AccountMaker

From Serbia, I have a supermarket about 200m from my apartment and a mall with a huge supermarket about 20 mins away on foot. In my city at least, you're rarely more than 15 mins away by foot from a supermarket, they're everywhere.

Translation tools (like DeepL and Google Translate), proof assistance for mathematicians, camera settings optimisations, data analysis assistance in pretty much any field of research, anomaly detection, compression algorithms, ADAS systems like following a lane or self-parking, I can't remember the specifics, but I know Nokia uses ML/AI methods for signal transmision/receiving optimisation, noise removal, image recognition for various purposes, I recall a system for automatic tree pruning, etc etc.

And before I get the usual "only GenAI is AI", the underlying methods for creating a generative model and something like a model that detects street signs or abnormalities in medical scans are based on the same principles, they are the same field of computer science.

It certainly is out and about

The guy is a pseudo-intellectual who became famous with your usual right wing stuff (society is collapsing, the wokes are destroying everything, we need to fight the neocultural marxists), and providing self-help tips for people to take responsibility for themselves etc.

That second part is important because when sufficiently pushed, a lot of his fans will say that they just like his self-help stuff because it helped them go through some periods, become better etc. But it's rarely just that, most of his fans go on to watch his talks and take his words seriously since he earned some credance with them with the self-help tips.

And then this supposedly highly intelligent professor goes on to provide some stability to this insane world by saying things like (off the top of my head): Bill C-16 will make the state send people to prison for using the wrong pronouns, but he will resist and go on a hunger strike when that happens! Women and men cannot work together in the same teams! Women are hypocrites if they complain about sexual harassment while wearing makeup! Hitler's views were guided by the crowds attending his speeches, he just adapted to what they wanted to hear! Climate change models are faulty apriori because you cannot model everything, etc etc.

Then, as others already mentioned, he went to Russia to get into an induced coma to break his addiction.

He's presenting himself and being presented as a good father figure, an accomplished academic, a voice of reason in a world gone insane, whereas he is just plain nuts. And his base is primarily vulnerable young people who have nobody to turn to, and he uses that to make them into your everyday incels, misogynists and other right wing wierdos.

So you can see that when someone like that goes onto camera to cry for the 10th time, the initial reaction of others might not be sympathy.

There are a lot of disturbing videos available on reddit. The police chasing and beating the living hell out of people on the ground, the director of the police claiming on national television that the protesters didn't allow an ambulance to pass, even though there is a video showing the ambulance passing through the crowd of protestors only to be stopped by the police, who then used the situation to commence a surprise charge at the protesters. And all this because we want... check this... elections. Something our overlord used to hold every 2 years, but now he's scared.

In Yugoslavia it was actually quite the opposite. Old commie blocks in Serbia all have big green spaces around them and playgrounds, while new buildings are all built on top of each other with no room to breathe and no greenery in sight.

Probably because they are.

The entire infrastructure of modern civilization rests on a single digit number of companies. How is this acceptable to anyone? Why is everyone just okay with this?

If it were only that, but traditionally 3rd party candidates are all the rage 2 weeks before the US elections, and then the day after the elections they're gone from the discourse, and you'll hear nothing about them for the next 4 years.

If you like black metal, Praznina and The Stone are amazing Serbian bands. Praznina's 2023 album "Čovek koji Nije" is one of my all time favourites

As Kropotkin wrote to Lenin in 1920

It would seem that the soviets should have served precisely this function of creating an organisation from below. But Russia has already become a Soviet Republic only in name. The influx and taking over of the people by the ‘party’, that’s is, predominantly the newcomers (the ideological communists are more in the urban centres), has already destroyed the influences and constructive energy of this promising institution – the soviets. At present, it is the party committees, not the soviets, who rule in Russia. And their organization suffers from the defects of bureaucratic organisation.

Seconded! And unlike DDG (based in the US), Qwant is in the EU

Seriously. For some people cooking, baking, sewing, cleaning, doing the dishes, laundry are all for women and not "manly". A "manly man" is then someone who cannot take care of himself at all and needs a mother/nanny substitute his whole life just to survive. And that's somehow "strong"???