I was going to wince at a US publication not doing European geography, but no, it’s actually the British The Independent, of all places.

Basically, for those of you who have been living under a rock, Mercosur is a trade deal…

Mercosur is an economic bloc in South America which the EU has been negotiatiating a trade agreement with.

This would be like some Argentinian saying “the European Union is a trade agreement” that we are negoiating with some countries in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU–Mercosur_Partnership_Agreement

The European Union–Mercosur Partnership Agreement is a signed, but not yet ratified, free trade agreement on which the European Union and the South American trade bloc Mercosur reached agreement in principle in 2019.

That may be true. I’m just telling you that if so, it doesn’t reflect Sweden as a whole.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics

Here’s the European Commission.

https://wprices.com/energy-prices/household-electricity-prices-in-europe/

Sweden has residential electricity prices at $0.2768/kWh.

https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

The US averages $0.1798/kWh.

You can do it, but it costs more. I understand that some of the reason that California’s electricity rates are as high as they are is because PG&E is doing a bunch of burying lines.

EDIT:

https://schlanj.substack.com/p/why-electricity-prices-in-california

The IOUs spent $7.7 billion in 2024 on wildfire mitigation, which equates to 4.2 ¢/kWh. Due to years of fire suppression, exacerbated by warming trends, and the desire to build homes in wooded areas, wildfires caused by downed distribution lines are a never-ending problem. To resolve the situation, the utilities are burying the power lines, but the cost is enormous.

Wildfire mitigation accounts for just over half of the price premium.

Plus, I mean, unless you’re using a Threadiverse host as your home instance, how often are you typing its name?

Having a hyphen is RFC-conformant:

RFC 952:

1. A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up
to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus
sign (-), and period (.).  Note that periods are only allowed when
they serve to delimit components of "domain style names". (See
RFC-921, "Domain Name System Implementation Schedule", for
background).  No blank or space characters are permitted as part of a
name. No distinction is made between upper and lower case.  The first
character must be an alpha character.  The last character must not be
a minus sign or period.  A host which serves as a GATEWAY should have
"-GATEWAY" or "-GW" as part of its name.  Hosts which do not serve as
Internet gateways should not use "-GATEWAY" and "-GW" as part of
their names. A host which is a TAC should have "-TAC" as the last
part of its host name, if it is a DoD host.  Single character names
or nicknames are not allowed.

RFC 1123:

   The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952
   [DNS:4].  One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the
   restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a
   letter or a digit.  Host software MUST support this more liberal
   syntax.

   Host software MUST handle host names of up to 63 characters and
   SHOULD handle host names of up to 255 characters.

I imagine so. I don’t use Boost, but I posted about the behavior to the Boost community, so hopefully they’ll get it straightened out.

Median household income isn’t the same as GDP per capita.

On top of that, it’s also disposable median income, so accounts for taxes and such, which could also be a factor between high and low tax states.

I mean, there are a number of cases in mythologies where you can find common elements. I’d buy that in some cases, there might be common elements causing it, but I don’t think that it’d need to be a common hallucinogen.

Off-the-cuff, some examples:

• Dragons

• “Hybrid” animals that are a conglomeration of different animals.

• Ghosts

• Mermaids.

• House spirits

• Sun gods

It’s not just EVs that are connected.

Society can’t have females stripping for males — which I’m assuming from the official’s phrasing does not constitute a “direct and cynical violation of basic moral norms and traditional spiritual values” — if they’re not leaving the kitchen.

Speaking in an interview with News.ru, Ivanov declared: "The creators of GTA 6 deliberately go to include destructive and vulgar content in their product, completely unacceptable to the moral health of society.

“This includes the planned inclusion of scenes of male striptease in the game, which is a direct and cynical violation of basic moral norms and traditional spiritual values.”

So…is this because the state has an issue with homosexuality, or are, say, bachelorette parties off-limits too?

The issues run deeper, Kaas Elias explained, than just these most recent cuts. “Unfortunately, the federal government has taken a step backward when it comes to public transport,” he said. For example, the Deutschlandticket for regional public transport across the country has transformed from a €9 a month COVID-19 era mega-success to €63 a month as of January 2026.

If I remember correctly back when that was announced, and there was some discussion on Reddit about it, that was intended from the beginning to be a temporary program.

searches

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

The Deutschlandticket (Deutschlandticket, lit. ‘Germany ticket’), also known as the D-Ticket, is a monthly subscription for local and regional public transport valid throughout Germany. It was introduced in May 2023 by the Scholz cabinet as the successor to the temporary 9-Euro-Ticket offered in summer 2022.

WP says it was temporary too.

But will the proprietary license(s) update correctly?

shrugs

I couldn’t say. If licenses are tied to the computer, there are a number of ways that they could have done that.

Unless you’re sure that they are tied to the hardware, though, may not be an issue. Like, they may phone home to some authentication server and just check for concurrent copies running with the same key or whatever.

I don’t agree with the whole “I hate anyone wealthy” thing that some of the left-wing crowd here has, but at least I can see where people are coming from. But…the bar for having a safe deposit box is pretty low. Depends on the size of the box, but you’re talking maybe $50/year in the US? I mean, okay, sure, “wealthy” is something of an arbitrary line, but that’s a…pretty low wealth bar for hating people. I just grabbed a pizza last night, and it was something like $25.

I believe that “older” mods can remove other mods, same as on Reddit, though I’ve never tried. So mods that show up higher on the list of mods in the right-hand sidebar in the Lemmy Web UI for the community.

Or instance admins on the instance where the community lives. They probably won’t get involved unless the mod is violating the rules they’ve set for their instance. Your idea of what constitutes acceptable behavior for the mod and their idea may or may not be the same.

You’d have to talk to either those “more senior” mods or the instance admins and convince one of them that the mod shouldn’t be a mod for that community.

Only alternative is going and creating some alternative community elsewhere and drawing users away.

I’ve never used the software package in question.

If you already own the software, and if the hardware it uses to talk to the microcontroller is on a serial port or USB-attached serial port, then you can most-likely just run it under WINE. This isn’t a VM, but a Windows compatibility layer — you don’t need to run a copy of Windows in a VM and all that. It’d be my first shot. That way, you can just use it like any other Linux program, don’t need to blow extra memory or overhead on running Windows in a VM.

So, say the program in question has an installer, picbasic-installer.exe.

So you’re going to want to install WINE. I don’t use Arch, so I’ll leave that up to you, but I believe that the Arch package manager is pacman. They may have some graphical frontend that you prefer to use.

Then go ahead and, in a virtual terminal program, invoke picbasic-installer.exe — assuming that that’s what the installer is called — under WINE:

$ wine picbasic-installer.exe

That’ll run the installer.

Now, my guess is that that much won’t have problems. And that WINE will run the thing. And it’ll probably let you compile BASIC programs.

You can go ahead and fire up your PICBASIC PRO program. I don’t know how you launch Windows programs in your Arch environment. In general, WINE installers will drop a .desktop file under ~/.local/share/applications, and that can be started the way any other application can. I use a launcher program, tofi, to start programs like that under sway using tofi-drun, but you probably have a completely different environment set up. My guess is that your desktop environment on Arch probably has some kind of system menu of applications or something like that that will include WINE programs with a desktop file in it. Or maybe you have some program that shows a searchable list of programs and can launch from that. KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, etc will probably all have their own routes, but I don’t use those, so I can’t tell you what they do. I’ll leave that up to you.

What you’re likely to run into problems with is that if the PICBASIC PRO program wants to talk to that microcontroller programmer via a serial port (which on Windows would probably be COM0 or COM1 or whatever), it’s going to need to talk to /dev/ttyS0 or /dev/ttyS1 or whatever on Linux, or if it’s a USB-attached, /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1, etc. Ordinary users probably don’t have permission to write directly to them, by default.

There are a couple ways to grant permission, but one of the most-straightforward ways is to add your user to a group that has permission.

The basic Unix file permission system has each file — including device files, like /dev/ttyS0 — owned by one user and one group.

On my Debian trixie system:

$ ls -l /dev/ttyS0
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 64 Jan 15 20:46 /dev/ttyS0
$

So that serial port device file is owned by the user root, which has read and write privileges (the first “rw”) and the group dialout, which has read and write privileges (the second “rw”). Any user that belongs to that group will be able to write to the serial ports.

On my system, my user doesn’t belong to the “dialout” group:

$  groups
tal cdrom floppy sudo audio dip video plugdev users render netdev bluetooth lpadmin scanner docker libvirt ollama systemd-journal
$

So I’m going to want to add my user to that group:

$ sudo usermod -aG dialout tal
$

Group permissions get assigned to processes when you log in (that is, usermod just sets what groups the process started when you log in as has, and then all its child processes). Technically, you don’t have to log out to do this — you could run sg dialout at this point, and then from that shell, run wine and see if it works — but I’d probably log out and then back in again, to keep things simplest. After you do that, you should see that you’re in the “dialout” group:

$ groups
night_petal <list of groups> dialout
$

After that, you should be able to use the program and write code to the microcontroller.

Unless you have some really serious hardware, 24 billion parameters is probably the maximum that would be practical for self-hosting on a reasonable hobbyist set-up.

Eh…I don’t know if you’d call it “really serious hardware”, but when I picked up my 128GB Framework Desktop, it was $2k (without storage), and that box is often described as being aimed at the hobbyist AI market. That’s pricier than most video cards, but an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU was north of $1k, an NVidia RTX 4090 was about $2k, and it looks like the NVidia RTX 5090 is presently something over $3k (and rising) on EBay, well over MSRP. None of those GPUs are dedicated hardware aimed at doing AI compute, just high-end cards aimed at playing games that people have used to do AI stuff on.

I think that the largest LLM I’ve run on the Framework Desktop was a 106 billion parameter GLM model at Q4_K_M quantization. It was certainly usable, and I wasn’t trying to squeeze as large a model as possible on the thing. I’m sure that one could run substantially-larger models.

EDIT: Also, some of the newer LLMs are MoE-based, and for those, it’s not necessarily unreasonable to offload expert layers to main memory. If a particular expert isn’t being used, it doesn’t need to live in VRAM. That relaxes some of the hardware requirements, from needing a ton of VRAM to just needing a fair bit of VRAM plus a ton of main memory.

That’s why they have the “Copilot PC” hardware requirement, because they’re using an NPU on the local machine.

searches

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/npu-devices/

Copilot+ PCs are a new class of Windows 11 hardware powered by a high-performance Neural Processing Unit (NPU) — a specialized computer chip for AI-intensive processes like real-time translations and image generation—that can perform more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

It’s not…terribly beefy. Like, I have a Framework Desktop with an APU and 128GB of memory that schlorps down 120W or something, substantially outdoes what you’re going to do on a laptop. And that in turn is weaker computationally than something like the big Nvidia hardware going into datacenters.

But it is doing local computation.