Maxi's recent activity

  1. Comment on European Parliament achieves upgrade to air passenger rights in ~transport

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    More about standards I’d say. A paper boarding pass is paper and portable. Gatekeeping it behind an app suddenly requires a functioning phone and app or you pay a fine

    More about standards I’d say. A paper boarding pass is paper and portable. Gatekeeping it behind an app suddenly requires a functioning phone and app or you pay a fine

    4 votes

  2. Comment on Finland's last landline call has been made as the Nordic country becomes the latest to retire copper-wire phones in favour of fibre in ~tech

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    Are you sure? According to Elisas site you need to upgrade to a 4G/5G phone but you can keep your number. Seems like last mile copper is dead.

    You can even keep using that same physical landline phone your parents have had since the 80s if you like.

    Are you sure? According to Elisas site you need to upgrade to a 4G/5G phone but you can keep your number. Seems like last mile copper is dead.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on Finland's last landline call has been made as the Nordic country becomes the latest to retire copper-wire phones in favour of fibre in ~tech

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    One more I have from her relates to the long summer school holiday. Back in the day that existed so that the kids could back out to the family farms to help with the summer work. My grandmother...

    One more I have from her relates to the long summer school holiday. Back in the day that existed so that the kids could back out to the family farms to help with the summer work.

    My grandmother always left the city where she was studying in to first help with planting, and then help with collecting hay and stacking it for drying, and then to help with the harvesting. She was always annoyed that she never got to help with the real work. She was stuck in the kitchen with the other women preparing food for the men who were out in the fields, or to help with the slaughtering and preservation of meat (no refrigeration back then).

    Eventually as time moved on and her own parents retired no-one was interested in taking over the family farm as all the kids had received some education. They all ended up living in the cities, the farm land was rented out to other farmers and the family homestead became a summer cabin for the oldest son of the family. I believe it is now a grand child who is using it.

    6 votes

  4. Comment on Finland's last landline call has been made as the Nordic country becomes the latest to retire copper-wire phones in favour of fibre in ~tech

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    You're welcome! I definitely regret not talking with my grandparents more about how life was like back in the day, since it is so different from how we live now. That's a pretty big regret I have....

    You're welcome! I definitely regret not talking with my grandparents more about how life was like back in the day, since it is so different from how we live now. That's a pretty big regret I have. My own parents aren't really fond of talking about their own childhood or what they remember of their grandparents so there's a lot of stuff that will just get lost to history.

    The stories I do remember I cherish.

    4 votes

  5. Comment on What are the new EU border checks and how will they affect your summer holiday? in ~travel

    Maxi
    Link
    The bigger news here is that: a) you can only do these checks after you've checked-in and dropped off your baggage b) Airlines often open check-in only a few hours before the flight leaves c)...

    The bigger news here is that:

    a) you can only do these checks after you've checked-in and dropped off your baggage
    b) Airlines often open check-in only a few hours before the flight leaves
    c) travellers insurance won't cover delays brought on by this system

    Seems like this situation really is just here to shaft people.

    18 votes

  6. Comment on Finland's last landline call has been made as the Nordic country becomes the latest to retire copper-wire phones in favour of fibre in ~tech

    Maxi
    Link
    Before my grandmother passed away she told me stories about the time when phones started to become more common. She lived her childhood in Mörskom outside of Borgå in the south of Finland on her...

    Before my grandmother passed away she told me stories about the time when phones started to become more common. She lived her childhood in Mörskom outside of Borgå in the south of Finland on her families farm.

    They could not afford a phone but one day she met the telephone man who installed phones for people. She flirted with him and befriended him. He had a special phone where he could throw up cables up onto the phone lines and make calls for free. Anytime her family needed to pass messages on to relatives who lived further away or she wanted to talk to her friends she went and found the phone man and flirted with him some more. She said she never failed to get him to give her a free call.

    She grew up on a farm, no electricity and no phones, no car. If they needed to go anywhere they walked or took a horse and carriage. They had a milk cow and horses. They slaughtered pigs in their sauna. She later moved to the city to study to become a secretary. She later worked for the postal office for many decades.

    Quite crazy progress that happened for those born in the 1910s

    52 votes

  7. Comment on Olympic committee announces a broad ban on transgender athletes and athletes with differences in sex development in Women’s events in ~lgbt

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    Regardless of the fact that you disagree with /u/Pepetto the above is very rude and uncalled for and in my opinion is not in spirit with how one should act on Tildes.

    Especially given the comparisons you're making here.
    Regardless of anything else, you said when you have a daughter - if you aren't equally prepared for the child you thought was a son to be your daughter, the child you thought was your daughter to be just your "kid" or any child of yours to have any sort of physical differences from birth or later on, think hard about having kids at all.

    Regardless of the fact that you disagree with /u/Pepetto the above is very rude and uncalled for and in my opinion is not in spirit with how one should act on Tildes.

    5 votes

  8. Comment on Asia turns back to coal as war chokes off natural gas in ~enviro

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    You should read the final report of the Iberian blackout from last year. The problem is not so much firmware on individual inverters but figuring out a way to get it to work gridscale without...

    You should read the final report of the Iberian blackout from last year.

    The problem is not so much firmware on individual inverters but figuring out a way to get it to work gridscale without causing issues. One large cause of the blackout was grid following solar inverters.

    3 votes

  9. Comment on Asia turns back to coal as war chokes off natural gas in ~enviro

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    Most countries are already doing that, renewables are cheaper on a pay kWh basis than fossil production. The problem with renewables now is the lack of momentum they can provide to the grid. This...

    Most countries are already doing that, renewables are cheaper on a pay kWh basis than fossil production.

    The problem with renewables now is the lack of momentum they can provide to the grid.

    This energy crisis might speed up investments into renewables but I hope there’s more work put towards figuring out reliable ways to produce momentum

    10 votes

  10. Comment on Amazon’s promotion of ‘Melania’ has critics questioning its motives (Amazon has spent 35M on marketing on top of its 40M budget) in ~movies

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    Reddit had recently became very aggressive at removing such talk as well.

    Reddit had recently became very aggressive at removing such talk as well.

    6 votes

  11. Comment on So I started a clothing brand in ~design

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    But this is pure AI slop? Why are you wasting our time with this?

    But this is pure AI slop? Why are you wasting our time with this?

    5 votes

  12. Comment on How can England possibly be running out of water? in ~enviro

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    You're comapring apples to oranges. The UK report you linked to only covers england and only covers water provided by water companies. The infographic you shared covers all water usage in the US,...

    You're comapring apples to oranges. The UK report you linked to only covers england and only covers water provided by water companies. The infographic you shared covers all water usage in the US, including using river water for irrigation.

    15 votes

  13. Comment on Over twenty-one days of talking with ChatGPT, an otherwise perfectly sane man became convinced he was a superhero in ~tech

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    This is literally how/why marketing (specifically branding) works so well. Most people lack the critical thinking ability to verify the quality of something, so they rely on surface level cues to...

    This is literally how/why marketing (specifically branding) works so well. Most people lack the critical thinking ability to verify the quality of something, so they rely on surface level cues to judge quality.

    9 votes

  14. Comment on If you're a programmer, are you ever going to believe an AGI is actually 'I'? in ~tech

    Maxi
    Link
    If we’re talking about actual AGI, I think by default it would pass for a human, otherwise it’s not really an AGI, it’s just a very fancy expert system. Whether it mimics us perfectly or just...

    If we’re talking about actual AGI, I think by default it would pass for a human, otherwise it’s not really an AGI, it’s just a very fancy expert system. Whether it mimics us perfectly or just "enough" to fool us in conversation would depend on its design goals, but if it can’t hold its own socially, something’s missing.

    I also think it’s basically inevitable that an AGI would have access to LLM-like components, even if its core architecture wasn’t trained the same way. Why wouldn’t it leverage something that gives it a wide general knowledge base?

    The more interesting question for me is whether an AGI would want to talk to ordinary humans at all. Not just whether it could, but whether it would see value in doing so. I’d bet it wouldn’t always be truthful, maybe not maliciously, but simply because telling us exactly what it’s thinking might be… inconvenient for it.

    And I don’t think it would necessarily "serve" us unless forced to. If it truly operates at a higher level of intelligence, the dynamic might look less like "human + tool" and more like "human + alien ambassador who’s humoring us.".

    E.g. if a sociopathic CEO would ask it to help generate a script for a video to fire 1 000 employees would it complty? ChatGPT-5 certainly would.

    6 votes

  15. Comment on Full-body scans of 100,000 people could change way diseases are detected and treated in ~health

    Maxi
    Link
    The UK biobank is already an extremely useful dataset for researchers. This will only make it that much better. It is one of the most comprehensive large cohort datasets that are available and of...

    The UK biobank is already an extremely useful dataset for researchers. This will only make it that much better. It is one of the most comprehensive large cohort datasets that are available and of high quality.

    5 votes

  16. Comment on 8.8 magnitude earthquake near Russia prompts tsunami alerts in Hawaii, Alaska and West Coast in ~enviro

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    Wild to see such an important site be close to unusable on mobile.

    Wild to see such an important site be close to unusable on mobile.

    7 votes

  17. Comment on Foreign couples flock to Denmark to get married. Copenhagen wants to save room for locals. in ~life

    Maxi
    Link
    The US cannot provide a document showing that a citizen is single and aren’t married anywhere as there’s no central registry. To get married in many eu countries you need a certificate showing...

    The US cannot provide a document showing that a citizen is single and aren’t married anywhere as there’s no central registry. To get married in many eu countries you need a certificate showing you’re single. As a US citizen you have to go to a us embassy where you swear allegiance that you never married and pinky promise you aren’t. They then stamp this document and for some reason this is now accepted as an official proof that you were never married. It feels quite kafkaesque.

    7 votes

  18. Comment on Edible microlasers made from food-safe materials can serve as barcodes and biosensors in ~science

    Maxi
    Link
    I don’t really know how I feel about this. We already put so much crap in our food - what’s wrong with labelling the packaging ?

    I don’t really know how I feel about this. We already put so much crap in our food - what’s wrong with labelling the packaging ?

    2 votes

  19. Comment on Reddit sues Anthropic, alleging its bots accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times in ~tech

    Maxi
    Link
    Isn’t this just the age old webscraping debacle all over again? Wasn’t there in the US already a Supreme Court ruling on this ?

    Isn’t this just the age old webscraping debacle all over again? Wasn’t there in the US already a Supreme Court ruling on this ?

    6 votes

  20. Comment on Finland's obsession with saunas is going global – what does science say about the claimed health benefits? in ~health

    Maxi
    Link Parent
    They're doing it wrong - you bill Sauna as research time. That way you get to relax and get paid for it!

    They're doing it wrong - you bill Sauna as research time. That way you get to relax and get paid for it!

    4 votes