Berlin is up to about 30% first and second generation immigrants. It’s very international. It’s the second largest city in the world for Turkish populations after Istanbul.

You’re spot on here. The list there was heavily subsidized by government funding. NIH, DARPA, NSF, NASA, etc made those be discovered and initially refined. Many are still heavily subsidized by government funding.

There’s an initial investment stage that takes risk, but after that, it’s mostly about refinement and efficiency. Capitalism tries to exploit those government funds then spread the risk followed by retreading old ideas for new dollars. Capitalism invents few things because it’s risky. It’s really good at monopolizing existing things and eventually driving the efficiency of exploitation to the umpteenth degree.

I only do technical CAD design, so FreeCAD works fine. It’s no AutoDesk, but it has gotten good for my project scale.

Slicing is done with Cura.

Printing I’m mostly living off copying to SD card like a barbarian, but I’ve used Octoprint on a Raspberry Pi board in the past. I even had the time lapse camera videos working. It was a nice setup.

Some of my kids do more advanced sculpture work with Blender and other tools.

I was handed a Windows laptop. I used it for a few weeks and then quietly just upgraded to a personal Linux machine. It’s been six months and no one cares. Fine with me.

Here’s the dumb part: nothing beyond old men wanting to grab power.

I was on the Tesla 3 waiting list many years ago. When I hit the top of the list I wasn’t totally ready to buy it just yet so I stalled. Eventually I got moved to the Tesla Y list and again waited while family things sorted out. In the end, I got my reservation money back and I’m very very very glad that I didn’t buy:

• A new car for no real reason (I drove my 2004 Subaru for another 10 years or so)
• A car product that’s turning out to be of terrible longevity
• From a Nazi

Drove the 2004 Subaru until we sold it and moved to a country where we don’t need a car at all. Much better way of life.

Oh! You mean being somewhere with neighborhood scale markets, not just “fuck WalMart”. (Which deserves it).

Yeah, Europe is mostly still rolling relatively small grocery stores of various makes and models. Go to a major Germany city on a mapping app and search for lebensmittel (groceries). You’ll get them everywhere.

I just got back from walking the 80 yards to our local grocery store for a few things to cover tomorrow while I work from home. Total time 20 minutes for shopping because I wandered a bit. It’s wonderfully easy and relaxing compared to when I would do a multi hour Costco->WinCo weekly trip in the US that included dealing with all the driving and stress of huge stores.

I miss Costco’s polish dogs, but that’s about it. The move to Europe was well worth it.

The Kaufland I’ve been in have nothing on a mid sized US WalMart when it comes to chaos, stupid shit, and nutty humans. I haven’t been to a hypercenter thing outside of town (no car to drive, so why bother?), but the in-city grocery stores in Germany are great.

Because we’ve seen 30 years of the Web? Because streets used to be (and some sill are) nothing but a place to put up billboards and ads? Because corporations are led by psychopaths and they care absolutely nothing about your well-being or personal health in your home?

OF COURSE if they can put an ad in your kitchen they’ll by all means put an ad in your kitchen. It’s literally the goal of giving out brochures and pamphlets of ads: to make you take the ads into your home. Why are there brand names on everything? It’s advertising all the way down. Giving them an Internet-connecting screen they control in your kitchen is just asking for ads to be displayed in your private space.

“I tried switching to Hannah Montana Special Arch Edition and it wasn’t easy!” – Is it ever easy? I dunno, but computers are complex things so trying any new approach is expected to take work. Picking a weird, unsupported, and possibly out of date software package isn’t going to help the effort.

People not knowing when to use ‘is’ and ‘are’ in English.

For reals, though? Mostly energy put into conversations, who spends the effort to initiate topics, and whether someone actually has hobbies other than just watching TV.

“The bombing of civilians will continue until you agree to be conquered and owned.”

Just leaving this here in case @op needs to check the weather where they are: https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/@2016590/ext

You’re sitting on the Chinese Translator problem, and to some extent the basis of the Turing Test (mostly the translator problem).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Knowledge != Intelligence

Regurgitating things you’ve read is only interpolative. You’re only able to reply with things you’ve seen before, never new things. Intelligence is extrapolative. You’re able to generate new ideas or material beyond what has been done before.

So far, the LLM world remains interpolative, even if it reads everything created by others before it.

But they were put in there 14 years ago after they were left alone with him at his mansion.

The city I just left is almost through that entire arc. How did you guess the history of a city you’ve probably never looked at!?!

The latest wave of city council leadership is actively trying to build out more public transit and it’s amazing just how horrible people can be when you ask them to make a tiny percentage of the roads (often 3+ lanes wide in the city core) have a bike lane or even a few blocks of bus priority lane so the busses can arrive on time during rush hour.

At the same time it’s in the top 5 most dangerous cities for pedestrians in our state, but the mutilation of fellow city dwellers is okay as long as people can drive fast through downtown to get to the big box store 20+ miles away. Strangely, the City Council’s old members keep yelling about how the city downtown is dying because we added a few bike lanes and therefore people don’t want to be there since it’s harder to drive (but only during major rush hours).

It relies mostly upon people feeling shame about being denounced. Being impeached is mostly about an official denouncement.

If you don’t care, then it means nothing to the individual. It then falls upon the citizens to actually give a fuck about their country having leadership who is more positive than negative. What we’ve learned in the last handful of years is that about 30% of voters would vote for a king if that king hates the same people they do. Another 30% don’t care who runs anything, so a king is fine with them.

So… A ruling monarch the US will have. It’s nearing the end of the Republic and Orange Fürher has crossed the Rubicon. Apparently no one cares enough to really deal with it, but we’ll surely see lots of walking around on a weekend as to not cause any inconvenience.

Yes, I feel No Kings is the right message, but the actual wherewithal to enforce the Republic isn’t visible yet.

It’s kind of a vote of no confidence that then requires the US Senate to hold a “trial” on whether to remove. Essentially, the House (a more general populace representative body) says "he is bad and should be reviewed’. Then the Senate (which more represents the states, not the public) decides whether to agree and then a removal happens if they do.

Otherwise? It’s just the Senate saying “he’s fine and we’re okay with it”, which is what the Republicans are. They’re okay with crime and hatred of fellow Americans as long as it’s their people doing the hating and criming.

Windows 95/98 sucked shit. I liked the games, but the kernels were terrible.

I dual booted or ran two machines Linux (RedHat 5.2 to 6.2, wtf was up with 7?), then whatever worked (usually Debian based) for a while. Mostly used Linux alone for years, but used Win7 for a bit. That one was okay, but Microsoft can’t build dev tools on their own OS to save their lives.

It’s been Linux Mint for a long time now on desktops and Debian/Armbian on servers.

Basically, I’ve been mainlining Linux since about '97 and it’s doing me just fine. Works great for my kids and wife. We’re a mostly Linux household. It saves me a ton of headaches. Easy to install, patch, and almost no other maintenance.

No one who survived the attempt to require others to use it.