It feels like most of the Fediverse is in Schengen Area. Then hexbear and lemmy.ml are like Russia and Belarus.

I like that they make servers somewhere with like 99% carbon-free electricity and low water stress.

Is that big, small moderate?

Is this SEO? Or some old-style SEO-like thingy?

Necessary but not sufficient conditions

I’ve been using Sennheiser for a while, a bit lower-grade models though (Accentum Plus). Works great, the only pet peeve is that they changed buttons for a touch-screen on the right headphone, I don’t like tapping it that much. But the sound is great and the equipment robust (my previous ones had lasted for 5 years with no battery or sound quality issues before someone stole them on a train…).

Thank you US-americans for preferring Danish meds instead of just eating better and doing some sports :P

XDDDD

Of course, overconsumption of everything is wasteful, by definition. I get other people’s critique. You don’t need AI to tell you what to eat for breakfast, and you will be better off sharing your worries with a human. You might write better code yourself in many cases, it’s usually worth trying (and search for help once needed). But LLMs are tools, and there is plenty of proper use for them.

Energy-wise, the European alternative is more likely to be closer to sustainable. Also, the water stress may look different in some European countries. Scandinavia has been experimenting a lot with transferring heat from data centers to district heating systems. I don’t think they would care much about that in US (you need district heating, first of all…).

Solidagent is a good in-between option, they run global state-of-art “open source” models on EU-located servers. Regardless how open they are, models like Deepseek are much more sustainable to walled gardens of Big Tech (not to mention that Deepseek actually used less resources to achieve similar performance).

And as others said, MistralAI also works well.

A small thing, but I stopped synching my calendar with Google and now have DAVx5 synched with my (new and free) Nextcloud, and use Etar frontend (it is better than Google Calendar, but I am still tempted to just use Samsung Calendar as long as I still have my 6-years-old Galaxy S10).

I’ve been using Koofr and I am very happy. It works smooth and fast, they have great blogs for more custom stuff. Backuping local folders is very easy, I also got to replace Google Photos with it (2 in 1!).

Nextcloud seem to be a standard for many things. I’ve barely used it, you would need to choose a provider, maybe it would work with Hetzner. I think Nextcloud requires more work to set up than Koofr or OneDrive, but is more customizable.

“Countering a common criticism against Esperanto, the statistician Svend Nielsen has found no significant correlation between the number of Esperanto speakers and the similarity of a given national native language to Esperanto.”

Wikipedia describing the results of this paper: https://svendvnielsen.wordpress.com/2017/09/24/explaining-the-density-of-esperanto-speakers-with-language-and-politics/

Okay, that’s even worse than I thought.

I get your point. But any collective myth will overlook a lot reality. Americans actually help each other and organize themselves in their communities, despite the hassle culture. Chinese had many failed attempts at dominating industries. Many Russians actually prefer a calm and good life to the glory of their country.

In a way, a myth is more about what we want to be than what we are. Or, the part of ourselves we are proud of.

The choice is ours. We simply need to choose whom we admire. Whom we want to recognize as successful. Whom we aspire to be when we grow up. We need to sing the praises of our true heroes: those who contribute to our commons.

It could, obviously, just be international. There are people giving away inventions to mankind all around the world, though not equally distributed. But there is a window of opportunity for big part of Europe to embrace these values as our, though not exclusively our. The local aspect is beneficial, since it gives the universal values a sense of belonging and strong institutions.

I’m not that good with Middle East politics. How bad is that?

This article in German says they can build up to 280,000 drones a year:

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/kroatien-drohnenabwehr-eu-russland-100.html

(Note: The company was founded in 2018, so this is what can be done in 8 years with limited funding)

I mean, I guess the non-dark ones may well be great as well, I just eat mainly dark chocolate ¯\(ツ)/¯

Or… Garant. They have surprisingly good chocolate, especially the dark ones with raspberries or cranberries are delicious.

Haribo and Chupa Chups now make chocolate?

(BTW +10 respect to Tony’s for actually carrying about the sources of their ingredients).

We often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the “success culture.” Those examples, and there are many more, prove the opposite. Europeans like success. But they often don’t consider “winning against the whole society” as one. Instead, they tend to consider success a collective endeavour. Success is when your work is recognized long after you are gone, when it benefits every citizen. Europeans dream big: they hope that their work will benefit humankind as a whole!

Simplistic (Europe and USA are non-homogenous), but this simplicity is needed to build a positive myth. And a positive myth might need a region, a culture, and institutions willing to stand for it - however universal it is.