Some retailers where I live in Normandy just sell to whoever, no questions asked. Bars serve too.

It isn’t a little sip of wine either. The shop across the street from a middle school sells kids vodka at lunch time and these kids get shitfaced. Same for cigarettes at the tobacco shops.

I get what some people are saying, that it is a right of passage and stuff, and that the drinking culture is different here, but these kids are binge-drinking at lunch. We also have loads of CBD shops now that sell pre-rolls. They won’t get stoned, but it isn’t healthy.

I suspect that it is closer to 99% of shops doing this in larger areas.

I did ask a shop owner about this. He will ask for ID, his wife too, but he can’t get his employees to always do it. The main factor for him is that if they refuse they might steal it.

Anyway, as a Canadian who has lived here for 20 years, I am still shocked whenever I see this especially when I get carded in Canada when I buy alcohol (not because I look young, it is just store policy where I come from).

Norway does not believe in cruel or unusual punishment. I think many of us have seen the clip from Michael Moore’s doc Where to Invade Next?. Give him the maximum sentence (20 years) or close to it in Ringerike.

But…

“Penalties in society” means the offender will serve at least some of their time out of jail and will have to meet with an official a specified number of times as ordered by the court. In return, individuals can stay out of prison if they follow the court’s rules. In most cases, criminals retain their current employment, or the court orders employment, and they may remain with their families and continue their normal life. Penalties in society are only imposed if there is no burden on the victims, their families, or society.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_Norway

It’s what I’ve been using since the early 2000’s. Whatever laptop I can get for free with boring Linux. I teach all my classes across multiple establishments with it. Battery still lasts over 9 hours. Beats the Raspberry Pi I used as a computer for 6 months!

I do have a colleague that installed one of the LLMs on their computer to play around with translation and live subtitles, and another who claims ChatGPT taught him French. Maybe there is something to it, but I draw the line at using AI because, as I said, I forbid it in my classes.

I have a 10-year old laptop with integrated graphics running Debian Stable, so I don’t think I’ll be using a local LLM any time soon haha. I tell my students I don’t want them to use any of these tools so I don’t use them either.

OpenAI doesn’t really have a product in the business sense, which is the fraud and why I compare him to Holmes. But I get what you mean.

Couldn’t tell you, I’ve never used any of them.

I am an ESL teacher. Generative AI is making things complicated for us, but it cannot replace learning the language. Right now, things like ChatGPT are presented as some sort of solution, but it is so far off and sometimes too obvious.

Like you mentioned, you think and reason differently in different languages. Plus, some people just love learning languages.

Aside: I am of the opinion that OpenAI and ChatGPT will disappear within 2 to 3 years. Their investors will abandon them leaving them drowning in debt, Sam Altman will face the same fate as Elizabeth Holmes. At some point his grift of asking for more money, hardware, electricity, water, etc., will be revealed.

Had a random desktop from a mall computer shop that ran Windows ME!

Before that we had some 486 machines with 40MB HDD and Windows 3.5 and IBM DOS…

My first computer that was mine though was a Dell D610 I believe. Lasted 8 years.