BananaTrifleViolin

It’s a bit of a dumb “gotcha” question to be honest.

Name 3 Indian people right now? Name 3 Russian people right now? Name 3 Argentinian people right now?

Most people don’t have a list of go-to names in their pockets based on nationality. And people in Europe will be much more familiar with other Europeans, and also Americans because we’re inundated in coverage.

I’m British with Irish heritage and I’m struggling on the spot to name 3 Irish people alive right now, yet I see a lot of Irish comedians, actors, musicians and TV shows on British TV.

It’s a specious argument that the question reveals what it purports to. Instead it reveals people are shit when put on the spot, and especially the further outside their day-to-day familiarity you go.

Yeah, Microsoft is gambling that the number of users who care enough to act are too small, or won’t bother, or won’t realise they can.

This is how big corporations get away with this shit. It’s not “illegal” in the criminal sense, but it is a breach of contract between Microsoft and those affected; and they likely could win against Microsoft.

The good news is the outrage over this is probably more damaging than any settlement or long drawn out legal case even would be. It’s at just the right time as Microsoft deals with major issues and unhappiness with Windows users over poor updates, crappy feature changes to Win 11 and of course force feeding of CoPilot down every users throat, while also decimating their own staff to save money for AI and polluting their own products codebases with shitty AI generated slop. Perfect storm has hit Microsoft, and they don’t even realise how bad it is yet.

Vivaldi is about as good as you can get with a Chromium based browser, but with the fundamental compromises that come with Chromium thanks to Google’s influence. It is European based so may have better governance and fundamental provacy than US based companies, but that is an assumption.

At the end of the day Vivaldi is a commercial browser, and that is a fundamental compromise that means it has to weigh up it’s commercial interests against users interests.

That said, I use Firefox as my main browser, Librefox for some other stuff, and occasionally use Vivaldi with a VPN extension for some stuff, and rarely Chromium without extensions if I have something low level to do on a site that I can’t be bothered messing around with fixing adblockers on. I don’t think you have to be all or nothing; it really depends on what you’re trying to do and when.

Vivaldi itself is well designed; it’s designed more for power users and tries to do everything. I just use it for browsing, but I appreciate the touches it offers. If you want to use a Chromium based browser, it’s a well made one.

Are you sure? Steam says it will need 800mb for me, and thats on Linux so probably with Proton. I’m seeing 200mb searching online for an average install?

While it’s certainly a pixel graphic game, it does have a lot of sprites and I can’t see how it’d be 10mb? Still, 200mb is nothing in this day and age.

Ok, even with mods, 10gb? Woah!

I’m playing stardew with a few mods and it’s 750mb on Linux via steam. I’m genuinely interested in what mods you’re adding to get it to 10gb?

I like the Ace Attorney trilogies; I’m playing through the Apollo Justice trilogy right now and thats about 19gb. Perfect on the steam deck.

Stardew Valley is under 1gb and is also perfect on Steam Deck. Or Core Keeper is only 1.1gb, for a more crafty less RPG vibe.

Also worth remembering of course, you can use SD cards to expand the space on your Steam Deck, and swap SD cards out as much as you want. So if you have intermittent internet as you imply elsewhere here, loading up games onto SD cards can be very helpful.

Awesome project, but I fear it will be taken down for legal reasons sadly.

If you want it, get it now - 121 gb.

https://virtualosmuseum.org/installation-list/

Yes.

Sorry but this is a nonsense doom-mongering take. The Trans rights issue is a complex mess but it’s not the end of democracy. That is hyperbolic nonsense.

The UK Supreme Court ruling is a reflection of a huge problem facing all countries: how do you reconcile women’s right and trans rights? The Supreme Court ruled that in the UK Equality Act, the terms “Man”, “Woman” and “Sex” referred to biological sex at birth, not gender identity and that a Gender Recognition Certificate does not change a persons biological sex under the law.

This was a clarification of the law as it stands; this was the way the legislation had been written and it ensures the Equality Act is applied clearly. It is not anti-democratic; Parliament makes the law and the courts interpret how it is written and remove ambiguity.

As this article mentions: it is up to Parliament now to change the law if it wants to. Parliament IS sovereign and can amend the Equality Act or provide a new definition for gender/sex. But there is a brutal reality why it is not doing so: this is a hugely divisive issue particularly for the Labour party. Women’s rights and Transgender rights are in conflict, and it’s extremely difficult to reconcile that. We’ve already seen how this played out in Scotland for the SNP, and Labour are in the same position. It can be argued to be cowardly and weak of them not to try to resolve this issue, but it is not fundamentally undemocratic. Labour don’t want to discuss this because they want to focus on other issues that they see as helping them stay in power.

It’s a nonsense to say this is the “start of democratic collapse”. It’s correct that the Right-wing have moved against trans rights, but for the Left it’s a paralysis of inaction due to there not being a simple solution that can please both sides. Women’s rights activists fundamentally hold that biological sex is immutable as that underpins their rights; Trans rights activists fundamentally hold that gender is not immutable as that underpins their rights.

Other countries are or will go through similar issues. Other rights like gender equality, race equality, Gay rights etc were controversial but they did not as fundamentally bring two groups rights into conflict. Arguably Gay rights and rights of religious expression did come into conflict and remain in conflict, and that was a long drawn out process but eventually there was a form of consensus. That is constantly under attack in multiple countries, and the balance may shift again on issues like Gay marriage if the Right-wing have their way. But with Trans-rights we have not even reached a stable political consensus of any form - it remains hugely controversial on the Right and Left for different reasons.

People seem to look back at the various rights issues over the past century and see a pattern of inevitability of the “good” winning, and people gaining their rights. Instead it’s a story of constant fighting and battles by different groups to be heard, and for their rights to be established and recognised. That war is ongoing in all those areas whether that is gender, race, sexual orientation etc. For Trans rights, we’re still in the worst part of the fighting. As with other rights issues, it may ultimately be resolved to some extent as we have generational changes that society changes and the law changes. Just as Gen X and Millenials had to come to the fore before Gay rights were finally recognised and enshrined properly in law in most countries, it may well be that it won’t be until Gen Z and Gen Alpha come to the fore in politics that their own social and political views on this are reflected in the law. Gen Z and Gen Alpha seem to be much more comfortable with seeing gender as changeable and not immutable like biological sex - that will inform the way things go long term.

This is not a failure of democracy. This is democracy in action. It is slow, it is flawed, and it seldom makes everyone happy. But change does slowly happen and things do generally get better over time as we have seen across the last 100+ years. People who believe in Trans rights need to keep fighting, they need to keep drawing attention to the issues and their plight and they must be organised and influence those people standing in the next general election, and the one after that and so on. Change can be achieved but it is seldom easy. But at the same time, Women’s rights activists also need to be listened to and the fundamental concerns around encroachment on their rights have to be addressed. I can’t pretend to know what the final answer will be - it is hugely complex and controversial with reason on both sides.

In some ways shrinkflation is “cyclical” in that inflation rises costs, companies try to cheat consumers by shrinking products, but wages go up and “premium” products launch that are a decent quantity again. Those do well, but then inflation hits again, they shittify and shrinkflation happens again.

The long standing “big” brands never recover, but new stuff does come along. Good example is the “premium” chocolate bars that come along, their selling point being they had more cocoa in them. The established mass market brands used to have cocoa in them, but reduced the proportion to save costs. Now some of those “premium” brands have reduced the cocoa content and new even more expensive chocolate brands are available.

No I’m not. It’s been impressive but it seems to have plateaued. It’s not particularly reliable, and we’re at the point of diminishing returns with the current technology and scalability. We’re not seeing big jumps in models capabilities in the ways we did at the start, and the investment needed to get incremental increases in power are now looking insane.

We’re in the middle of a stock market bubble, where everyone is hyping up their products and speculators have been throwing money at AI, desperate to have a slice of the “winner”. But the productivity gains we’ve been promised haven’t followed. If you use the products even a little, you really see the limitations - they “hallucinate”, they don’t reliably produce the most efficient answers, they often tell you what you want to hear.

A lot of products have been badged as “AI” but they’re really either LLMs or more targetted generative AI. They are certainly useful, and some are undoubtedly going to be profitable, but they’re not anywhere as near useful or powerful as the proponents are trying to make out. Companies like OpenAI for example are burning through money at an alarming rate, and not really producing much gains now. Companies like Microsoft, Meta and Google have deep pockets and have thrown many $100s of billions at AI, yet to what end? Little chat bots, tools that help you make emails briefer/concise, tools that sort-of help you search the internet? It’s not as revolutionary as it first seemed.

It’s telling that companies are quietly backing away from hyped up mega-deals with OpenAI (Microsoft, Nvidia), and that Microsoft has pivoted away from Copilot due to backlash and lack of user uptake. Their own stats shows only 3% of users were using Copilot, yet they’ve rammed it into almost every corner of Windows and Office, and to the detriment of their actual core product and users.

General AI is likely on the way, but not from this initial burst of technology, and probably not from any of these companies. LLMs and other current techniques are interesting and have their uses, but the idea that we just scale it up and have General AI is seemingly nonsense. The biggest proponents of that idea are companies like OpenAI that are desperate that the technology they have is the one that dominates. Instead I suspect it’s the researchers and companies quietly working on technology that better mimics the actual biological brain that will get us to something like General AI, and that seems to be quite a way off.

Complex ideas like this are not just about throwing money at the problem; there is plenty of resource going in to AI development but what you actually need is good quality research and time. Much of the money is very likely being wasted on duplication, pointless infrastructure (like more data centres for current models to scale), bloated salaries of research staff due to competition, bloated salaries of non-research staff and of course the stock-market shenanigans and deals that really produce nothing for AI research.

Don’t be worried about AI; be worried about this stock market bubble popping.

The hardest part is documentation. 1945 is perhaps easier to “create” an identity following the war, as so many we displaced. But after that it would mean needing to change identity every so often. I’d probably stay in Europe, either in my home country of the UK or maybe even move to West Germany. Both countries did well in the post war 1950s, although not as well as the US. Maybe I’d go to the US because post war may have been an easier time to slip in to the country and then take part in the post-war boom?

I’d start trying to earn money, and put every penny I could into a company I owned and use that to buy stocks and shares in companies I know would do well in the post-war boom. The key is compounding investments to make more money longer term, accepting lower standards of living initially. In the 40s-60s that’d be largely blue chip companies like Coca-Cola, IBM, GE, Proctor & Gamble. Then as new big names of the future came along I’d buy into them - obvious ones being Microsoft and Apple in the 1970s, Google in the 2000s. And of course, probably buy into Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hatherway at the earliest opportunity in the 1960s.

With wealth I’d create new identities - a “son” to inherit the business every 20 years or so. Move around every 10 years or so, maybe between countries to help keep anonymity and to stay under the radar. Unfortunately it could also need a degree of criminality to be able to keep this going - identity fraud but at a low level. Maybe set up a trust, and every 10-20 years be a new lawyer who manages it. So much of that can be done somewhat anonymously and somewhat remotely even in the past.

The aim - if I am to be immortal - would be to accumulate a lot of wealth, spread across multiple countries, to prepare for getting back to today when fore-knowledge runs out. Because not knowing what happens next, all you can do is then try and prepare for possibilities, and making shit ton of money seems like a sensible way to guarantee security and comfort.

EDIT: The other thing to do of course: buy and sell land. Knowing that cities will grow rapidly is perfect for buying up land for later development. And also in many big cities, certainly in Europe anyway, there was a period of suburbanisation with matching collapse of the urban core. A lot of apartments and buildings were sold cheaply as demand was depressed, but then the trend started reversing again in the 1980s though to now. Imagine buying up apartment buildings in London, Paris, Berlin etc. Then all you have to do is live off the income - pay your taxes and no one really is going to ask who owns what, and who exactly is getting the money.

They didn’t miss the “wave”, they discovered it’s just hype and a bubble. They spent a fortune and damaged their core products to try and get in on AI, and have realised it was fools gold that their actual paying customers don’t want. This really sums the problem up well:

According to Velloso, less than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot, even though Microsoft has pre-deployed it directly into the Windows 11 taskbar and across the Office suite.

Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.

I’m sure I’m like many people - I tried Copilot a couple of times; it’s ok to make an email or even document text a bit more concise, but that’s really it. I don’t find it useful; I do all the actual work and then occasionally get an AI to help make it a bit easier to read very similar to a spell check and grammar check. It’s not good enough to do anything else; it bullshits and is error ridden and like all the AI I’ve tried it’s really plateaued. I just really don’t see where the value in that $37.5bn spent by Microsoft is.

I certainly wouldn’t pay for copilot myself. Instead I object to it being rammed down my throat at work, and Windows 11 just being generally awful but not improved. Microsoft are finally making the right noises but the damage is already done.

News coverage of elections is so poor.

Plaid “won” the election with 35.4% of the vote. UK journalists are so used to the “winner takes all” First past the post system, they report proportional representation elections like this as if they’re the same. Plaid is going to be a minority government, and the reality is even if the Greens and Lib Dems went into coalition with them they would be short of a majority. Reform, Labour and Conservatives (and probably Greens and Lib Dems regardless) would not be motivated to support Plaid so it’ll be a slow process of negotiating every piece of legislation.

Wales is well used to minority governments but the stakes are higher this time for all the opposition parties, as all of them are going to be vying for Wales’ Parliamentary seats in the next general election. Plaid will too of course, but unlike the other parties Plaid is not part of the 5 way split in national politics that will dominate the next few years. So Plaid will be dealing with opposition parties that may not be that co-operative in Wales, as they care much more about how things look going into a General election.

Wales was pro-brexit (52.5% Brexit) like England (53.4% Brexit). Scotland was pro EU (62% remain) and Northern Ireland too (55% remain).

Also Plaid are the largest party but don’t have a majority; they got 35.4% of the vote - way off getting a mandate for an independence referendum. Second with 29.3% of the vote was Reform, which is rabidly anti EU and a unionist party.

Or maybe lower RAM models to try and have entry level machines that are at least tolerably priced since AI distorted the RAM market?

No, it has better frameworks to regulate local companies but seems to give a free pass to international conglomerates that come in and avoid tax by off shoring it in other EU states. The EU has allowed the US tech companies in on an uneven playing field and they have obliterated EU tech companies, with Ireland in particular taking the proverbial by enticing them with low taxes to benefit it’s own economy.

This was also perhaps tolerated as it was believed the US and EU were close and Europe benefited in other ways from the open trade with the US. Now it looks very short sighted and foolish. When Europe does try to regulate the big US tech companies, the US - not just Trump - objects and undermines it.

I agree it’s a hyperbolic headline and article; more of an opinion piece than news. It’s subjective but I think I would describe it as “sneaky” to add a 4gb AI component to a browser. The AI features were added as a default feature, opt-outs were only added later, and the users are not asked for permission before the download of the 4gb file to support the AI service. This doesn’t benefit users; it benefits Google in it’s quest to try to dominate the AI space by pushing it’s own AI features and integrations.

Factually completely wrong headline. No British research involved; it’s an EU parliament briefing paper that cites a South African news article / opinion piece as “Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well”. The news article is a snarky written piece about how VPNs are being used to bypass the Online Safety Act. No research, no one apart from the journalist using the word “loophole” and no research saying this needs to be closed.

Which “British research firm” labels them a loophole?

The paper is from the European Parliament Research Service, which is an in-house EU Parliament service. And the “briefing” they published has a section titled “A loop hole that needs closing” that starts “Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well”. The words “Some argue” are a hyperlink to a South African news article / opinion piece by some random journalist who writes in a slightly snarky way about VPNs allowing people to bypass the Online Safety Act.

So the TomsHardware article is nonsense - it’s an EU briefing paper which seems to think a random south african opinion piece counts as “research”. No British research firm, and in fact no real research at all - just crap layerd on crap and making it’s way into a crap briefing paper. If this is the quality of the information been given to MEPs, EU citizens should be worried.

Links:

• The briefing paper: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/782618/EPRS_ATA(2026)782618_EN.pdf
• The linked article that is being called “research”: https://htxt.co.za/2025/08/the-uk-seems-to-have-just-realised-that-vpns-are-a-loophole-in-age-verification-measures/