ajsnigrutin

Why is the communist-built national assembly building in Ljubljana, Slovenia on the list here? A bunch of missing castles, but then a commie style building from 1959 comes on the map?

It could be 1.7 if we actually built apartments young people could afford.

It could be 1.9 if we had better paid jobs for those without college.

We could have even more if kindergarden didn't cost as much, and if people could afford everything else.

"Back in the time", you'd start work at 18 (or even earlier, most people didn't go to college), settle down with a partner at 20, 21, and what else is there to do than to make a kid? And since it was communism, having a kid meant you'd get a larger apartment. You're 23, 24... another kid, why not, you're still young. Third kid? An even larger apartment!

Now, you need college to get any kind of proper job, so nothing before 25yo, then you need to build up your career, and the age of first kid is going towards 30yo (for mom) or more. That's before accounting for the place to put your kids in. We used to build apartment buildings in communist times, now we don't. And it's not unique to communist areas, even in places like london and paris, low income housing blocks were being built in the 1960s, 1970s and even 80s,... now? Almost nothing.

So, change the law, import as much workers as you've built housing for, give priority to locals with zero houses already, give tax breaks and create assimilation programs (language first) for foreigners. You can't just bring people in, without having (livable) places to put them in and then leave them be. Hey, you big company needing workers... until you pressure your mayor to approve more housing, you won't get them, and mayors listen to "big money". But nope.

So invading the privacy of millions of people, even if it's just automatic scans for some specific thing is a right thing? Does this apply to mandatory drug tests for everyone everywhere? How about drug and weapon seeking drones, doing daily checks in every apartment everywhere? How about mandatory AI powered microphones everywhere that would detect threats, blackmail, any talk about anything illegal, etc.?

If you take a 1000 random people of the street now,how many of them are sharing CSAM via icloud?

If you take a 1000 random politicians, how many of them have corruption scandals? Why not start with them instead, a bodycam and an AI powered microphone that would detect corruption automatically... let them lead as an example, before they apply the laws onto "the rest of us".

More effort should be done to find real-world equivalents of such actions and "think of the children".

An icloud is like a storage locker or a safety deposit box... the owner should go through all your stuff there, just in case you have some CSAM!

Metadata is just tracking info about who, where and with whom... every bartender should take your IDs and log when you came to the bar, who you sat with and how long you talked there.

EU Chat control is like general eavesdropping... every time you sit down and talk with someone, an EU bureaucrat should sit next to you and listen and write down your conversations, just in case.

etc.

Somehow people think that "it's ok if it's on the internet", even when it's stuff they'd never accept in real life.

You can spin many things to sound as racism if you want them to.

My small eu country has in the recent years started importing workers from asian countries, and people are against that... of course it's branded as 'racism' in the media.

The reality is, that some businesses have been having troubles with finding workers to do hard work for minimum wage (which is easily solvable by paying people more and creating better working conditions, but hey, think of the profits), and importing foreign workers means that wages can stay down. We're talking about AI and how we'll all lose jobs,and at the same time, importing new people, and that doesn't compute for many, especially those underpaid who can't negotiate for better options because the government approved new foreign workers in their field.

Then you have the more on-topic problem of importing thousands of "outsiders" into a relatively small city (~300k pop), without building any housing, neither for them, nor for locals, who want to move out their 30+yo "kids" out of their childhood bedrooms, nor for others living a bit further away who'd like to live closer to work. Sure, you can fit 8 "poor foreigners" into a 2-bedroom apartment with 4 bunk beds for 200/month each, and it'll be cheap for them, but for a young couple wating a child, 1600eur for such an apartment is around 1/2 of their combined income, so nope, no apartment and no kids for them, since they have nowehre to put them, and "we need foreigners, because our people are not having enough kids".

Then the third problem is integration... and the government does nothing about it, no language courses, no nothing... the laws say that businesses must use our native language, but in some areas, you can interact even with waiters or shop clercs (so, first line of interaction with customers) who can't speak a word of it.

But hey, it's easier to say "racist people hate foreigners", than to solve the issues.

There's no need for the city to build it, they have zoning plans, and they can easily zone "that corn field over here" into an aera of commie-style apartment buildings (5+ floors, commercial on ground floors, apartments above, garages underground), and assign some percentage of space for green areas.

I live in one of those used-to-be-commie countries, and we somehow manage to keep cornfields in prime locations, and in many areas, the most the local government allows you to build is a two-apartment two-story house, but none of the non-built land is actually buildable, so you need to demolish something else first. Here and there someone is able to build something with maybe 6-8 apartments (probably with an envelope switching hands), but that's it.

It's as if some rich people connected to the government managed to get a lot of realestate in the 1990s when communism fell, and now they don't want prices to drop. But hey, we're building office buildings without any issues and making airbnb even easier instead... so yeah... the situation is pretty bad.

Yep, same with seatbelts... a lot of broken ribs, etc. and people complaining.

If you crashed so hard, the belt broke your ribs, without the seatbelt, you'd be dead right now, head first through the windshield. I mean sure, you wouldn't be complaining about broken ribs, but yeah...

But you still get fined if you don't wear a helmet

In an ideal world, even before you crash your motorcycle and hit your head somewhere, forcing you to start wearing it

The PD 2.0 spec came out two and a half years before samsung's first USB C phone. And the power brick that came with it wasn't USB C.

So what, there's a brick that does qc, and there a usb c connector on the other end. My mom plugs it in, it fits, and it doesn't charge.

I'm not sure, but a 65 watt charger definitely would. "Get 65W for a laptop" isn't any harder than any other third party power supply for a laptop. Which is optional, you don't have to get a third party supply.

How would my mom know that? The cable fits.

Her old laptop charger didn't have a second phone plug. If you don't want the complexity then don't use it.

So why does it fit if it doesn't work then? Why is the other plug there if it makes the first one stop working? Again, if you know what PD is, if you know what current is needed for what device, if you know the power needed to power and charge that device, and if you clearly mark everything so you don't use the wrong cable for the wrong device (since the bricks are behind the nightstand), "it just works". Normal people don't do that. Normal people buy something that fits. 45W, 65W who cares, ikea advertises it can charge a laptop, why would a phone prevent it from charging a laptop?

Okay. To your mom: Every 60 watt or higher charger will work. That super cheap one is only 5. It can't do it.

SO which ones are 60W? There are 3 similarly looking ones behind the nightsand, they all fit. So she must buy different colored cables now too, or move the nightstand every night to check which cable goes where?

If you want to be sure then go for 60.

But my powerbank has only 18watts. I already have it. Will it charge the laptop? Or won't it? Or will the laptop charge the powerbank and drain the internal battery even faster?

And what I'm saying is that a lot of these issues are not unique to USB at all. And most of the rest can be solved by either using the chargers that came with a device or hiding/trashing the e-waste chargers you have and only using the good ones.

Those troubles didn't exist before usb C, because every device had a custom plug that only fit that device and charged it properly, there was basically no way to mess them up. Something like this ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/10/So... ) would only fit inside an ericsson phone and charge it.

And then everyone said "we're going usb C, one cable for everything", and my mom is happy! But hey, that old charger with usbA->C cable gives her a warning that her phone is charging slowly... it fits, but it doesn't work properly. Her earbuds charge on that cable but not on the ikea charger. Her ikea charger charges her laptop and her phone, but if her phone is plugged in, her laptop still shows the charging light, but the battery percentage is going down. The phone charger that she got with her new phone will charge her phone but won't charge her laptop. Her powerbank will charge from her old phone charger and her new phone charger, the led will be on, but it will take ages to charge from the old charger. Her powerbank will sometimes charge her laptop and sometimes her laptop will charge her powerbank, who knows when and how, the manual is in the trash.

Want to add data to this? Which of her existing usb-c cables will do data at what speed? usb2? usb3? Will it work for video? Thunderbolt?

Yes i know, I should go there, throw all the powerbricks in the trash, buy only 65 watt ones, buy only proper thunderbolt capable usb c cables, and mark have her charge her earphones on the pc with her usbA->C cable, but that's a waste of money and a lot of electronics in the trash for no good reason. If i did that a few years ago when PD became a thing, she'd have 18W chargers everywhere and i'd have to replace them again when she bought a laptop with usb C charging. And again, I could do that, because I know the tech behind all that, and can read voltages and currents... if i didn't, i wouldn't even know what to buy, i'd just go to ikea (she likes white powerbricks for some reason), and get whichever was available, probably the 45W one, because it has two ports instead of one on the 65 watt one.

For us living in "the rest of the world", we only have a choice of being spied on by chinese or american companies, and american ones can do a lot more damage to us than chinese.

So if we're getting spied on anyway, why not buy a better product?

I've never seen a USB C brick that supported some alternative to PD but not PD. Do many exist? Are they still making them?

They existed not that long ago, before usb c pd was a stanard, many samsung phones supported it (and not PD), and those powerbricks with those usb c cables still exist and still fit into PD phones.

Wattage of chargers is easy enough to handle.

How? Explain that to my mom, she picks up a cable that fits her phone/laptop and plugs it in. Here's the charger: https://www.ikea.com/si/sl/p/sjoess-usb-polnilnik-z-2-vrati-... It says 45 watts, will that charge her laptop? Why won't her laptop charge if she's charging a phone too? That didn't happen with her old laptop charger.

If your laptop doesn't have weird DRM, the answer is either "every charger and every cable works" or "every 60W or higher charger and every cable works".

https://www.ikea.com/si/sl/p/smahagel-napajalni-komplet-5060...

Will this one work? It won't, no usb PD support, but it fits into my moms PC, explain that to her. The cable is on her nightstand, she plugs it in, doesn't charge.

I think that's violating the standard so you'd have similar problems even without this kind of standard. But that's basically just a 30 watt requirement in practice which goes back to being easy.

I have a charger and a soldering iron that just says voltage too low and doesn't work. The cable fits, but it doesn't work. I know why not, now explain it to my mom.

That one's definitely violating the standard.

Sure, but she bought such a device, the cable fits but it doesn't charge.

This is the same as with other kinds of plug, which can also vary in charging speed even when they're compatible.

What plug? Ericsson plug fit and charged the ericsson, same for nokia... usb C fits and doesn't charge.

For higher wattage laptops in particular you might care about cable choice. That's an annoyance but also easily solved by getting only high wattage cables.

Again, explain that to my mom. how many watts? Is 60 enough? Ikea only has 45 watts, will that work? What is a watt? Why is it only 22 watts if she's also charging a phone?

You've lost me. Without USB C a laptop power bank basically wouldn't exist. Weren't we comparing to back in the day?

Of course laptop powerbanks existed before USB C, they gave out usually 19 volts and the guy at the store would install a proper connector to fit your laptop and you'd lose the others. You'd charge it with a charger that fit that powerbank and charged it, then charge the laptop with it.

Now you buy this: https://www.ikea.com/si/sl/p/varmfront-prenosni-polnilnik-te... 18 watts.. will it charge the laptop? Won't it? Who knows. Will the power go from the laptop to the powerbank instead? Who knows! You have to read the goddamn manual for that to see, and the manual says:

Charging power bank • Connect the USB-C cable to the USB-C port of the power bank first and then connect the USB cable to a USB-charger or USB-outlet that can provide sufficient power to charge the power bank. The LED indicators will display the charging status.

Supply power to devices • Connect the USB cable to USB-C or USB-A port of the power bank first and then connect the USB-cable to your device that you want to charge. • The power bank will detect a connected device and start charging automatically. • The LED indicators will display the remaining charge in the power bank during discharging.

Now explain that to my mom. The cables fit.

Yes, i know i'm complaining, but i live just far away from my parents, that it's a pain to sit into a car and drive all the way there to swap some adapters or chargers, or cables and label what goes where and for what it can be used... and debugging that over the phone is a pain.

thunderbolt

If you add data, it's even worse... does the cable do thunderbolt? USB 3.0? Or just 2.0? There's no way to know and the cable still fits

Sadly, that's far from truth...

"back in the day", you had an ericsson charger that fit in an ericsson phone and charget that ericsson phone well... and you had a nokia charger for you nokia that charged your nokia. They physically looked different, they wouldn't fit into any other device, and when you needed a charger, you'd take the one that fit the charging hole and it would charge.

Now, you have a bunch of usb C bricks, some just 5V usb, some USB PD, some QC(2, 3).... then you have a bunch of usb C cables, some with ID chips, some without, some able to carry 15 watts, some 100 watts, and then you have devices, some that can do QC, some that can do smart PD, some with just some resistors, some without even those.

Everything fits in every hole, every charger can take any cable and any device can take the other end of the cable.... but will this particular combo charge your laptop? The cable fits.. will it charge? What about those cheap earbuds that just want 5 volts? The USB-A to usb-C cable that came with them works, but the USB-C to USB-C that you bought after, doesn't. How about that smart LiPo charger, it's USB-C, but it needs at least 9 volts to charge, and not every power brick gives out that voltage. What about charging speed? Will it do fast charge? Your laptop charging light is on, but the battery percentage is going down... why? What about a powerbank, does it charge your laptop? How does it know who does the charging, and who is getting charged?

I mean sure, if you know your standards, you'll know what devices need PD and which ones use QC, you'll read the specs on the power bricks, you know how many watts your laptop needs, how to switch the current directions, which devices can't do proper handshakes, and need usbA->C cables, etc, and you'll get yourself a baggie of a few power bricks and cables for different stuff, but i had to label the cables for my mom, because while everything physically fits, many combinations won't actually charge your device. 10 years ago, this wasn't a problem, since her laptop charger didn't fit her wireless earphones, now it fits and it doesn't charge them.

It's easy... you just tell it what you want, and it gives you the answer, especially if you know very little about the topic itself.

The problem is, when you know the topic well, and it's giving you bad/wrong answers, because you know the topic enough to notice it.

Gell-Mann AI effect in action

But maybe we change work to 8-4 from 9-5 and might be better that way anyway.

Why not change the working hours of stores, and tv programming and other schedules too?

In the end, you get the same thing as a clock change, but having to change the times of everything everywhere.

A lot of the new designs are actually practical.... be it striped carpets or patterned bus seats, they're designed to hide stains and wear. If eg. bus seats were made from white fabric, no one would want to sit in them after a month or two of use, same for eg. carpets in places with many people.

Back then, you had 20, 30, 50 'friends' on facebook and basically all the content you saw was made by them. Except for chatting, you could basically view all the 'daily content' (all the posts by everyone you had on your friends list) in maybe 10 minutes.

Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing your friends dinner plates soon after it got bought out by facebook and it too replaced the friends dinner plates with random "reels".

If the kids only saw stuff posted by their 'friends', instead of being pushed a lot of random garbage they never decided to 'follow', it would still be a much nicer place.

In quite a few countries, you can drink less-acoholic drinks, eg. beer and wine, much younger than high-alcohol drinks, eg. whiskey, vodka, etc.

Germany is one such example.

But we want cheap stuff, we don't have unlimited money.

This law didn't open a phone case factory in europe, it just made the 1eur case cost ~5euros (vat is paid on customs too). The only alternative is to go to a local mall and buy a case there for 10-15euros, and it's the same chinese case, just more expensive, but the reseller pays a lot less tax, since they can buy 100 cases for 1eur and still pay just 3eur of customs on them.

So I, the consumer get 300% customs on that 1eur case (+vat on huge customs fee), while the mall kiosk gets 3% customs fee, how is that fair? And how will that build a phone case factory in europe?

Why not build the factory first instead? Have it make 2eur phone cases, and then the price raise would make me buy the european one, but for now, it's just makes me pay more for the same chinese stuff, and I can't spend the leftover money for a local beer at a local bar anymore, so stuff actually made in europe.

Because it's control of what we send and it's done en-masse.

I was born in a communist country (with red stars, a communist party and a dictator), and even back then, the government requiring post office workers to read (and photocopy) our mail would seem absurd, but now, somehow it's ok, because "it's on the internet". And yes, CSAM could be sent via normal mail too.

Same for every repressive thing... if you went to a bar, and had to show your id, have it logged, and someone would write down when you came, who you sat with and how long you've talked, that would seem absurd even then... but now, since "it's on the internet", storing metadata is somehow ok.

Stop protecting the governments, if they wanted to stop pedos, they have the whole epstein list, and they don't care about it.

I was just pointing out that the 4th amendment is not really helping the americans with tyranny and all the related stuff :)

Getting the criminals is not the point here, mass control is. How many of your friends do this now? The criminals might do it, but why, when they can just meet in person and talk there, without a digital recording of what they talk?

Combine the 'age verification' (show your ID when you register) with this (we can read what you type), add some AI (to profile the people), and you have all the info you'd ever want on anyone anywhere.

And then you got the patriot act.

Real time notifications here would solve a lot of issues...

Imagine Alice, an 18, 19yo girl, having a boyfriend, Bob, and since Bob is on a student exchange, she decides to send him a boob photo. Since alice is skinny, her boobs are on the smaller side.

Now imagine Alice hitting 'Send', and getting an automated message from whatever CSAM AI bot:

"Your message has not been sent, the system detected the breasts in the photo to be probably underage, the photo was forwarded to <your local police station> for manual review"

And half an hour later

"Detectives Rob Johnson, John Robson and Bob Bobson from police department XY, have done an extensive manual review of the photo of the breasts and have 2:1 decided that they're probably not underage, so the photo was sent to the intended destination. Than you, your friendly CSAM AI bot!"

And then stop people from being able to afford cheaper stuff from china (without european middlemen) by implementinh a 3eur customs fee on an 1eur phone case!

Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.

Where do you live?

In slovenia for example, we have "default speed limits", where there are zero traffic signs unless the speed limit deviates from the default for that type of road (50 within settlements, 90 outside, 110 on motorways and 130 on highways).

This also makes me want to buy a shirt with 150km/h or 20km/h sign on my back.

I mean.. that's like putting solar cells in the shade... i mean sure, they work better in the sun, but why not both? They still produce a few milliwats of power in the shade too.

For the amount of money spent here, we could've build quite a few kilowatts of power capacity on more traditional surfaces, like if the project had to be rail related, on eg. roofs of rail platforms.

Solar sidewalks, solar roads, now solar rail?

WHY?! Dave from eevblog did the math and it's bad

Did we really fill up all the area on top of roofs, parkings lots, industrial areas, etc., and we're running out, and we have to put solar cells on railroads?

Sure, i might want to follow an influencer or two and look at their videos, but I want my "feed" to be "social", so people i choose to follow, be it real life friends, or even influencers, but not "random" content from sources I don't follow.

I have a lot of friends who have moved abroad, changed jobs, had kids, etc., and social networks gave me all that info, plus I could contact them in a "lighter" way than taking the phone and calling them, plus you could make groups of people (classmates, coworkers from previous job, etc.). There were also a lot of "we're at <local bar>, if anyone wants to join us" posts back in the time, and since i lived 5 minutes away, I joined or even posted that status if I was one of the first people there, and other came... now it's hours of coordination just to meet for a beer.

Basically, it was easier to reach people who are "not that close" to you that you would directly call them, and you find out stuff (who moved where, who has a kid now, etc.). Now I don't know any of that, but I get served a fake video of someone inserting a battery into the antenna connector of a tv.

The more I see of social media, the more I'm convinced that it's not really a fulfilling way to share and socialize on the internet.

I kinda miss the "old" social media, where it was media and also social... you would open whatever (facebook, myspace, instagram...) and you'd see your friends, plates of what they're eating, some attention seeking statuses, wedding photos, invites to birthdays, etc.

I have no idea if people stopped posting all that or if algorithm hid all that content behind random content it wanted to push instead, so you get zero of that but a lot of random news stories, "reels" and random videos from influences you don't follow and are not interested in, and basically a lot of not-social stuff. I know there's more money for the social network if they show me artificially protracted diy wideos and "you won't believe..." crap, but that made me leave one "social" network after another.