Same here. Tried out Proton and Fastmail, and chose Fastmail. Been happy with it for a few months so far.

I wonder how the data in Danish MitId is managed and stored. The thing is used for everything here, from doing taxes to buying real estate to getting a library card.

I think there must be a continuous spectrum between the extremes you describe.

I had a similar experience many decades ago, taking a long overland trip and being out of touch of news for almost half a year. Coming back, I realized that the world had gone on perfectly well without me following all the daily drama. Most news seemed so irrelevant for a while after that trip.

Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.

I did this except it was more like a month. When I got back I realised how much happier I was to be off of X and oblivious to the news. There is virtually zero utility to being "informed" of most things, and plenty of downsides.

I once stumbled upon the idea of calculating the signal to noise ration of "news". Say you consume 30 pieces of "news" a day, you are roughly at 10k "news" pieces a year. How many of those influence a decision you make. Like which job to take, whom to propose to, where to move.

The author, Hans Rosling by the way, showed with this little thought experiment, how little signal for our personal lives and our important decisions lies in "news".

I also worked in publishing for a while as my first job out of university. Ever since I left that industry I am so happy to be out of that drama generating machine.

The big one is voting, of course. It's not like following international politics will impact what firmness mattress I will buy.

I can easily read up, research the actual behavior of any candidate, their program (aka promises they won't keep) and what the party line is (as program - see before) and in the last few years, when actually putting in their votes on any issue.

I tend to prefer "just in time" and "up to date" research to "just in case" spamming my brain with noise.

But I also know how easy it is for me to fall down the rabbit hole of being back in the dopamine inducing social or news streams. I actively had to purge social apps from my phone(s) and on my private phone setup a launcher, that only shows a few selected apps as text names. No icons, no nothing - especially no badges and notifications for missed mails/messages.

This is currently the only way for me to battle these (at least to me) massively addictive systems.

I agree it's hard to not get sucked into the soap opera aspect of it all. Taking a break once in a while is a healthy strategy, but I think ultimately the sweet spot is to be informed about the important developments as they happen, something that shouldn't take more than 30 mins per day of watching news and political analysis while preparing food etc.

After all, there's more to the democratic process than just voting. There's a global conversation going on which needs informed and diverse participants. Plus there's a personal learning aspect to it, which goes much deeper when one tries to understand and anticipate trends as they happen only to have those inklings and reasonings being checked by the course of history. It's an ongoing lesson in the mysteries of human nature.

I have set up a few alerts and feeds I check semi-regularly. And I have a script sending me a summary of important world, regional, local news as a pushover notification in the morning. So I get two pushes - one is for the weather report, one for global events that might impact my life (I am still in the process of dialing in the sensitivity level of what the report should contain).

Because - on the other hand - I am very much interested in advances in different sciences and would love a better report on actual advances (and not just BS headlines about some new weight loss thing or currently alien speculations from interstellar objects)...

But I am getting there over time. So that I can increase the signal to noise ratio a bit.

But how often would your preferred candidate change compared to which / how much news you consumed? Most people I know are fairly set in their political opinions and already only consume news that confirms their biases

It's highly unlikely following the news will make you better informed of politics. Pretty much everyone votes on vibes.

uninstalling twitter on my phone was one of the best decisions I made

I admit I have never worked with it, but I have a strong feeling that a formal verification can only work if you have a formal specification. Fine and useful for a compiler, or a sorting library. But pretty far from most of the coding jobs I have seen in my career. And even more distant from "vibe coding" where the starting point is some vaguely defined free-text description of what the system might possibly be able to do...

Agreed, writing formal specifications is going to require more work from people, which is exactly the opposite reason why people are excited to use LLMs..

Slowly degoogling my life. Switched to FastMail a while ago, it works. Have written a simple shopping and todo list web app, and a minimal photo gallery. All very simple, mostly for one user only: Myself. Using these as excuses to learn about coding with LLMs. As I have retired a few years ago, I can afford the time, and work with no stress or deadlines. Also slowly improving my beer tracker system. All this as perl-based cgis under Apache, running on my home server/workstation.

Good explanation on tokenizing English text for regular search. But it is far from universal, and will not work well in Finnish, for example.

Folding diacritics makes "vähä" (little) into "vaha" (wax).

Dropping stop words like "The" misses the word for "tea" (in rather old-fashioned finnish, but also in current Danish).

Stemming Finnish words is also much more complex, as we tend to append suffixes to the words instead of small words in front to the word. "talo" is "house", "talosta" is "from the house", "talostani" is "from my house", and "talostaniko" makes it a question "from my house?"

If that sounds too easy, consider Japanese. From what little I know they don't use whitespace to separate words, mix two phonetic alphabets with Chinese ideograms, etc.

That's true. For this reason, most modern search engines support language-aware stemming and tokenization. Popular tokenizers for CJK languages include Lindera and Jieba.

We (ParadeDB) use a search library called Tantivy under the hood, which supports stemming in Finnish, Danish and many other languages: https://docs.paradedb.com/documentation/token-filters/stemmi...

Yep and I find that this really worsens LLM performance. For example `Ben,Alice` would be tokenized as `Ben|,A|lice`. And having to connect `lice` to the name `Alice` does not make it any easier for LLMs. However, formatting it as `Ben, Alice` tokenizes it as `Ben|,| Alice`. I found it kind of useful to improve performance by just formatting the data a bit differently.

I actually just started working on a data formatter that applies principles like these to drastically reduce the amount of tokens without decreasing the performance, like other formats do (looking at you, tson).

Strange, I remember trying the Silmarillion a few times, many years ago, and finding it very hard reading. Whereas I re-read the Aubrey-Maturins every few years and find them easy, if not always light weight.

I juts counted, 44 books so far this year, with lots of variation. Not

I can not say much about quitting the social media, as I never really started. Just HN, and some youtube (always start on my subscription page, only some late nights do I look at the main page with its algo suggestions). The occasional computer game (from doom to chess). Some hobby coding (retired couple of years ago), music, and yes, lots of reading.

> Strange, I remember trying the Silmarillion a few times, many years ago, and finding it very hard reading. Whereas I re-read the Aubrey-Maturins every few years and find them easy, if not always light weight.

So the difference, to me anyway, is the heavy use of archaic and naval terms in the Aubrey-Maturin series. As I went through them they got easier, and I'd certainly find them more lightweight now, but still.

The Silmarillion is hard in a different way - sort of like George Martin and ASoIaF, it's rather long-winded and name-heavy, so it can be hard to follow, even for avid Tolkien fans.

Still, Tolkien has a style of writing that I just love. No other author I've read manages to capture the feeling that you're really reading a myth or a legend, and not "just" a story.

I don't know, but for me Perl has not died at all. I still use it for smallish scripts and some CGI. Maybe I am an old retired fart, but it is the tool I reach for, when the problem looks like Perl-ish. Like I reach for C or other languages when I need that kind of things.

agreed. it's often in my toolbox -- mostly since I already know it, and I prefer semi-colon-driven syntax -- but it's just one of a few languages I use.

I have never been much info blogging, but I am in the habit of writing things down in small text files on my computer. It has almost the same benefits as a personal blog that has no outside readers, and a bit less stress about having to write something or worry about what I can say in public...