House parties and board game nights, basically. Supermarket prices, and guaranteed to be around people I enjoy the company of. There’s also normally events going on every week, so there’s normally some kind of food fest/pedestrianized road with buskers/something going on that’s either cheap or free.

The ending is a real cop-out though

Wouldn’t be the first time a government banned a number

Like sysiphus, we must continue pushing up the hill, forever. There is no final victory. If you’re tired, trust in others to continue pushing, very understandable. Just don’t piss on the people continuing where you left off.

That was for tabling the vote, actual vote is happening on the 14th of October

steaming services

One steamed ham, please.

You can’t run an LLM on a crappy PC, that’s true. You need at least a decent CPU. If you’re running an LLM locally, there’s no calls to the outside world. I have a very mid computer, it isn’t great, and unfortunately I need to work with LLMs due to my job. A call to my local LLM might take ~2 minutes where using an online platform it might take ~30 seconds, but I think that’s a reasonable trade.

If you have a gaming PC, you have a platform that can run a local LLM.

If you really really want/need an LLM for some reason, install ollama. It’s the only safe and easy way to do it.

those peoples no longer under Soviet/Russian control appear to taking major steps as sovereign entities to resist Russian reestablishment of its former sphere

I hate this spheres of interest argument for exactly this reason: it logically follows that Eastern European, central Asian and Caucasian countries neither have nor deserve any sort of say in their future. If you’re not a world power, you’re not allowed to resist imperial expansion (yes, that’s what they’re doing). As an Eastern European, I refuse that denial of our autonomy out of hand.

You got me interested, so I searched around and found this:

So, if I understand this correctly, the only fundamental difference between level 4 and 5 is that 4 works on specific known road types with reliable quality (highways, city roads), while level 5 works literally everywhere, including rural dirt paths?

I’m trying to imagine what other type of geographic difference there might be between 4 and 5 and I’m drawing a blank.

Could not agree more. I’m a democratic socialist. I firmly believe that the ideas of that ideology, properly implemented, can drastically improve the standard of living for a huge percentage of the population.

I live in a country where our democratic socialist party is fantastically corrupt, lazy and completely bereft of any motivation to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit themselves. Consequently, I don’t support them. Results over ideology is an important mantra no matter what you believe.

Europe is primarily white people

Hah, that’s telling. Just FYI, there’s been generations upon generations of racism and ethnic hatred here in Eastern Europe. I guess we have the advanced racists: the ones who don’t hate you for your skin colour, but who your parents were, religion and primary language.

I’ll bet that if your dad grew up here in Romania, he’d be complaining about those sneaky Szeklers trying to steal Transylvania and Roma people being subhuman.

Also, he seems the type to pine for Europe because “We’re all Christian!”. Trust me, you haven’t seen “Christian love” like state religions persecuting people of the wrong sect. Orthodox Christianity is the state religion here, and Protestants of all stripes get treated like heathens.

Hi, Eastern European here. We begged to join NATO. We kicked and screamed, wheeled and dealed, anything we could to get that coveted NATO membership.

You know why? Because we’ve been dealing with expansionist Russian imperialism for our entire histories. Different coats of paint in different time periods, but it’s all the same shit. The US is an empire, but at least here it’s preferable to Russia’s imperial ambitions.

In Romania, CFR makes DB look like the most competent shining lights of progress by comparison.

Track that hasn’t been properly maintained since the fall of communism (and we keep lowering max speeds because of it). Rolling stock consisting of hand-me-downs. Constant engine breakdowns.

And the worst part? Due to political shenanigans finding inventive new ways to siphon money out of the company, it’s still managed to find a way to go bankrupt again, meaning another government bailout.

Yup. Did specifically say that I was missing tons of stuff in that super short summary of the formation of Israel. Also left out the Balfour declaration, the White Paper of 1939, the Buraq uprising, the Black Hand, Lehi and their attempted alliance with Nazi Germany, and much much more.

Here’s the long version.

Short version is that in WW1, the UK conquered Palestine from the Ottoman empire. 1922-1948, the British ran the territory, getting shot at regularly by both native Arabs, the tiny number of native Jews, and the comparatively much larger group of immigrant Jews. In the 1940s, the UK asked for and got US help with counterterrorist operations, especially against Jewish ones. Arabs and Jews pinky promised to play nice with each other if the UK left, so rather than continue getting shot by everyone in the region, they left. Arabs and Jews immediately started a war as soon as the UK army left. Then, every single neighbouring country attacked the newly formed Israel, which they somehow survived.

(Missing HUGE amounts of context and nuance here, obviously)

If you’re interested, the short version is that instances (A.K.A servers) are run by different people in different places. A reason to move instances might be:

1. My admin, the owner of the instance, has been doing things I heavily disagree with (bans, blocks, etc)

2. I don’t agree with the rules on my instance.

3. The instance is run in a country which criminalizes something that I care about, and so has to ban discussion of that thing (piracy, porn, etc).

4. I want to run a community on a specific instance for whatever reason, and so need an account there

You know you’re old when the gf/wife wants to accompany DnD with a cheese board and a bottle of wine for the guests :))

The key is sharing a hobby. For me, it’s board games and TTRPGs. Much easier to hang if there’s an activity.

I missed the mention of Verizon. Good catch!