weweweoo

The surveys also shows that Linux is more or less equally popular with MacOS among techies. As nice as M1/M2 Macbooks are, I probably wouldn't pay Apple tax just to run Ubuntu on it.

Personally I use whatever boring laptop my company offers, and so far that's been Intel. As long as it runs Linux I don't care what's under the hood.

The illegal migrants coming to the US know they have to work if they wish to eat. Meanwhile, coming to Sweden has been just a ticket to easy life, where you get free housing and money, but will be probably excluded from the job market unless you learn the language and get several years of education.

So, in practice the two phenomena are very different.

Personally I think it's less about accepting others, and more about the fact European economy sucks, has rigid job markets, and lacks entrepreneurial spirit. Historically people left Europe to the US, because that's where you could improve your life through hard work. Those Chinese-Americans improved their life by founding successful businesses, which doesn't seem to happen so much over here.

Obviously the US being a land of immigrants with most commonly spoken language in the world helps a lot too. The fact Europe isn't like the US doesn't make it xenophobic. Compared to pretty much anything except the US, it's still among the most accepting towards people of different cultures.

To be honest, it's also the quality of migrants that Sweden receives. The migrants joining gangs or getting radicalized in Sweden are primarily ones who arrived as asylum seekers, usually without much language and marketable job market skills, and with conservative cultural background that can be a burden. This is a big contract to the United States, which doesn't receive anywhere near as many refugees (adjusted to its size), and is generally more picky about migrants.

The welfare system doesn't work well with integration either. If all that is available to you are bad jobs due to your lack of job market / language skills, why work if welfare pays almost the same?

I think Sweden does a decent job integrating those migrants who arrive with sufficient skills for the job market. It's the rest that are problematic, and they would probably do better in the US with its lack of welfare state.

Most things in life are not sustainable with current population levels.

It is all of that, if done rurally and in small enough scale. I wouldn't mind outlawing wood as a source of heating in urban areas, but banning someone who literally lives in middle of a huge forest from utilizing wood would make zero sense.

I've read that also in medieval Finland crimes that were punishable by death rarely resulted in actual execution. Fines and other less harsh punishments were preferred, probably because that way the criminal could still remain a contributing member of the community. Makes sense considering how small the communities were back then in these parts of the world.

Generative AI appears fantastic aid for many smaller tasks where there's enough training data, and correctness of the answer is subjective (like art), or easily verifiable by a human in the loop (small snippets of code, checking that summary of an article matches the contents of the original). Generally it helps with the tedious parts, but not with the hard parts of my job.

I don't have much belief in fully autonomous generative AI agents performing more complex tasks any time soon. It's a significant productivity boost for some jobs, but not a total replacement for humans who do more than read from a script, or write clickbait articles for media.

What is seen as "good work ethic" is absolutely a cultural thing, and at least partially explains economic success (or lack of) in many countries. The Japanese aren't protestant, but they have other elements in their culture that encourage hard work as a virtue.

I take joy in projects that I actually find meaningful. Being an underpaid cog in the machine, working on JIRA tasks visioned by someone else isn't meaningful. Lack of adequate pay makes me feel underappreciated, and frankly destroys any motivation I could otherwise have. So no, I'm doing the bare minimum and don't feel bad about it. I treat my employer like it treats me, that's called justice.

This. From worker's point of view it's irrational to work hard if the pay sucks. Good management should realize that, and demand less from underpaid workers. Embrace the culture of laziness, or pay a fair wage.

The winning move is to work remotely/hybrid from the countryside (close enough to a city though), and invest all the savings in housing to stock market.

I can't see the value in pure city-living when quality of housing keeps going down, and prices go up. Better salary alone doesn't mean anything.

I'm not that impressed until one of those "intelligent humans" can make me a sandwich and deliver it to me. Gen AI's productivity boosting capabilities are seriously limited outside office work, and even there it can't be trusted to perform totally autonomously. It's a big deal, but not a revolution.

Now, if combine robotics with Gen AI and some other solutions to form true AGI that can do both tasks in physical world and virtual, then things will get more interesting.

I don't see what's wrong with old second hand power supplies. These corporate mini PC's are manufactured in such large quantities, that finding them in good condition from reliable sellers isn't exactly hard.

For most self-hosting purposes mini-PC's are often the best option in my opinion, because they're small enough in size and low in power consumption to be comparable to raspi, but powerful enough for stuff like running a virtualization environment, and support containers that are only for x86. Admittedly I did go for desktop though, because I wanted more storage, dedicated GPU and ECC RAM, but for lots of people a single mini-PC could host everything.

I still like raspberry pi for doing small things where I want redundancy, like running DNS server that stays up even when I do maintenance on my main server. And obviously it's great for embedded projects and such.

"Nevertheless, doctors in many areas are in short supply and it's incredibly hard to become a doctor."

At least in my country both of these things are caused by doctor's unions lobbying to limit student intake to the point where lots of perfectly capable people simply can't get admitted. It has got to the point where many go study abroad in other EU countries.

Anyway, even if everyone in the workforce was capable of the 5% hard work, companies could still fire lots of people, enough to give us universal basic income or third world war. Everyone in the workforce will be affected at that point.

Yep, despite all the talk of young people being "digital natives", installing apps from Android/iOS app store, taking pictures and chatting with friends doesn't teach you much that is valuable for office work.

PC gaming and specifically modding is what I can thank for much of my computer proficiency, but even that is easy these days with Steam and its workshops for many games.

It's not the realities, but people's choices. One can live in rural area and limit driving to the absolute minimum necessary, and build a small house heated using renewables rather than a big house heated with fossil fuels. Similarly, lots of city people increase their carbon footprint through excess consumption and travel.

I guess ecological rural living may not be easy if you enjoy lots of social activities. For an introvert like me it wouldn't be a problem.

Higher property taxes for less dense areas might make sense for suburbs of big cities, but not beyond that. In the countryside road and other infrastructure is required for agriculture, if some people also choose to live there (and that way reduce prices in cities) it's a win-win.

This is definitely the case in Finland too. Somehow there's a chronic shortage of doctors, but only minimum increase in number of students, something which government could easily control through funding. Meanwhile lots of other university degrees have become less and less valuable, because too many students graduate.

Doctors's simply have the strongest association/union to preserve their privilege. No wonder why they easily earn way more than your average senior software engineer, lawyer or whatever around here. After the first few years from graduation, many of them go work in private sector where there's generally less stress, and 3-4 day workweeks are pretty common too, as they can afford it. Not a bad deal at all.

Here it has got to the point where young Finns pay money to go study in poorer countries like Latvia and Romania, because it's too hard to get in medical school here.

The big picture is that social media and smartphones reduce social interactions, and lower their quality. Just look at all the kids and teenagers that are glued to their smartphones all the time.

Obviously there are exceptions to the rule, like people living in middle of nowhere, or who have otherwise trouble finding like-minded friends offline.

Yeah, if I had my own seat in small office with my teammates like pre-COVID, I would probably visit the office at least 3 days a week. But what we have instead is a massive open office full of flex desks. There is absolutely nothing attractive about the whole place, not even fancy coffee machines. I would just waste 30 mins of my life getting there.

Sometimes forcing a person out of their comfort zone is the best thing that can happen to them. In fact, nearly all good things that have happened in my life have required me to exit my comfort zone, which for a long time was playing games alone at home. Sometimes it has happened voluntarily, sometimes due to government (conscription) or social pressure (going to study in another city, because that's what you are supposed to do). In all cases, the outcome was good. My social skills improved, I got education, a job, wife, children, nice travel experiences.

To be honest if I were to become a hermit, I would go live in middle of a forest. Then one can be alone AND enjoy fresh air & nature with no people around. At this point lots of rural places have adequate internet connection for remote work & any entertainment needs.

Cities are kind of pointless if you don't enjoy participating in live activities with other people. Just worse housing at higher price.

Gang crime is primarily a symptom of poverty, inequality and lack of opportunities. Many rich Western European countries had very little gang crime, at least until they decided to create a new class of working poor from exploited migrants. Nordic countries in particular would have a super low crime rate, had migration been handled better.

If people adapt, there are still options for life in ex-agricultural communities. Small-scale farms can make excellent environment for tourism, as many city dwellers don't exactly enjoy living in a city, and want some peace on their holidays. Remote work is also a possibility for an increasing number of people.

Smaller post-industrial cities could also be a good option for commuters, if they are located close enough to big, living city. Many are not, which admittedly is problematic.

Not really. As long as there is no universal basic income, any job with decent salary beats unemployment. The job may suck, but the money allows you to do fun stuff after work.

As long as there are people in Russia and China who are willing to work on such tech, it's actually ethical for Americans to work on the technology.

Effectively, it's the military power of the US and its allies that prevents people like Vladimir Putin from killing potentially millions of people in their neighbouring countries. Whatever faults US has, it's still infinitely better than Russia. I say this as a citizen of a country that shares a long border with Russia.

Not just social media, but traditional media as well. As an example, British tabloid 'The Mirror' is using AI to write some of its news articles, and apparently nobody bothers to proofread them before release.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/vladimir-putin-adds...

This piece of "journalism" released a couple of days ago claims Finland is in the process of joining NATO, while it already joined nearly a year ago. This is obviously caused by utilization of a LLM model with training data limited to time before Finland was accepted. At least at the end of the article they mention AI was utilized, and included an email where you can complain about factual errors.