“If you are an exec at a dominant company with a growth stock, you have to live in constant fear that the market will decide that you're not likely to grow any further. Which is why growth stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video, or cryptocurrency, or NFTs, or Metaverse, or AI.”
—The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-studio-rdma-over-thunderbolt-5 – if you were still looking for a gift for that special Mac / AI nerd in your life…
TL;DR: ChatGPT 4o “Deep Research” saved the day and helped me secure a nice stash.
We are camping in Sweden this summer. Managed to pack everything including possibly the biggest tent I’ve ever seen into our car, including the kids, and generally having a great time.
One detail I overlooked in the prep was ensuring we had either a sufficient supply or good availability of the special gas containers required by our camping stove.
If you’ve never given this any thought I can’t blame you, but there a many different types of gas cartridges – and even though most are using very similar butane/propane mix gas, there are several connection types that aren’t compatible with each other. A win for free markets I guess.
Our lock-in into the Campingaz “easy clic” patented system. traces back to camping at least 20 years. Initially had just the single burner, then added a gas light accessory in this system, then a 2-burner stove and here we are in 2025, still locked into a proprietary system for cooking our meals.
In concept, these canisters are kind of convenient. An advantage over many older ‘puncture once’ style systems is that you can disconnect and re-use across devices. They are widely available in southern Europe so I never really had cause to look further.
Until now: to our surprise, they are not generally available in camping stores in Sweden. Nor in any of the other usual places like big supermarkets or DIY stores. In Sweden, Weber and Primus seem to have a lock on the market. They use what I believe is called a EN417 fitting
There exist various adapters to use Easy Clic devices with other, more common fittings. If you think ahead, this might be one to put on your packing list to allow more flexibility. You’ll want to have an idea of the fitting for butane/propane mix canisters in your destination region to select the best option. Example adapter to MSF-1a Connection or Lindal Valve Connection. If you’re feeling brave you could also go direct to China
Screenshot
Now, for our purposes, since we’re already on the first campsite and quickly running out of gas, it seemed easiest to accept the challenge of finding a local supplier. DuckDuckGo showed that Reddit and other forums have quite a few discussion threads of people with this same challenge, and helpfully one had a link to Campingaz’ website Store Finder page.
Now for reasons I don’t quite understand vendor websites rarely offer a great experience. This one lives up to that expectation and the (Google powered) map doesn’t even load at all for me, but at least it gives me a list of retail locations near Goteborg, around 45 mins drive away.
Unfortunately; one shop seamed to be no longer in business, one only opened on Fridays between 10-16 and the final option listed, Hornbach (chain of home-improvement/diy stores), were fresh out of stock in all their nearby locations (although I considered to 250km drive to Malmo for a moment). Note to self: more internet research could have saved me at least one drive out to figure this out).
Back to the internet. Searching for the actual product name (CV470 site:.se) shows a scattering of stores across Sweden. The good part: they exist. The bad part: It is hard work to manually cross reference these search results, digging into store location and stock availability, and figuring out the proximity to my campsite. Remember, Sweden is a big place.
This is where ChatGPT actually proofed super useful. On a whim; I asked to do a ‘deep research’ for this product near my location. It took ten minutes, appeared to search for the different retailers and ultimately came up with several options – one only 25km away with 6 units in stock. I’m pretty sceptical of many AI use-cases but proofed to be a great timesaver.
If you want to avoid ChatGPT and the like at all cost, my advice would be to look for either boating- or camper specialist stores – they seem the most likely candidates.
Marcin is a hero – his attention to detail and enthusiasm are infectious; whether he’s writing about abandoned rail infra in SF, obscure movies (Sneakers!) or vintage typography. This is a gem showcasing (interactively! with VMs in your browser!!) the evolution of Mac preferences UI.
Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.
“After careful consideration, we’ve made the difficult decision to phase out Pocket — our read-it-later and content discovery app. This includes the Pocket Web, Android, iOS, and macOS apps, as well as the Pocket browser extensions.”
“No, I don’t use LLMs for writing the text on this very blog, which I suspect has now become a default assumption for people reading an article written by an experienced LLM user. My blog is far too weird for an LLM to properly emulate. My writing style is blunt, irreverent, and occasionally cringe: even with prompt engineering plus few-shot prompting by giving it examples of my existing blog posts and telling the model to follow the same literary style precisely, LLMs output something closer to Marvel movie dialogue. But even if LLMs could write articles in my voice I still wouldn’t use them due of the ethics of misrepresenting authorship by having the majority of the work not be my own words. Additionally, I tend to write about very recent events in the tech/coding world that would not be strongly represented in the training data of a LLM if at all, which increases the likelihood of hallucination.”
This man takes reading high-quality content very seriously and takes the time to make us all part of the process. I’m envious of the dedication.
Hans de Zwart is a researcher and lecturer at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS). As a philosopher, he focuses on the ethics and philosophy of technology. He is currently pursuing a PhD in political philosophy at Radboud University titled A Neorepublican Perspective on Automated Decision-making. He is a member of the Ethics Commission for Research at the AUAS.
