greenhouse gases by simply existing.

> if the average person can save 10% of their income, it takes 8.8 years to save a 10% down payment

Not according to this article, where it mentions the average household income, not the average per-capita income. So you can expect it to take quite a bit longer than that to save for that down-payment, for the average person.

I'm so sorry to hear about your loss.

Slightly over a week ago, a car ran a red light and hit my dad. He was severely injured and suffered a severe TBI. Doctors were giving an unfavorable prognosis. He was in a deep coma, with a GCS of ~5. My whole family was in a complete state of shock. We couldn't really feel anything. My mom somehow kept repeating to herself that he's going to get well, she just couldn't face the fact that she could lose him. As for myself, after researching every tidbit of information I could find about brain injuries, DAI, cases, treatments, I simply couldn't keep my optimism. I was very concerned about the very brief information we were getting from the doctors. I was perplexed as to why they're not actively monitoring his ICP, when his case and most protocols would suggest that that was the right thing to do (i'm not even sure if they did, they definitely didn't use an invasive technique). I was asking left and right about the medication he was on, whether he was being given things like amantadine, which research seemed to suggest was extremely helpful. I was left in the dark. He was given cerebrolysin, OTOH.

I started feeling a huge pain in my chest, and looking forward I just couldn't see myself functioning without him. He was and still is probably the most important person in my life. I was looking back and imagining that him getting well again would simply be the happiest, most positive life I could ever imagine. The life I used to have before seemed like heaven even though I wasn't perceiving it as such at the time.

Our days simply revolved around the visiting period of about an hour when we are allowed to visit him in the ICU. They still do, but the tension in the air is clearly a lot less intense. My dad somehow made great progress. He's mostly lucid now, he still can't talk, but we communicate a lot through glances, hand holding. He's still intubated, although he can breath on his own for hours. And his CTs show a great reduction in most of his brain lesion. We're definitely not out of the woods yet, but his progress/change is like night and day.

I am (probably) extremely lucky. But our lives will never be the same again.

But let's be honest, the quality of life in places like Transnistria is quite bad. Lack of services, infrastructure, a population strongly supporting Putin.

I wouldn't want to be stuck there for years, to the point where even a few years in jail might be worth considering. But I'm not familiar with the conditions for prisoners in the US.

I have Russian work colleagues in a western European country. While they don't support Putin (at least not overtly) and don't like the level of power he has acquired, they seem to have an ingrained distrust of the "west", even though the "west" gave them permanent residence, social security, a means of living. They somehow still believe Putin's propaganda, claiming that they're not sure if bioweapons or labs really were found in Ukraine, or generally not trusting western news sources, while somehow still believing Russian ones.

So in my experience, a majority of Russians, even those living abroad, really are Putin's puppets.

You're somehow implying that eating meat is bad for human health, which considering how general a statement it is, is bound to be completely false.

Human beings have thrived eating meat for hundreds of thousands of years. And it's a lot harder to completely address all the nutritional requirements on a purely vegetarian diet, but not impossible.