AGI is not a new term. It’s been in use since the 90s and the concept has been around for much longer.

It’s not new today, but it post-dates “AI” and hit the same problem then.

Text-based-games and MUDs are not the same thing. There’s a considerable library of text-based interactive fiction out there.

I’m thinking that this is some sort of joke article at City AM, because it’s always convention to define an acronym at first use, and they didn’t just omit it – like, it probably wasn’t just an editorial error – but put it in at the very end of the article.

I suppose it was just a matter of time for this to happen, once the Russian government started cracking down on domestic Internet use in Russia.

Unfortunately, we haven’t managed to domesticate huckleberries, so getting the huckleberries for the sauce is probably going to be a pain if you don’t live somewhere near where they grow in the wild.

I don’t know if France24 is doing it because the US uses a leading currency symbol, but if so, we in the US obtained the convention of having a leading currency symbol from the British, so technically it’s the Europization of Europe.

I am kind of inclined to think that France24 isn’t doing it because it’s a US convention, as the date right below it is DD/MM/YYYY, while the US convention would be MM/DD/YYYY (and in my opinion, the world standard should probably be YYYY-MM-DD, but that’s another story).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Railway

The Vatican Railway (Italian: Ferrovia Vaticana) was opened in 1934 to serve Vatican City and its only station, Vatican City (Città del Vaticano [tʃitˈta ddel vatiˈkaːno], or Stazione Vaticana [statˈtsjoːne vatiˈkaːna]). The main rail tracks are standard gauge and 300 metres (980 ft) long, with two freight sidings, making it the shortest national railway system in the world.[1] Access to the Italian rail network is over a viaduct to Roma San Pietro railway station, and is guaranteed by the Lateran Treaty dating from 1929. The tracks and station were constructed during the reign of Pope Pius XI, shortly after the treaty.

Beginning in 2015, one passenger service runs each Saturday morning with passengers for Castel Gandolfo. Most other rail traffic consists of inbound freight goods, although the railway has occasionally carried other passengers, usually for symbolic or ceremonial reasons.[2][3]

south facing windows. That little apartment turned into an oven in the summer.

Can try something like this:

https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/home-window-solutions-us/solutions/temperature-control/

It’s an infrared-reflective film you can put on your windows.

Or if you have the windows open, slatted shutters or a slatted screen.

I’m assuming that in the Netherlands, it’s humid in summer, so probably can’t use an evaporative cooler; that might be useful somewhere like Madrid.

I live in a city, and where I live it gets up to around 40°C in summer.

30 planned today in the north of France

That’s 86°F. That’s certainly warm, but I do 86°F without an air conditioner, though I’ll probably have a fan on. I could see someone using an air conditioner then, sure, but that’s not an extreme “I must have an air conditioner” temperature, either.

especially for freaking October.

That’s my point. It’s warm for the season, but being warm for the season isn’t what drives air conditioner use, but being warm in absolute terms.

Go back to summer a couple years ago, and that’s the kind of thing that will drive air conditioner rollouts:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/16/europe/france-temperature-record-heatwave-intl/index.html

Temperatures reached catastrophic levels in France in 2019, when Paris saw a record 42.6° C in July. According to the French Ministry of Health, 567 people died during a heatwave between June 24 and July 7 that year. A second heatwave that summer claimed the lives of another 868 people.

That’s 108°F. That’s the kind of thing that’ll make air conditioners important, rather than a warm fall.

I’m not in Europe, but I understand that it’s fairly common in some southern areas, but overall much less common then the US. Air conditioning is apparently more common for offices and stores than for residences.

Rolling out more air conditioning in Europe may not be a terrible thing from the standpoint of electricity providers. As things stand, unlike the US, where peak electricity demand is in the summer (due to air conditioning), Europe’s peak electricity demand is in winter, due to electricity-driven heating. Having more-even seasonal demand probably makes life easier for the grid.

All that being said, I believe that the article is talking about unseasonably warm temperatures for October – which is not that hot – not so much extremely hot summer temperatures. This may not be a “roll out air conditioning” sort of thing.

Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

I don’t know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.

republic candidate

Republican candidate

I expect that the ice will still be melting wherever they put it. And according to the article, what they put in its place is snow on crushed rock, so that’ll probably be melting too.

The women told investigators that the driver wasn’t involved, “saying that they climbed abord the truck thinking they were going to England because of the Irish registration plates,”

I don’t think that would have worked, but they’d have maybe gotten to a country that doesn’t have any border checks with the UK.

The six women were detained for being in France illegally before being released. Four were given 30 days to leave the country.

Via Calais, I expect.

I dunno, but I just Googled for both the National Police and the Paris police department to look for contact information. In both cases, Google sent me to the English language Wikipedia page (which linked to it), andt the websites themselves were only French.

considers

I guess maybe one could call the French embassy in Vietnam. They could presumably do Vietnamese or something.

EDIT: Ironically, I did almost the same thing the other day. I noticed, from an article, that a number of shops in Ukraine last winter that had lost power due to Russian missiles were running space heaters on diesel generators. That wastes a lot of diesel – there are inexpensive Chinese diesel heaters that could be used instead. I went trying to find some sort of contact person in the Ukrainian government involved with energy who might be a reasonable person to drop a note to, but there’s only so much in English. I eventually wound up trying to contact a charity in the UK that had been working to heat Ukrainian homes that had been impacted by explosions instead, hoping that they could direct me to a relevant party. And I wasn’t in the position of having a frantic, suffocating family member calling me on the other end – I was more willing to spend time searching.

As a percentage of GDP for a peacetime country, it is high, though Russia has generally run high.

As a percentage of GDP, it’s higher than the US (IIRC currently about 3.5%) or Europe (with a few exceptions, below the 2% target of NATO).

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true

The global average is a little over 2% of GDP.

https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2022/6/pdf/220627-def-exp-2022-en.pdf

Compared to WW2 spending, it’s quite low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II

In 1939, Britain spent 9% of its GDP on defence; this rose drastically after the start of World War II to around 40%.

EDIT: I’d also add a couple of caveats:

• Given that this is in rubles, some is probably inflation, if the news source isn’t adjusting for that, as the ruble has fallen in value relative to last year:

  https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RUBUSD=X?p=RUBUSD=X&.tsrc=fin-srch

  Relative to the dollar, it’d need to rise by 70% to hold constant since a year ago, so a 70% ruble increase may not be so exciting. I don’t know what periods of time the numbers take effect at (like, in this situstion, where in the year the rubles are from may matter a lot).

• What we have for this is Russia’s word; it could very well be spot-on, but we don’t know yet.

• We don’t know what the breakdown in spending is. So, for example, I believe that there may be benefits that need to be paid family of solldiers who were killed or injured and suchlike. At least in the US, I’m pretty sure that that’d be counted as military budget.

  https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/03/3/7327915/

  “All members of the families of military personnel who died during the special military operation in Ukraine (Putin’s term for the war in Ukraine – ed.) will be allocated insurance coverage and one-time assistance in the amount of 7,421,000 roubles. Monthly monetary compensations will also be paid to each family member of fallen [soldiers]”.

  Details: Putin also stated that he considers it necessary to set up an additional payment of 5 million roubles for the families of dead soldiers.

  In addition, he promises that the wounded receive a one-time payment of approximately 3 million roubles. And if a soldier becomes disabled during the war with Ukraine, he will be provided with monthly payments.

So it probably doesn’t translate to something like “Russia has 70% increased capacity relative to last year.”

I expect that Perun will put something up about it if he hasn’t already, as this is his field.

I don’t think that the glacier as an intact sheet of ice has value so much as it just is a particularly-visible sign of global warming, because small temperature changes to large masses of ice that are bounded by the melting temperature of water produce large changes to that mass.

The EU is preventing price discrimination within the EU.

They do have that requirement as part of the Digital Markets Act, but I don’t believe that that’s what the case here is addressing. That is not what the article OP posted or the article I linked to is saying: they are specifically saying that what is at issue is sales outside Europe.

EDIT: I am thinking that maybe the article is just in error. I mean, just from an economic standpoint, the EU doing this would create a major mess for international companies.

EDIT2: Okay, here’s an archive.ph link of the original Bloomberg article:

https://archive.ph/JuM0z#selection-4849.212-4863.277

In the contested arrangement with Valve, users were left unable to access some games that were available in other EU nations.

Yeah, so it’s just that these “mezha.media” guys mis-summarized the Bloomberg article.

But retail law attaches to a location, not to citizenship. Why would the EU be mandating sale of things in other regions? I mean, it’s not like the US says “if an American citizen is living in the EU, then vendors operating in the EU must follow American retail law when selling to him”.

EDIT: Okay, I went looking for another article.

https://www.gearrice.com/update/steam-cannot-block-the-activation-of-a-game-depending-on-the-country-of-purchase-europe-confirms/

Steam specifies in its terms of use that it is prohibited to use a VPN or equivalent to change your location on the platform. Except that it takes the case of the activation of a game given to you by someone and sent to your account. Following Europe’s decision, this should technically change and it would be possible to change region in Steam directly to buy a game then activate it in France. Valve has not made a comment at this time.

Hmm. Okay, if that is an accurate summary – and I am not sure that it is – that seems like the EU is saying “you must be able to use a VPN to buy something anywhere in the world, then activate it in Europe”. Yeah, I can definitely see Valve objecting to that, because that’d kill their ability to have one price in the (wealthy) EU and one in (poor) Eritrea, say. Someone in France would just VPN to Eritrea, buy at Eritrean prices, and then use it in France. The ability to have region-specific pricing is significant for digital goods, where almost all the costs are the fixed development costs.

thinks

If that is an accurate representation of the situation, that seems like it’d be pretty problematic for not just Valve, but also other digital vendors, since it’d basically force EU prices to be the same as the lowest prices that they could sell a digital product at in the world. I don’t know how one would deal with that. I guess that they could make an EU-based company (“Valve Germany”) or something that sells in the EU, and have a separate company that does international sales and does not sell in the EU.

I mean, otherwise a vendor is either going to not be able to offer something in Eritrea (using it as a stand-in for random poor countries), is going to have to sell it at a price that is going to be completely unaffordable to Eritreans, or is going to have to take a huge hit on pricing in the EU.

I’m a little suspicious that this isn’t a complete summary of the situation, though; that seems like it’d create too many issues.

EDIT2: Though looking at my linked-to article, it seems to be that the author is saying that that’s exactly what the situation is.