Building an energy system dependent on Russian gas is, and always was an idiotic thing to do. I live in Finland, and our energy costs are pretty back to more or less what they used ot be, even though we live next to Russia.

I don't know where you're from, but at least Germany's problems run way deeper than their idiotic energy policies. Lack of investment in infrastructure, lack of innovation and all that. Even with cheap energy there's no way German car makers would compete, when Chinese make better EV's for less money. Laziness and lack of innovation is the problem, just like in European IT sector, which just buys everything from America.

Also, let's not forget the huge impact Covid spending had on inflation, and in turn interest rates & people's purchasing power. Ukraine war and sanctions against Russia are completely insignificant compared to that blunder. We're living the recession that was supposed to happen in 2020.

I have slightly similar experience. When I was a teenager, I had a random flu shortly before two flights abroad. I didn't feel that sick anymore, but apparently my ears were still badly blocked. On descent my ears would hurt like hell, and I was half-deaf for rest of the day. That was more than ten years ago, and since then I've suffered from moderate tinnitus.

I too got used to it, but I would really advice people to avoid flying sick if they can help it (or at least use some meds to unblock your ears while doing it).

Yes, and to be honest if you know how to read, you can also cook. Just google a recipe with good reviews and follow it to the letter, the outcome will most likely be good enough.

You'd think this, but google results for recipes are full of slop (AI and otherwise) and what I assume are fake reviews.

I know people whose cooking is "good enough" for themselves, but suspect enough from my point of view that I now decline any invitations for dinner where they're cooking.

Yeah, I get why people don't want wind turbines right next to their house, but also in my country I see people in the countryside complaining about turbines that are literally in middle of a forest, many kilometers away. It's just pathetic, especially since we're talking about economic backwater, where tax revenue and jobs from those turbines are a significant plus.

I think major breadbasket collapses can be avoided through geoengineering. Thanks to volcanoes and emissions from marine traffic, we know for a fact that climate change can be slowed down by spraying enough stuff reflecting sunlight high in the atmosphere.

Of course some conservative US states are enacting laws against geoengineering, but thankfully they can't prevent rest of the world from doing it. I hope we'll eventually reach some kind of a solution where Trump-voting radical Christians can have the biblical apocalypse they want locally, while rest of the world continues to improve.

I can accept some temporary geoengineering as long as we stop burning dinosaur juice. My reservations lie in unintended and non-reversible side effects like ecosystem disruptions.

Europe and even China show that renewable energy can be done. Greenhouse gas emissions stopped increasing after Paris agreement (I failed to find the article), and we can do iteratively better as long as we want to.

It's mainly German fixation, not EU fixation.

Yep, I dual boot Linux Mint & Windows 11 and only bother with the latter when I need MS Teams, or some other proprietary software that tends to be more reliable on Windows. In terms of performance and user experience Mint wins easily.

I only rarely need to use Microsoft Office or Paint.NET and a Windows VM on Linux has solved the problem entirely for me. I don't know if videoconferencing would work as well, but I'd really recommend giving it a try! I've already gone without a proper Windows install for almost 2 years.

But the browser versions of Office products royally suck. I still actively use the 'open in app' option over the default action of opening a document / spreadsheet in a browser window. I wholly disagree with It's generally flawless for MS products

The Office-in-browser experience is laggy and slow and long-learnt familiarities are gone.

Additional old-man whinge: Outlook keeps wanting to open in a browser window now. I have enough things open in a browser that are difficult enough to manage that I don't need Outlook getting lost in that forest as well. It's convenient having a separate Taskbar icon that will definitely open my Calendar or Email.

When everything's a browser tab, what's the point of the taskbar?

When everything's a browser tab then the browser is the Operating System.

Every day I'm forced to use Microsoft at work, I'm increasingly glad I ditched it at home.

I've tried this many times and my conclusion is that it still lacks many features available in the native apps (by the way, these are absolutely not webviews). Using office online also requires signing in which many people, including myself will avoid.

I don't know how it is today, but about 3 years ago I worked in a shop that used MS Teams. I was sneaky enough to get myself a Kubuntu install when everybody else was on Windows, but I had no problems using Teams on Kubuntu back then.

The Teams Linux client was discontinued but it works well enough in a browser.

I too recommend Rectangle. It made transition from Linux significantly less painful.

In this case I feel like it's the opposite. If generative AI really succeeds, most software devs will be out of job, in which case profits from those investments could become useful. If it flops, then there's a greater chance devs will be still needed.

They aren't symmetric sides of a coin though.

1. If you become unemployed because it "succeeds", then a diversified portfolio probably does well as other industries reap the benefits, and if you have to cover lost wages you're at least "selling high."

2. If you become unemployed because it "fails", then there's a crash/recession where everyone is spooked and you get screwed by being forced to "sell low" during the transition.

I suppose there's also the chance you're put out of a job by powerful AI, but the "winners" are all lesser companies you never invested in, so you lose both your job and investments.

If these things really become good enough to automate software engineering then it’s just a matter of time before they are used to automate all information work.

That would be such a radical societal transformation that I’m not sure we would come out of the other side even having a capitalist society.

I wonder how this aligns with EU's accessibility act. Covering "the vast majority of users and real-world use cases" isn't really enough based on EU's own regulation.