Hard disagree here.

“Forcing simple healthy choices” completely disregards the many and varied causes of obesity.

This type of thinking reminds me of the war on drugs approach to drug abuse.

Quite obviously, the underlying causes of obesity are many and varied. The only way to resolve an “obesity pandemic” is to have more services directed at understanding an individual’s unique circumstances and helping them develop strategies to improve their health.

This sounds expensive, and doesn’t sound like an election-winning policy in 2025, but that’s where we are at.

There’s a lot of cringey responses in this thread. Just be a nice person and talk to your family and friends in an open and honest way.

Firstly, this happens in any profession. I’m a tax consultant. People always want to talk to me about tax.

Thing is, 100% of the time people will understand if you say “I don’t really know very much about that particular thing I’m sorry.”

When someone says “my wifi isn’t working” they’re not necessarily saying “please will you come over and fix my wifi”, often they’re really saying “what should I do to solve this problem” and the answer is usually “turn it off and on again, update adobe reader, if it’s still not working take it to whatever shop.”

If someone directly asks you “please will you stop what you’re doing and come fix my x”, which never actually happens, then you just deal with it as appropriate. “Sorry nan I have a lot going on right now, you’ll have to take it to the shop”.

Yeah, the medical industry in Australia is probably similar, sliding away from universal health care.

I mean it’s nothing like the US but I do feel that we’re headed in the wrong direction.

10 years ago it wasn’t hard to find a GP that wouldn’t charge you anything on top of the government rebate. Now the rebate is usually about half what the GP is charging.

That said, myself and those in my care have spent a lot of time in hospital over the last few years and we haven’t paid a cent for any of that. My partner gave birth to Twins, it was a “complex pregnancy”, all fit and well in the end but we spent 3 months in another city to be near a specialist hospital. Govt paid for a nice apartment for us for the whole time, absolutely gold standard care from the miracle workers at that hospital, just amazing honestly.

We have the same inflation / gouging problem in Australia.

We had a supermarkets inquiry to investigate practices of price gouging. I don’t think anyone has any faith that it’s going to improve anything.

This doesn’t sound terrible?

In Australia, it feels like the inverse. We generally have conservative governments until they do something particularly abhorrent and lose government for a term.

We’re presently enjoying our once-in-a-decade progressive government term and sadly I feel they have squandered their term. They seem determined to ignore the core responsibility of making life better for everyone and instead waste political capital on fanciful notions like banning sheep exports and frivolous changes to the constitution.

Maybe the dog was about to attack a small child.

I’ve seen someone poke a dog in the ass with a stick. They were a hero. Dog was latched on to someone’s leg.

“Anything longer than a sentence deserves a phone call”

I disagree.

Lemmy is also a link aggregator which works in a similar way to reddit, but it has it’s own history, culture, and quirks.

Sure, things will happen on Lemmy which are reminiscent of reddit because they’re both link aggregators, but to say lemmy “is” reddit is very reductive.

I’ve found it to be unnecessarily complex, confusing, and tightly coupled with other microsoft products.

I’m a consultant with several assistants. I really just want to sync a ~20gb folder with those assistants. This is easily achievable with dropbox or nextcloud for example, it works exactly as you’d expect.

In onedrive it was always just a muck around. What is sharepoint and how is it related to onedrive? Why do different staff have access to different features in some folders but not others? How can staff create upload requests for clients? How do I avoid being notified about every change a staff member makes?

I always felt as though I needed to have some kind of microsoft certification in order to address this very simple use case.

I’m sure someone will be along in a moment to tell me how easy all of this is and how silly I am for not being able to address it. I don’t care. I also think it’s fair to point out that this microsoft ecosystem is incredibly powerful and the configuration issues I find frustrating are required for larger more complex organisations.

You’d just burn yourself doing that though.

So long as you still have the data there’s a very strong probability the subscriber is going to renew in order to access their data.

Once you delete the data the subscriber is probably going to change to another provider that doesn’t delete things.

“I think you’re a bot” is just a cheap insult.

Addressing the threat of climate change is not going well. Talking about it frankly may be “doomerist” but that does not make it untrue.

We’re producing more CO2 than we ever have. The detrimental effects of CO2 are emerging more quickly than we had thought. All over the world we’re electing governments disinclined to take any action.

To look at this situation and conclude that rolling out solar production is a positive thing is naive.

“This whole climate change thing could be a bit worse, so that’s positive… right?”

I’m simply rebutting your assertion that faster than expected solar adoption is a good thing, because that statement can’t be isolated from faster than expected deterioration in climate.

If climate change wasn’t a thing solar would only be useful for applications where connection to the grid is impractical.

Solar adoption isn’t a positive thing, it’s merely somewhat mitigating a pretty terrible thing.

That doesn’t address my point though.

Solar is only good because climate change is bad.

You can’t say “solar adoption is good” and ignore the climate deteriorating faster than expected.

Obviously, that depends how you’re counting.

In the year 2,000, if you projected solar adoption, you might now be pleasantly surprised.

However in the year 2,000 if you projected progress on climate change, you’d probably now be horrified.

Solar adoption wouldn’t be a positive if not for climate change.

Of course there can be an 0th year.

Kids don’t start at 1 because they can’t be 0, you start counting by days weeks and months and then years. This wasn’t even a problem though, because in the 0th year people weren’t walking around referencing dates according to whatever calendar we use.

If no years have elapsed then it’s the 0th year.

It sounds to me as though some idiot named the 0th year “1”, which just happens to be a numeral.

I suspect the claim that AI has consumed all gains is hyperbole, given that it used to be applied to crypto.

Regardless, those assholes are still using too much power, privatising the benefits, and socialising the fall out.

Given the era a pump seems more plausible than a generator.

Lanterns would be so reliable and manageable, while electric lights so unreliable and poorly understood.

Yeah this is me.

I was reading these comments feeling as though I must be very odd until I got to yours.

Debian comes with firefox ESR which I think is a good choice because it “just works”, but it’s also no one’s “preferred” browser. I tend to use both LibreWolf and ungoogled-chromium all day every day.

I do use the terminal every day. Years ago I used oh-my-zsh for a while but I think eventually I just kind of didn’t bother to install it.

For file manager and video player et cetera, I’ve always found the defaults to be good choices.

Yeah, still not convinced.

I work in a field which is not dissimilar. Teaching customers to email you their requirements so your LLM can have a go at filling out the form just seems ludicrous to me.

Additionally, the models you’re using require stupid amounts of power to produce so that you can run them on low power machines.

Anyhow, neither of us is going to change our minds without actual data which neither of us have. Who knows, a decade from now I might be forwarding client emails to an LLM so it can fill out a form for me, at which time I’ll know I was wrong.

If I’m brutally honest, I don’t find these use cases very compelling.

Separate fields for addresses could be easily solved without an LLM. The only reason there isn’t already a common solution is that it just isn’t that much of a problem.

Data ingestion from email will never be as efficient and accurate as simply having a customer fill out a form directly.

These things might make someone mildly more efficient at their job, but given the resources required for LLMs is it really worth it?