While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).

It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?

Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?

In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.

And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.

Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.

Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.

And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.

Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.

And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.

With one of self hosted services being Adguard-Home can do both ADs blocking and internal DNS... The public DNS records for your "internal use only" domain remain empty.

Given how those good (enough) search engines work these days ... I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of the old social/discovery things things (DMOZ and such) start coming back.

Few days ago a law that forbids non professionals to set off fireworks started applying... We'll see if that makes any difference.

The dishwashing machine being able to notify you ahead of time that you're low (but not already out) of softening salt or rinse aid liquid is also convenient - but indeed also solvable with display on the machine itself.

But the automation like lights, or blinds/shutters... Being able to open/close shutters from your bed (or automatically in the morning as part of waking you up), or turn on/off lights based on motion/presence detection - is actually useful.

Of course you shouldn't need Internet to operate it. And many people use Home Assistant exactly because they don't want their "smart devices" to talk to the cloud.

What Dutch government/politicians seems to be "ahead" compared to other countries - is combination of narrow or short sightedness and (over)correction trough rules, laws and regulations.

Like giving subsidies and tax breaks for electrical cars, rooftop solar panels and mandating household switch from gas (LPG and such) to electric heating and cooking. And ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.

More of the same with stuff like 30% tax rule for expats, which was originally introduced as cost saving measures because actually doing bookkeeping for expatriate expenses was costing government more money. But then more recently expat tax breaks have been reduced and phased out "because cost saving". Meanwhile employers have trouble finding highly skilled workers. And we're limiting numbers of foreign students in universities (by forcing them to do it in Dutch instead of English).

Some Bulgarians cheated/defrauded Dutch tax returns or such - and "solution" was ML/AI reviewing things - but it turned out to be broken/biased and (ab)used for other things - leading to the whole toeslag scandal and government resigning.

Same for nitrogen vs lack of housing... And many more.

Not talking about stuff that would automatically change the FM station to the one with traffic announcements.

Our ~2012 Škoda Octavia had typical Volkswagen Audi Group navigation built in. It would receive data about traffic jams in the background, and incorporate it into route/navigation decisions.

Not sure if switch from FM to DAB carried that over too. Kind of doubtful since mobile phones took over navigation even before Android/iOS Auto stuff showed up.

I would suggest Calculate Linux.

It's 100% Gentoo, with additional customization (e.g. profiles presetting not just sane defaults, but also things you usually want on desktop [e.g. samba, network printers ...]), there are pre built binaries for all profiles and basically all the software (but you can still override some and get it compiled with or without specific features) ...

And perhaps most importantly - there's extra tooling/automation around the Gentoo/portage updates and such.

With vanilla Gentoo - beyond regular PITA to update packages due to various package/use-flags conflicts (which would make me do it even less often). I was also regularly (every few years) having to reinstall Gentoo because my glibc/bintools/python/etc were so far behind that during system update something would break and fixing it was basically reinstalling Gentoo from stage3 tarball.

It's been ~10 years that I've "switched" to Calculate Linux - and it's "cl-update" was automatically solving even those things that would've left me with world update broken system.

With Gentoo you get to choose SystemD or no SystemD ;)

And that's aside the fact that if support cases are the actual issue - they could (and probably already do that) just not allow free users to open/submit bug/support cases.

There's already tooling for using say .deb or golang packages - but still having them installed as proper Gentoo/portage ones.

PS. Tek sada videh korisničko

And still benefit from packages/system being smaller/faster because they are not built to cater for all possibilities.

And you can still override options (use flags) and compile some things exactly as you want/need them.

The Gentoo profiles mentioned in another comment is what still allows the system to have packages compiled with a consistent subset of things.

I just can't see that cost of having a free Linux version (on top having a paid Linux version) is big?

Besides AI grossly over/under estimating values even when you give it a photo of the packaging with nutritional table and tell it weight you used.

The other thing that surprised me, at least until I read up on how LLMs are actually working. Was how it would confidently BS you for your daily total.

Even when the chat/messages are just "Ate ABC with XYZ values, what's my daily total?"

While I guess new chat for each day, or some MCP for storing and retrieval of record/meals would've helped with those daily totals.

The total would still be wrong - unless you explicitly specified each of the values you need to track (e.g. carbs, fat, protein, kcal) to be put into records.

At which point of course - you're not really using AI/LLM but basically an CRUD application.

I was waking up an hour or more before the alarm (so waking up <=6AM with 7AM alarm). And I thought my sleep was good - after all Fitbit sleep score was 80-85.

Then after stopping alcohol I started sleeping longer. Specifically waking up later, at least for the first few weeks.

Seemingly alcohol was causing earlier waking due to spiking cortisol too early.

While waking-up time took a few weeks to recalibrate. Already 2-3 days after stopping alcohol - Fitbit was showing clear improvements in actual sleep quality metrics - HRV was increasing and RHR/BR were decreasing.

And now my "bad nights" have Fitbit sleep score of ~85, and it's regularly 90+.

Lab results are night and day - e.g. CRP was 20 (>5 signals inflammation), just few weeks after stopping alcohol it was ~10 while I was having cold/fever, and now it's <1.

The biggest/hardest problem for me was that after stopping alcohol, my sweets intake increased, especially in the evening. I was doing almost no carbs during the day, and then in the evening ... I guess brain was lacking some easy dopamine that it would previously get from alcohol... I would crave sweets, ice cream ...etc.

It took almost 3 months to be able to stick with strict keto diet. I'm finally doing <=20 gram of carbs because from past experience - any higher and I have a hard time limiting carbs to say just 50 (which would still be low carb/keto).

Not sure how different it works from Apple/Samsung trackers. But my Motorola Android phone can set it up, and phones out and about are reporting where it is.