Also, looking around the globe at professional politicians once also lauded for their political talent, like Macron, or Merkel, I’m really not seeing their policies paying off in spades, nor their "political vision" proving particularly beneficial to their citizenry at the moment. In all three cases, it seems, seasoned politicians made capital errors in judgement which are now causing resentment, almost unprecedented political realignments and upheaval across these nations. People are incredibly quick to judge the potential behaviour of a future political formation - yet Western democracies are by and large falling apart, as a result of career politicians’ actions, inactions, stupidity and avarice? As people speak more and more loudly on certain issues, like Palestine, these same politicians are comfortable ignoring them. Where is the scepticism for them, or the viability of this guild-like way of structuring the political sphere as the way forward? We are living the consequences of having career politicians lead, do we like it so much we cannot conceive of anything better?

Anyway, if you look into the local press in Serbia and especially enclaves like Twitter, there’s a wonderful symmetry: the EU champions are terrified the student movement has already shown "concerning" right leanings, they’re busy counting how many EU flags the students have draped themselves in while marching, and aren’t happy. The right is deeply worried about how the "globalist, NGO, pro-EU camarilla" is already deeply embedded in the student movement (they went to Brussels, after all!) and is perhaps even planting their candidates into the mix to sell out the country’s interests to the globalists. I am being slightly ironic here, but I have nothing but contempt for this thinking on both sides. Winning the election required the participation and support from both these camps’ voting blocks, which tells you how bad the situation truly was, since sworn enemies were forced to cooperate with a political unknown just for the chance to win against the existing political regime.

In a sense, only a political unknown could have won, as all pre-existing political factions, (mostly comprised of these praised seasoned politicians, many of them three decades into their careers) would not or could not muster the strength or wherewithal to work with one another. No nationalist would ever cooperate with a globalist pro-EU green party, even if it cost them their country, democracy, and those same national interests they hold sacrosanct. Likewise, no progressive citizen party saving democratic principles would ever work with what they view as backward retrograde nationalist movements threatening to plunge the country back into the type of rhetoric and milieu as existed during the wars of the nineties. Also, at some point the decades-long careers of many politicians was perfect cannon fodder for the regime’s propaganda machine, gleefully cataloguing their past sins and outright inventing them if the need arose. After a while, political experience morphs into evidence of one’s political parasitism.

It took a decentralised student movement which could not be targeted and besmirched, to engage the non-voting public and voters on both sides of the political spectrum. Part of the reason why all parties which took part in this election were swept away (except for the students and the outgoing regime) was because of failing to recognise the political moment. This election, in my view, was a single-issue election - the workings of democracy and stopping corruption and the further decay of institutions. This is what the political movement will be judged on, and what will determine its political future. The citizenry, at this juncture, is willing to table discussions on foreign policy for the sake of internal affairs and weeding out corruption. Most foreign powers and press corps, sadly, are interested primarily in the foreign policy implications of this new movement, and seem like they couldn’t care less if Serbian citizenry lives in caves, favelas, or in a thriving democracy.

Many things are still unclear, such as the exact relationship between the Parliament and Government, once formed, and the direct democracy practiced by the student movement. It is unclear how effective it will prove, or how they will select their allies and collaborators, as it’s perfectly obvious that the movement cannot simply replace the totality of public administration. Regardless, the new regime will enjoy a broad latitude and a measure of good will among the citizenry not seen in a generation. It needs to use that to good effect. If it fails to deliver, they will be ridiculed and attacked by members of both internal factions, and will more than likely splinter, and usher in a return of Vučić, who - lest we forget - is now the only opposition party in Parliament, with a sizeable number of representatives, and plenty of corrosive residuals and slush funds and media operations still at his disposal. Lest we also forget, with 700k party members, it is a powerful organisation even without the corruptive backend of the state apparatus.

The guy is clearly burned out, fighting an uphill battle, and feeling like it's no longer worth it. He could have reported the bug and taken the money, but he didn't. To judge him for feeling upset that someone else did that, and not give him credit for not taking the money in order to contribute more to the community, is... well it's a choice, I guess.

The LLM wave hasn't really produced this upswell of terrific apps or ideas the "common man" would've made if he only knew how to code. It's just slop, usually made at the level of the lowest common denominator, literal bespoke software nothing can coalesce around. The exceptions are few and far between, and they usually started before AI and adapted to using it as an existing community.

If thisnsort of behaviour is going to become the norm for the future, there will be no future, and I'd want to get out too? There will always be the one guy that's just hungry enough to not care about others and they'll take the money. No community can form around that, it'll never even get a chance to start up under such conditions.

It’s incredible how these brands are, one by one, destroying any affinity and good will left for them (LG, Sony, Microsoft, etc.). Nowadays whenever I hear a company has a custom OS I think custom what? Custom tracking and ad pipeline? This just makes me turn elsewhere entirely, not want to "upgrade" to an even more expensive product that _might_ not track me. Might isn’t good enough.

I’ll take a cheap TCL panel with all the latest bells and whistles, and be done with it. Sure, the software will be janky, but it will be cheap and just as good at showing moving pictures, if not better. If I suspect something nefarious, I’ll get an old Android box and install a rooted system on there that I control, and use that instead of the inbuilt Android TV. But I _won’t_ be paying extra for the trouble.

This just shows the fragility of the tech and why I wouldn’t want to rely on it for anything crucial.

In Continental Europe we used to have winters with regular snow even in large cities. I know, I really liked playing in the snow as a kid. It was cold. For the past dozen or so years, there is less and less snowfall, with milder and milder winters. Snow in the cities amounts to maybe a week or three of weak drizzle. Forget about what my grandpa remembered about how the Danube used to freeze over so you could walk across the river. What we do seem to get more of is wild, torrential rainfall in sudden bursts amid long dry spells. Bad for infrastructure, even worse for agriculture.

The climate is changing here, and it’s getting hotter, not colder or more balanced. Wildfires are increasing in frequency, and God knows what’s going on with the country’s underground aquifers, we never seem to care about those, because we’ve always just had plenty, so why worry. Of course all this is easily dismissed as anecdata. But when I read about the research labelling Europe the fastest warming continent, I don’t have trouble believing it. Sure, someone living in the northernmost reaches of Europe might not see anything, yet, this doesn’t mean the research is wrong.

Worse yet, the infrastructure for dealing with this simply isn’t there in most countries, and I’m not talking about stuff that will "reverse global warming" or whatever, I’m talking steps that will keep cities livable in the short to medium time-span. Most societies are unwilling to mentally deal with or consider what might happen two, three decades down the line. They aren’t willing to contend with a future where their children will have to endure water rationing, curfews, economic and other hardship, mass migration or any number of scenarios that will affect their wellbeing.

We have to greenify the streets, reduce the number of heat-producing vehicles, upgrade the pipelines, irrigation, water collection, and other systems across European cities... I have a sneaking suspicion it will take some massive, un-ignorable crisis, like a record number of elderly people dying from heat exposure to actually start investing in any of this. And by then it might be too late.

Where did it all go wrong? To think I really liked Windows 10 when it first came out, and thought it was a solid direction forward into modernising Windows.

Now, on Linux there’s also a setting in regular Brave which allows you to uncover per-feature switches to disable offending elements and retain some, which is the way I use it, to avoid having to reinstall Brave. I’m guessing this isn’t available on Windows without getting a licence?

Regardless, Zen is still the better main browser, particularly on Linux... but Brave is a fine second choice IMHO.

There is sadly ample fiscal headroom in mundane drone-like work that was being outsourced (still cheaply, I might add) that AI can replace and even do a marginally better job of. I suspect AI prices can even increase and it will still be profitable for enterprises.

Companies like this will certainly keep expanding their AI use, and once they commit to that, there's little stopping them from moving to open models or local inference if need be.

My concern is less over the bubble and more over the social cost of AI. Call centres and the like provide a tremendous number of jobs. As AI moves into enterprises more and more, where are all these people supposed to work? Become baristas? They certainly won't be "learning to code"... What sorts of social and other unrests will this cause?

These forces I think will muddy the waters and make predictions difficult. Say what you want about the AI bubble, but if it pops, it will be different than previous ones. The bubble doesn't even need to burst because of the insane economic model, if enough people are economically devastated by it, it will cause ripple effects of its own.

I’d hate to see an AUR that’s a walled garden, and I’m not sure what an Arch without the AUR would look like. But something in between will need to be invented.

The singer/performer (in Homer’s time there were special bards specifically of Homer’s texts called rhapsodes) would use these formulae to help them construct the flow and meter of the overall poem while rendering. So they basically knew the formulae by heart, knew the general plot outline, and had enough cultural and other vocabulary to be able to reconstruct a long text in a single sitting from memory.

This means that most of the time, every performance was unique, and small details were continually added and altered by every rhapsode / performer. Hence, while the outline remained fairly known, the details have naturally shifted over the years. Hence the mountains of inconsistencies with for instance armour, customs, etc. Even though the story is set in the Bronze age, most dress and probably some of the cultural aspects in general is a mix of stuff contemporary to the time of writing and stuff the Greeks may have thought seemed old to them.

It was, by and large, more important to remember the overall details about what the key characters do than it was to remember what they wore for centuries on. For the purposes of plot, armour is armour after all. (Incidentally, this is why the description of Achiles’ shield in the Illiad is such an interesting example.)

Given all of this, today it’s generally accepted that "Homer" was not a singular poet of tremendous gifts who bequeathed the world two immense poems, but rather a name for a collective author. This hypothesis was borne out by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord in their research in Yugoslavian oral poetry in the early XX century, where they found living examples of singers able to, in several sittings, render some 12k+ verses from memory.

This is by no means unique, and similarities have since been found across cultures, though, perhaps, not to that extent. Blues is, for example, full of constant epithets and other formulae that make constructing and reconstructing songs or indeed improvising them in a call-and-response manner much easier. As long as you have the cultural cachet and knowledge of the building blocks, that is.