I find 12:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. incredibly confusing. It’s 11:59 a.m. and one minute later it’s suddenly 12:00 p.m. and you just keep counting until 12:59 p.m. before you reset the clock to 1:00 p.m. The literal meaning of p.m. (post meridiem) is after midday, which instinctively suggests that 12:00 p.m. is 12 hours after midday. If it would just start counting from 0:00 p.m. you wouldn’t have this problem. Of course it all makes sense if you’re used to it, but this is from my 24h perspective.

In the Netherlands I notice that small companies tend to use the formal way a bit more often, whereas large companies prefer the informal way, probably to make it feel more modern and less stiff. Is that similar in Portugal?

It looks like just the UK, France and Germany combined already add up to more aid with a combined GDP that’s much lower than the US. These kinds of graphs give a distorted picture due to the high population and GDP that the US has.

GDP: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gdp+of+uk%2C+france%2C+us+and+germany

Population: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+uk%2C+france%2C+us+and+germany

We could take countries like Finland as an example and keep the power in the parliament. It would be very similar to how constitutional monarchies work, but without the monarchs.

I’ve been on holiday in 32 countries. Quite a lot! About 2/3 of those were European countries (I’m European).

In my country it signifies how much of your pre-disability salary you’re able to make given your circumstances. If you there is no effect on your performance, you have a disability of 0%. If you can’t work at all, it’s 100%. If it’s more than 35%, you can get a disability allowance. This is all in relation to work and the associated allowance and doesn’t signify how severe your disability is in other contexts.

Like with German, we can make arbitrarily long compound words in Dutch (for example, “kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedencomitéleden”), but if we limit it to words that are in the dictionary, “arbeidsongeschiktheidsverzekering“ (disability insurance) is one of the longest words that’s also commonly used.

Having an account registered to an email address and being able to post content is all that’s needed for these categories to be checked. Well, apart from the diagnostics.

The difference with Mastodon is that the third party server that you’re connecting to is handling this data.

If you compare it with an app like X, you’ll see that there is another category that shows which data is being used to track you, instead of just being processed for basic functionality.

Judging by the upvotes to downvotes ratio, I think many people have become allergic to the word “AI,” even if it’s not a large language model and genuinely beneficial and applicable in practice. I guess that’s what happens when everything is called “AI.”

Not only do they need to exist at the same time as us, they also need to be close enough to make it feasible to travel here and they need to pick us from the countless options that exist. With the vastness of space and the immense timescales, I wouldn’t be surprised if we never get in contact with any other intelligent life at all, even if there’s plenty of it in the universe.

Also, I don’t believe that politicians and civil servants can keep something of this magnitude secret for many decades.

But, hey, I can’t prove you wrong. Who knows.

There are now over 13,900 SPAR branded stores in over 48 countries on four continents, meeting the needs of over 14.7 million consumers every day.

https://spar-international.com/

It was 1 out of 5 people who voted, so 1 out of 2 in the US. I’m sorry, but just that’s just the way things are. Voting turnout matters, but it’s not like the people that didn’t vote would’ve all voted democrat.

I didn’t know about Eierkuchen. In the Netherlands eierkoeken (same word, but Dutch) are something else: https://www.recipesfromeurope.com/eierkoeken/.

For debit cards we’ve always used Maestro for as long as I can remember. Nowadays new debit cards are usually Mastercard or Visa due to Maestro being discontinued, like you mentioned. Back in the days we also had a system called Giro cards, but then I’m taking about the time when cheques were still a thing.

There’s also the option to use direct debits from your bank account, which we use for subscriptions and utilities. This can be approved using iDEAL, same as with one-time payments. This doesn’t involve Maestro, Mastercard, or any card whatsoever. Most Dutch people only use debit cards in a physical stores.

We use iDEAL to pay taxes, the invoice of your house renovation, your Spotify subscription, your utilities, you name it. Of course instant bank transfers are also an option, but that’s basically the same thing, but with more effort and room for error.

It’s based on iDEAL, which we use in the Netherlands since 2005. All the Dutch banks are connected to it and when you pay, you approve the payment in your banking app or website, after which it’s immediately deducted from your bank account and the webshop gets an instant payment confirmation. Variations of this are also used peer to peer, for example for splitting the bill or when buying second hand stuff. You send someone a payment request (url) or show a QR and payments arrive instantly on your bank account, without any fees.

So indeed, even though it’s immensely popular and widely used, it’s not a full replacement for physical debit cards and it doesn’t offer credit.

I use the OISD list for family members and I haven’t received a single complaint in years.

Looking at their repo, they’ve tested this with LLM models that have not been trained to generate chain of thought outputs, by varying the system prompts. It’s therefore more of a proof of concept, but I can imagine that if you train a model to do this natively it could work.

Using the same prompt with QwQ made no difference for me (the chain of thought was still very long and quite verbose), while using it with Qwen2.5 Coder made the output extremely terse and not very useful for open-ended questions.

It’s 7 billion parameters big.

Revolution!

L