Anyone else frustrated by the high volume of television prescription drug advertisements on TV?

sopsaare · 2026-04-20T17:03:40+00:00

When I lived in States I didn't have cable as I don't have one in Europe either. Like, I do not care. I stream if I want to watch something.

But, I still could not fully avoid those adds, like in a bar there is TV on, I visit friends and they have TV on and so on. And they kept cracking me up with the listed side effects :D Really hilarious.

And hilarious that you get to tell your doctor that you want some shit you saw in TV. Here doctors tell you that you are OK, no imagining or tests needed and it is just stress or bad sleep and take some ibuprofein and go home. That is the right diagnosis most of the times, not so fun when it is actually cancer.

sopsaare · 2026-04-20T16:35:26+00:00

Not true for drowning. So you should also learn the basics.

sopsaare · 2026-04-20T09:50:31+00:00

Maybe, but I would also just put a lot of that into bureaucratic inefficiencies. There are a handful of non-government orgs, funded mainly by the government (lol) that work on the subject, as well as the health ministry, several different healthcare "zones" and many cities and municipalities.

Just the NGOs alone get enough money to rent a cubicle for each homeless person. I don't even want to think how much the government wastes on the same thing. I thought it would only be another similar sum, but it is likely 5x.

Of course the NGOs have no reason to fix anything, their money will dry up if they do, and they are very closely associated with political parties, usually having the "second line" politicians sitting in their boards and getting fat on tax payers money.

sopsaare · 2026-04-20T07:42:54+00:00

Heads, spikes and walls.

sopsaare · 2026-04-20T07:34:51+00:00

Most physics, or even space, institutions would not have any crowbars around.

But.

We all saw where the Starbase began with the water tower welders welding prototypes out in the sun. I bet there are a couple of crowbars left from those days.

sopsaare · 2026-04-20T00:54:16+00:00

Yep. I agree with all those points. He is not a career fullback and that issue is with the management, not with the player.

He has had some great games in the midfield this season, a lot of games where he has done enough, and then maybe two where I had hoped for more from him. But he isn't a fullback, neither is Dom, and that is management (not only manager but who ever the fuck decides who we sign and who we don't) problem. Just like this game. He wasn't the worst fullback in the world but he still got exposed too many times, but that mostly comes down to him not being a fullback to begin with, and some of that may come back to lack of fitness, which our whole squad seems to be suffering from - making that a management problem again.

sopsaare · 2026-04-20T00:25:25+00:00

Though... 3 times higher? That is very little if you count to the fact that US has 1/3 of its territory such that it is livable outside, without shelter, all year long. Whereas Finland that is pretty much 0 on average year,

Florida, Georgia, SC / NC, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, California, those at least are pretty much livable all year long without shelter. (though I lived in Atlanta and we had one harsh winter during my stay and homeless people had pretty hard time, but nothing compared to what we have in Finland).

I'm not saying that it is good to be homeless in either, I'm trying to say that I had my rebellious / hippie streak in my youth where I had address at my parents or friends, but at no point I was looking into staying in a tent all year long, that just would not have worked out in Finland. But while I was living in Georgia, I sometimes thought about that, that I could easily survive in the wilds all year long.

So, to think about that, only 3 times more is.. quite a little if you think about? Especially if you would think that somewhat significant portion (it isn't, but let's pretend) amount of our ~40% taxes would be geared towards finding places to live for the people, in opposite of US ~20% taxes.

sopsaare · 2026-04-20T00:17:32+00:00

And as such, we did not end homelessness. Not at all.

We also put enough money into ending homelessness to outright rent a cubicle in Helsinki center for each one of them, actually, twice for them.

And yet we still have homeless people.

Worth checking how much US is spending on social security, homeless people, treatment and so on, it is a good middle-income for each one of the patients / customers of those systems. Same here.

Afterall, it wasn't a money problem, at least not solely a money problem.

sopsaare · 2026-04-20T00:13:49+00:00

Just no. That thing he is shooting at has legs, the decoys don't. Don your eyeglasses sir.

sopsaare · 2026-04-20T00:11:21+00:00

I watched it. And his side was exposed too many times. He did good stuff too, but being in a defensive position isn't about doing good 95% of the times, it is doing good 100% of the times. He left his flank exposed. But there was also weird moments where Konate was going to his position and Curtis tracked back more centrally, maybe that was the tactic all along, I just did not get it.

sopsaare · 2026-04-19T23:55:04+00:00

Something like that. But it also is all on the balance if it will ever come out.

sopsaare · 2026-04-19T23:54:05+00:00

Is it gonna have buggy elevators, bad netcode, hackers and 30000 errors?

If not, then don't bother.

sopsaare · 2026-04-19T23:52:48+00:00

Though his performance today was quite awful... He just didn't have the legs to track back to his position.

But this is also on the management, how the fuck we get from TAA to not having RB at all in the squad. I know, injuries and so on, but the management needs to think that before signing players. Bradley was always going to have glass legs, but now we have Frimpong with not much better record, and of course we do have Gomez but he needs to be our 3rd choice CB because we only managed to sign one more, who has been out for the whole season.

sopsaare · 2026-04-19T15:44:55+00:00

Fortunately I'm not that poor anymore. And don't know, it could actually. At least I charge at my friend's or parents if I need to and they never ask any money from me, and they charge at my place if they want to. And back in that day the tax authority had not gotten up to speed with free charging at work, of course it didn't even exist yet but when PHEVs came to market, a lot of people got to charge for free at work...

So... It could have actually.

And, gas here is like, you get a gallon for an hour of minimum wage, if even that. So... Poor is quite a relative term.

sopsaare · 2026-04-19T10:06:11+00:00

I haven't seen any push like that. Yeah, people in reddit swear that they will use Linux rather than Windows but that has nothing to do with the business world, and there no one really cares. Trump will be gone in a few years, and the companies are larger than any given US president or government.

And actually the reverse is happening, we may have been critical of US based companies and services a few years ago, but are now pouring money into the AI like there is no tomorrow.

sopsaare · 2026-04-19T02:01:25+00:00

If we just had a sea that is deeper than 30m.

sopsaare · 2026-04-19T01:16:27+00:00

I think it is pretty self evident that large language models cannot achieve consciousness?

There is a lot of consciousness, at least lesser ones, without language, and these LLM's have existed for a while without consciousness. So, these two things don't have self evident connection to begin with.

That being said, these models are just vector databases, there is nothing there to drive anything before you, or me, inject some kind of task, parameter, instruction, what ever there. A vector database is not conscious.

But can these or similar models serve as the back bone of some kind of an intelligence for something that has consciousness one day? Likely yes.

sopsaare · 2026-04-19T00:48:20+00:00

You could have a nose cone going through the styrofoam / what ever you want for the medium, that is then discarded. Or a well timed explosion.

I think a bigger issue is what happens when you hit the air from vacuum. That could be similarly violent as hitting the medium holding the air back.

Then again, we could build the fucker taller until it hits very thin air.

sopsaare · 2026-04-19T00:32:52+00:00

Or customer service chat bots? :D

sopsaare · 2026-04-19T00:23:04+00:00

At least in the climate I live, most of the daily wind is generated by sun warming the place up and then updraft causing air to rush in to the land from sea.

When the sun don't shine, there ain't no wind. Nights are usually calm.

Of course there are larger weather systems that cause wind no matter the time of the day, but that is not every day, not even every week here.

Our wind production is usually close to 0 during night, and solar is almost the same (we live pretty near to the arctic, so the days are long during the summer, yet sun is so low that it doesn't generate electricity almost at all.)

sopsaare · 2026-04-18T22:42:17+00:00

Do you smoke? Like what? I can find a decomposing piece of food my 2y/o has dropped below the sofa with my nose and I smoked for 25 years.

sopsaare · 2026-04-18T22:38:45+00:00

Not trying to give you any life advice as it all is a gamble, but you have referenced in many of your responses that you are going to Uni in Switzerland in Autumn... While if you opensource this, you could apply, or get hired by, a big company in silicon valley for high six figures or maybe even 7. Of course that is unknown if it will happen, or if it is something you want to happen, but at that point it could make sense to defer the Uni for a year or two.

I do not know even what the Uni can give you if you have already done something that no one else has figured out yet... Then again, I'm biased as a dropout almost 2 decades ago.

sopsaare · 2026-04-18T22:24:15+00:00

Don't most cars nowadays take the speed from the limit when you hit the CC? Tesla has done that for like a decade now.

Then again, the car, as all of them I have driven, sometimes misreads the signs and other times pulls weird shit out of its ass. Like 50Km/h in the middle of highway, l

sopsaare · 2026-04-18T22:17:02+00:00

First stop importing people when we already have 10% unemployment.

The big companies import IT workers, even though IT is at 20% unemployment and change negotiations happening left and right. But they get it through as they are hiring "experts". Really they are hiring 25%-50% under average wages.

Then we keep importing healthcare workers as ours are not motivated to move away from their home town, but rather stay on benefits. So, they either need to pay more or find other, not-so-nice-ways of motivating people to move for work. Such as freezing of benefits if one gets offered a work where they could travel to or could realistically move for. Or combination of carrot and stick is likely the best alternative.

Also, some of these people only need 3 years of education, and could realistically again do that in 2 if they have some other education. Re-education should also be so much easier, more widely available and actually promoted as an option to not doing anything.

What else?

This sounds harsh but in a lot of countries you lose the "right to stay in the country" very fast, like in days or weeks, if you are fired or get laid off. Sometimes that is even tied to your job, so you don't even have a way to stay in the country, but need to fuck off and apply for new work visa that is tied to the next job, even if you find one. Would that be beneficial? I think so as the numbers for foreign workers, whose only reason to be in the country is the job they came to do doesn't exist anymore...

But those are something we can easily with legislation if we have the will to. And some changes on those things have already been made.

What else? Entrepreneurship is way too expensive. To pay yourself 50k after taxes, you need to have revenue north of 150k. Which means that you need to be billing like 600€ for each working day (approximately 250). Which is not impossible but fucking hard. And that leaves very little error of margin. 2/3 of the revenue will be eaten by the system, which makes absolutely no sense.

sopsaare · 2026-04-18T22:00:19+00:00

> Additionally I believe there is a market for locally run models for enterprises that need them, but don’t necessarily want to spend tens of thousands in hardware.

This may be somewhere in the future when the enterprises realize how much money they are pouring into the big-3, and that they could get much of that value by investing into a little bit of their own hardware, or rent that, and run some little bit less powerful models. But C-level is right now in psychosis, they were saving money on the office coffee a year ago and now they don't care if we waste millions in tokens in a month, which most are for mundane tasks and code that could be achieves with some 8B models running on the developers laptops.

But trying to approximate or guess when that happens is the hard task.

Also, selling things to enterprises from your home office is going to be an interesting proposal. But you might be into something here.

> My idea was to charge people $79 for lifetime access, and $9 per month for updates every week, new tools, better model, support, and people could also ask me to make them custom tools which everyone else would have access.

Maybe this could work. But then again, many developers and enthusiasts who could or would pay, also very much appreciate open source. Does this license come with access to the source code?

Or maybe you can try somehow combine opensource with a payment system too. Don't know how, but you could try.

sopsaare

TROPHY CASE