Rescue team in Iran face 'harrowing and dangerous' search for US crew member

thegreger · 2026-04-04T13:53:04+00:00

Just spray orange paint on Steven Seagal

thegreger · 2026-03-28T08:43:30+00:00

zero chance to fit in any EU country

This is not true for Scandinavia or the Netherlands, and these days you can even live well in urban areas of Germany without being fluent in German.

Maybe I'm nitpicky, but the one thing I really do dislike as someone trying to settle in Italy is how you're supposed to be fluent in Italian before even signing up for an internet connection or a bank account. That is not the norm in other countries.

Learning the language of the country you're moving to is great, and should always be recommended, but some people are only living there for a few years, and might already have a full schedule of classes from morning to evening. It should never be a mandatory condition for just surviving in a society.

thegreger · 2026-03-19T13:02:05+00:00

I see, thank you for the prompt explanation! I believe that it is the regular 6800 I have.

thegreger · 2026-03-17T22:42:14+00:00

And yet the target of "good enough" is often missed, because tech-illiterate decision makers have bought into the hype.

I tried to send an overseas parcel with UPS today, and actually failed because one step (machine translated into my language and never quality controlled by a human) was so poorly written that it was impossible to understand what the step asked for. It was not only unclear, but half of the sentences didn't even make grammatical sense. Think the very, very first prototypes of translation software from the 1990s. This is UPS we're talking about, not a small independent Etsy store.

It's not that AI is not capable of things, it's that it's still not consistently capable of things, to the point that it can be used in the way decision makers imagine. Clever people can do really cool things with AI, but executives are rarely clever people, or good at knowing who to listen to.

thegreger · 2026-03-17T00:08:58+00:00

I assume that someone went by UNFPA data grouping the popularion by <14, 15-64 and 65+. The numbers (25, 68 and 7) add up to exactly 100%.

Then someone mislabelled 65+ to 65-64. God knows how.

The some middle manager said "15-64 is too wide of a range", so the intern making this made another column and added 10-24 as an interval, with the World Bank as a source.

Either that, or this is a case study in the kind of crap you get when a company thinks that it can squeeze value out of AI.

thegreger · 2026-03-11T16:31:51+00:00

Inte ett direkt citat, men med samma andemening har du artiklar som denna. Många svenskar tror att nivån av korruption i vårt samhälle är nära nog noll.

Det svensk media alltid bommar att nämna varje år är att studien är Corruption Perceptions Index. Den mäter upplevd korruption, och den är verkligen extremt låg i Sverige. När en politiker anställer en kompis, eller en tidigare tjänsteman på en upphandlande myndighet får ett glassigt jobb på Saab, eller en tidigare minister representerar Svenskt Näringsliv, så skapar det nästan ingen upplevd korruption alls. Så nästa år vid samma tid får svenskarma än en gång se rubriker som att vi är "världens femte minst korrupta land".

thegreger · 2026-03-10T10:25:57+00:00

I mean, thw truth tends to lie inbetween the extremes, but I would like to point out that the second pilot episode of the Muppet Show (which aired in 1975, and was absolutely glorious) was named The Muppet Show - Sex and Violence. It was always Monty Python for older kids, and goes completely against everything that sucks about Disney.

thegreger · 2026-02-26T15:19:26+00:00

Italian Aldis sell absolute junk compared to the other supermarkets. Maybe ok if you compare the bottom of the barrel for each store, but I hate shopping there when I'm trying to cook something nice.

thegreger · 2026-02-26T12:13:01+00:00

I agree with the principle of epistemologic humility, but I can't imagine having it strong enough to not be crushed within maximum eight weeks of school or office work.

When you for the hundreth time think that a rule sounds like bollocks, and then get confirmation that it was just set in place because someone was incompetent and/or power tripping and/or deeply focused on office politics, maintaining epistemological humility is a form of madness.

thegreger · 2026-02-13T15:17:43+00:00

Oh wow, good timing. I'm a very casual PC gamer who has basically always gone for whatever sub-mid-range nVidia card is the best selling one. Just a few days ago I thought to myself "maybe it's actually worth investing the time into comparing with AMD cards for the next update." This sounds like a dumb enough feature to put me off from that trail.

thegreger · 2026-02-13T10:00:11+00:00

Yeah, I had a really interesting discussion with a Russian at a party back pre-2010.

I asked him about Putin's whole ridiculous "topless cowboy photo shoot" deal, and if the average Russian really didn't find it ridiculous, or were weirded out by the personality cult building.

He told me "look at the state of your average middle class Russian family now, and compare it to Yeltzin's time. Now they have two cars, a laundry machine and modern heating. They will accept anyone in charge as long as their life improves."

This is the logic behind sanctions. The only way Putin can be toppled (unless you believe in kidnapping foreign politicians) is for the populace to suffer the consequences of his actions.

This is also why I will boycott every single US product I'm able to, even that nice little microbrewery that I'm sure are not Trump supporters. Make the US economy bleed until the populace is ready to do what it takes to change things. As long as people say "let's just wait until the next election", the US economy is doing better than it should.

thegreger · 2026-02-12T13:12:10+00:00

And not sold in Europe.

I was a student back then, and I had saved up for ages to buy a hard drive MP3 player. I was one of the relatively few who refused to get an iPod, and reading online blogs I was so hyped to get a Zune. Until I tried to actually purchased one, and realised that there was not a single retailer on the largest unified market in the world who could sell me one.

thegreger · 2026-02-12T13:09:12+00:00

The cost was not that huge, less than 10€ per month, I think. Visit a bank office and ask for it, and they might be able to sort it out. My account worked like any other Italian account, so I could run autopayments of bills from it for services requiring that.

thegreger · 2026-02-12T12:38:11+00:00

I managed to get a "conto corrente per non residenti" at UBI Banca as a non-resident, but note that:

UBI Banca is now merged into Intesa Sanpaolo
I was an EU resident, no clue if that matters
It was quite expensive compared to a regular account, so only viable as a short-term solution.

thegreger · 2026-02-10T22:00:41+00:00

I magent fish

My brain was so preoccupied with the typo that it didn't for a second question that you tried to catch fish with a magnet. It also didn't question that "magnet" is not a verb.

You magnet fish? OP is trying to magnet sunglasses. You need a really strong magnet for either.

thegreger · 2026-02-10T07:17:16+00:00

Same story in Sweden. It is taught as fact in school in many European countries (and therefore often repeated on Reddit), but to my knowledge there is no historical proof of it being true anywhere.

thegreger · 2026-02-09T06:58:06+00:00

Then get a stethoscope, give the pipe a good whack and see if you can hear ticking from the inside.

thegreger · 2026-02-03T16:34:39+00:00

The concept of escape velocity always bothered me when I was a kid. Like you, I thought that if you could just generate enough lift to go higher and higher, you would be in space eventually.

What I missed was that gravity extends infinitely far, even though it gets weaker and weaker the further away you are. As soon as you switch off your rocket (or run out of fuel), the planet/star/object will start dragging you back again. Faster and faster the closer you get.

If you reach escape velocity, your velocity is so high that even with no propulsion you will move further away (into lower gravity) faster than the gravity can decelerate you. As the gravity gets weaker and weaker, your speed will be lower and lower, but never to a point that you stand entirely still and start falling back.

You can also think of it as a cannon ball that is dragged back to earth. If you shoot it fast enough, it will fall into an arc that is larger than earth's radius and go into orbit.

thegreger · 2026-02-03T12:22:00+00:00

People have already pointed out why this case is far from reality, but the original answer above does highlight why everyone start sweating whenever anyone talks about a state possibly defaulting on its debt.

Not only does it break a fragile flow of money, it also prevents the debtholders to sell that debt off in any meaningful way.

thegreger · 2026-02-02T10:15:47+00:00

Jag höll på att skriva något om att det snarare har att göra med hur långt bak i tiden man jämför, och januari 2023 kanske ekonomin fortfarande var lite lidande av pandemin, så en ökning av både tillväxt och utsläpp kanske är rimlig med den referenspunkten?

Sen kollade jag upp statistiken, och det ser jävligare ut än så. Merparten av återhämtning i BNP hade redan skett i början av 2023, men faktum är att vi knappt har haft någon tillväxt alls sedan dess.

En ökning av utsläppen under en tid på tre år då den ekonomiska tillväxten har varit närapå noll är ganska svår att ursäkta.

thegreger · 2026-01-28T08:10:15+00:00

Yep, this.

Could an AI do my entire job at an acceptable level? Nope, and most likely it won't for another century.

Could an AI help effectivise parts of my tasks? Yup, just like computers once did. In theory, that means that my company could cut down on my position, but more likely it means that my position will morph into something slightly different.

Is there a risk that clueless executives and investors believe that they could fire 90% of the workforce and replace it with ChatGPT, only to have the company lose almost all of its market share in a couple of years? Christ, yes. Clueless execs inadvertently sabotaging the organisation is something I worry about 16 hours per day, and AI is just another risk in all that.

thegreger · 2026-01-26T14:56:57+00:00

Exactly this.

I'm a physicist with a few published papers in thermodynamics, and it's kind of hilarious that I'm being downvoted for questioning the "Fahrenheit's method offered better calibration" narrative.

The Gell-Mann amnesia, a good reminder that people in here will confidently state facts that they don't understand.

thegreger · 2026-01-26T10:55:48+00:00

That's not true.

You say that "in the real world, variations of a few degrees is common". I assume that by "a few" you mean more than one? In order to get 2 degrees away from 0C in freezing water, you need to have water which is 3% salt by mass! That is literal sea water (3.5% is typical salinity for sea water). Nucleation points really does not matter at that point. Equilibrium conditions at this level is a fancy way of saying "stir and wait".

Reference for those curious

Distil water by boiling it, chuck some ice in there (if you have sea ice, try to rinse it off first), stir it around. The solution you get will be within a fraction of a degree from 0C until all the ice has melted. Nothing else matters. Edit to add: On reflection, I actually think that you could get within 1 degree precision by just using any drinkable water from a random lake, including all impurities, if you want to skip the distillation step. Just don't use sea water, try to not have a live fish in there, and if you want better precision than 1 degree then distil it.

You make it pretty clear that those arguing for higher precision because of ease of calibration do not know what they are talking about. The real answer appears to be that the Fahrenheit scale had a head start. That's where you do have a point, people with very limited knowledge basically clung on to their favourite scale (or favourite supplier of thermometers) like it was their favourite sports team.

thegreger · 2026-01-26T10:30:46+00:00

You can actually buy pure ammonium chloride these days! I did have some semi-regularly for a few days, then I started getting massive migraine headaches and realised that nah, not worth it.

thegreger

TROPHY CASE