I fear there is no such system where this applies. The tech stack on any old netbook is so advanced and complex that there is nobody on this planet who fully understands it.

Being theoretically able to read the code is certainly better than not being able to, but it’s not the same as having actually read and understood all the relevant code to the point where you can be somewhat confident that there’s no backdoor in it.

(And even if someone had the time and mental capacity to do that, at some point when going through the stack you always hit a proprietary layer. Be that drivers, the bootloader, component firmware or the hardware itself.)

*insert obligatory xz utils reference*

I’d be fine with “no US politics”. It’s so annoying that [email protected] is specifically and only about US politics. Because apparently, US politics are the only politics relevant for the world.

Yeah, that’s totally true. If you speak Serbian and you move to the Netherlands, nobody would (or could) switch to Serbian for you.

That’s why I said, everyone needs (or has incentive to) learn the global lingua franca, the regional lingua franca, the language of the country they live in and their mother tongue.

As someone from the UK living in the Netherlands, these four languages are English, English, Dutch and English, so you’ll likely learn (at least to some degree) two languages.

If you are from the UK and stay in the UK, all four languages are English and thus you likely won’t have a need to ever get to fluency in a second language.

(Of course, there are some special circumstances, e.g. if you are from the UK and live in the UK but work as a French teacher, you do have a need to know French, but I’m talking about the general case.)

If you are an immigrant in a country with a low-tier language, e.g. a Rumanian living in Albania, the four languages will be English, Russian, Albanian, Romanian.

Speaking multiple languages is a thing because you need it.

Everyone needs to know English, because its the global Lingua Franca. Not only to speak with native English speakers but to speak with everyone. If as an Austrian I speak to someone from China, I will do so in English.

Everyone needs to know the local Lingua Franca, because it’s a massive career help and you will need it quite commonly. That’s why most people in Hungary learn German. They need that all the time, since the economies are tied so closely together.

Everyone needs to learn the language of the country they live in, because only if you know the language you can access the job market and all services without barrier.

Lastly, everyone needs to learn their mother tongue to be able to speak with their family.

If you are from Serbia and move to the Czech Republic, you will learn and frequently use four languages.

If you are from Germany and stay there, you will learn and frequently use two languages.

If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.

I can speak English quite well.

That’s because of the “language tiers”.

People don’t usually learn languages for fun, at least not to a point where they can actually speak it fluently. They learn it because they have an use for it. If you learn a language without having an use for it, you lose it quite quickly.

The highest tier language is the worldwide lingua franca: English. You learn English to talk to anyone, not to talk to English native speakers. For example, my company (a central European one) uses English as the work language. We don’t have a single English native speaker on the team. But if I want to talk to a colleague from Rumania, Egypt, Spain or the Netherlands I will talk English with them.

The next tier is the regional lingua franca. That’s e.g. Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Russian or Arabic (and likely a few others, I don’t know the whole world). These languages are spoken in certain regions and can be used to communicate with people from neighbouring countries. You can get around with e.g. German in Hungary, because most Hungarians learn German. It’s also sometimes necessary since TV, books or other media might not be available in the local language. For example, a lot of Albanians speak Italian, because TV shows and movies are rarely translated into Albanian and instead broadcast in Italian. (Also, since Italy was so close, many people watched Italian TV while Albania had communism.)

The lowest tier are local languages. These are languages that are only spoken in their own country. For example: Rumanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch and so on. People speak these languages because they live in that country. For someone who doesn’t live in that country, there’s rarely any major benefit to learning these languages.

In general, people only really learn to speak languages that are on the same tier or higher.

If you live in Albania, you learn Albanian as a child, then probably add Italian to understand TV. In school you will learn English and once you go online you will use it. You might also learn Russian to be able to communicate with people in nearby countries and if you are from the muslim part of Albania you might also learn Arabic.

If you live in Germany, you’d just learn German and English. No need for any other languages. If you spend some significant time in France, Spain or Italy, you might pick up one of these languages.

If you live in the US or GB, you start with English, and there’s hardly any point to learn anything else. By default you can already communicate with everyone, read everything on the internet and watch all TV shows and movies (pretty much everything is translated into English, if it isn’t even refilmed in English). If you try to learn another language and try to use it with native speakers of said language, chances are pretty high they just switch over to English.

I mean, fair, but I understood it as a “must watch” movie. Something that everyone needs to have seen kinda thing.

And Harry Potter, I think, does fit that bill.

Harry Potter 6 for me. I could not get through this movie. I tried it about 5 times so far. Same with the book. I tried reading it at least 10 times including listening to it as an audiobook.

It’s just insufferable.

(And don’t worry, Rowling-haters, I of course pirated it except of the copy of the book that I got when I was a kid)

Looks like a bad LLM’s try at drawing ASCII fish.

I don’t have one in English, but I have some in German for those who understand.

My Granddad had a female coworker that was higher in rank than him. He would always greet her with “Meine Allerwerteste”. It’s a word play because “Meine Werteste” is equivalent to a very formal version of “my dear”. “Aller” is a superlative form, so basically “My very dearest”. But “Mein Allerwertester” (so the male form of what he used) means “my ass”.

The other one is to use terminology like “Er versucht immer sein Bestes zu geben” (“He always tries to give his best”). In Austria, you are legally allowed to ask for a work testimony from your employer when you are looking for a new job. There is some legislation that prohibits negative speech in these work testimonies so that your employer cannot make you look bad in front of your potential new employer (which makes the whole concept pretty useless, but it is what it is). So to get around that, employers adopted a kind of “secret” code where e.g. “tries to” means “fails to”. So you can use the same kind of terminology to deliver something that sounds like a compliment, but for everyone in the know (which is most people by now) it’s clear that you deeply offended the person you are talking about.

It’s called PEPit, and it can be found here: https://github.com/Dakkaron/PEPit

Most of the documentation is in German, since my primary audience so far were people living close enough that I can hand them devices and I haven’t gotten around to translating everything to English. But I think it should be simple enough that auto-translation should be understandable.

I’m not sure what to do about distribution other than just handing them out for free, having them sign waivers, and getting funding from a charity or similar organization.

That’s what I have been doing so far. I “sold” a few of them for the price of the parts. I donated two to two different local hospitals to use with in-patients. I got a physiotherapy device company to donate money for a scientific study at one of the hospitals, where they will hand 30 devices to patients to keep them and measure how it improves their therapy experience. But so far that’s pretty much the end of the road.

I’m already worrying about how I can even do the study without getting in trouble in regards to taxes and stuff.

It would be really cool if someone else would start picking these up and making some for kids that need it.

This is mainly made for kids with Cystic Fibrosis (like my kid, who was my original audience for the device), but I talked to a few people with broader experience in regards to lung conditions, and it would also work well for kids with Asthma (for RMT therapy) or people with COPD (for inhalation and PEP/RMT therapy). PEP is breathing out against resistance, RMT is breathing in against resistance.

“This idea that the lower cost of renewables alone will drive decarbonisation – it’s not enough,” said Daly. “Because if there’s a huge source of energy demand that wants to grow, it will land on these stranded fossil fuel assets.”

Corporations don’t think in savings, they think in budgets. If the cost of electricity goes down, thanks to e.g. renewables being cheaper, that just means that they can afford to use more electricity.

Tbh, no. The device is realistically priced for a niche medical device with low number of units sold. Medical certification alone is around €500k. Development costs for a very custom device like this are also quite high. The price point isn’t crazy at all.

At the same time, health insurances (even more so here in Europe than in the US) are pretty slow to pay for new technology, especially if the benefit isn’t immediately tangible.

As in, “Will this reduce the need for further insurance spending by e.g. preventing hospital visits?” or “Will this allow a person who is on disability benefits to return to work?”

Not, that’s part of the issue. And also a big reason why someone would pay for much more expensive industrial sources.

I recently got into making hardware to be used by people with medical issues. Specifically, I made a handheld physiotherapy game console.

That’s a simple device using off-the-shelf components and a 3D printed shell.

Parts alone cost around €60 if I buy them off Aliexpress and around €100 if I go for more reliable industrial sources.

Assembly (some hand soldering required), flashing the software, testing, packaging and shipping takes about two hours. I don’t have any employees, so if I do this at the rate I get paid at my day job, that’s another €150. If I had employees, it would be similar due to tax and insurance costs.

Now I have a device for €250 plus shipping, but the calculation isn’t done here.

I also have to account for DOA parts, support (in my country there’s 2 years of warranty on electronics like that), returns (we have a 2 week free return law in my country) and a reserve for potential claims if something catastrophic happens (e.g. a battery blowing up and burning down a customer’s house).

So that easily doubles the price to €500.

But we are not done yet. First we need to account for R&D. So far I spent around 200h developing the device and the games for it, so that’s €15 000 in dev costs, and development is not nearly finished. I expect this to easily double.

Then come certifications. I will need CE including the radio part, certification for that will cost €10k-20k and that is if I don’t need to make changes. If the base board that I am using turns out to not be CE compliant, I will have to DIY a whole PCB design that passes CE and do the certification again.

If I want to have any chance of getting this paid for by an insurance company, I need medical certification. I spoke to a large manufacturer of medical devices (I wanted them to take over my project, but they declined), and they said that medical certification for a device like this is around €500 000.

I expect to maybe sell a few hundred devices per year if I am lucky, and I don’t know how long the market for this device would work. Let’s go with a four-year period until I want to at least break even, because anything longer than that would be very risky.

So let’s go with an unrealistic best case of 1000 devices per year, so 4000 total.

That means, the one-time costs would factor in at least €150 per device. If I only sell 100 devices per year (more realistic estimate) I would need to add €1500 per device.

Btw, medical certification only means there is a chance that insurances pay for it. It doesn’t mean they actually will pay for it. So if I’m unlucky, I paid half a million for the certification and the insurances won’t care.

So now we are up to €650 - €2000 for a device that’s €50 in off-the-shelf hardware. And I haven’t made any money from it apart from the salary for assembling it in my bedroom. And on top of that I also need to pay for taxes and stuff.

This is super frustrating. A handful of kids are already using that device, and every single family of them reports that it made their lives much, much easier, their therapy efficiency much better and improved the health of the children.

I even opensourced the design, to maybe give kids access to this device, but so far nobody dared reproducing it.

I don’t know how to spread that device in a manner that people can afford.

Back to OP: the device in question is developed by a real company, having to pay for patents (both they want to hold and the ones they need to license), salaries, taxes, insurances, and so on, and it’s a really custom device with very custom parts. The price is neither unrealistic or crazy at all. It’s, in fact, really low for what it is.

The fact that we can get amazing high tech products like smartphones for a few €100 is totally crazy and only possible because millions of them are produced (economy of scale) and they are produced by exploiting foreign super cheap labour at every stage of the process.

Why won’t these pesky peasants shut up and give us our data?

Who could have known that the people who voluntarily use a tiny niche browser mostly for privacy/idealism reasons wouldn’t wany just another AI browser?

Honestly, how out of touch with their user base can they be?

If I want a good browser that works with every website, I’d take something chromium based. If I want an AI browser, I’d take one of the many chromium based ones.

I was stuck at the same one.

First take Peter’s hint. It says that one of Sofia and Wanda is innocent, one is criminal. That means in Column B we know there are two innocents, two criminals and Bruce.

Now take Gabe’s hint: there cannot be three criminals in Column B.

If Bruce were criminal, there would be three criminals in Column B, so Bruce cannot be criminal.

I was stuck on the same one.

Take Peter’s hint: It says that either Sofia or Wanda are criminals, so there’s exactly 2 confirmed criminals, 2 confirmed innocents and Bruce on Column B.

Now take Gabe’s hint: There cannot be 3 criminals on Column B, so Bruce needs to be innocent.