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bildungon The role of Amazon fires in the record atmospheric CO₂ growth in 2024

I think we witnessed a profound paradigm shift last week - China is the new global driving force to avert climate catastrophy. The probably peaked CO2 output last year. Last yeear they reached their 2030 target for renewables as share of total energy production. Almost 60% of new cars sold there are electric. And China produced more PV cells in the first half of this year alone than have been installed in the US in sum, ever.

And now they stated a public CO2 reduction goal for the first time.

I suspect people in the US haven't really noticed this as much because the 100%+ tariffs on cars and PV isolate the country from the dramatic changes happening everywhere else. Here in Germany I can buy 2 kWp in panels plus an inverter for under 400€.

bildungon How to make sense of any mess

From the start of the book:

"Each time you see a word that is highlighted, [...] it means that this term is a lexicon enabled term. By clicking on that term, you will see a page listing all other uses of that term within the book."

bildungon A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages

If you want to improve the lives of many, by all means go for it, I think that is a wonderful ambition to have in live and something I strive for, too!

But we are talking about an ad company here, trying to branch out into ai to sell more ads, right? Meta existing is without a doubt a net negative for mankind.

bildungon Donate to the Treasury to help pay down the $36.7T public debt

It seems you are more in need of an API to block the government to willingly reduce their income. The US spending per capita isn't that high compared to other developed countries, the US problem is the repeated decisions to have the wealthy citizens not contribute in proportion to their wealth.

bildungon Distillation makes AI models smaller and cheaper

Well compared to the human brain LLMs do approximately zero work. An LLM neuron is at least 3 orders of magnitude less complex than a neuron in the human brain - and this factor only accounts for the neuronal instrinsics we currently know of.

bildungon 'It cannot provide nuance': UK experts warn AI therapy chatbots are not safe

I you look at the horrible things that happened in medical history, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study it's pretty clear why the ethics care more about not causing harm...

bildungon Only Teslas exempt from new auto tariffs thanks to 85% domestic content rule

> Why should we send $240 million to Zambia? Is it the United States taxpayers' responsibility to treat all of the developing world's problems?

If you see someone drowning in the river, and you stand by and are a good swimmer, is it not your responsibility to help?

> There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.

US Foreign Aid was a trivial amount of money buying much soft power around the globe. China for comparison has almost double the foreign aid amount the US had, relative to GNI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...

bildungon How a $2k 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured

Your scenario is more like a best-case option, actually. I mean currently there are only 13M people employed in manufacturing in the US [0], while output is at an all time high [1]. The vast majority of this manufacturing is dependent on components imported from other countries - which just got much more expensive. So even if employment in manufacuturing would increase by 20% (unrealistic IMO), that would only translate to 2.6M people - while at the same time losing multiples of that in better-paid jobs in other industries, mostly services.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...

bildungon US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU

Because that would be an obvious loophole and has been made illegal almost everywhere (i.e. you can't have a business that isn't aiming for profitability).

bildungon US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU

You get all of it returned. 100% of the VAT you paid on things you as a company bought you'll get back from the tax office.

And when selling products, you'll send 100% of the VAT collected from consumers to the tax office.

VAT doesn't affect a company (besides the bookkeeping).

bildungon U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

But if that is true, why does the EU actually has almost double the entrepreneurs per capita the US has, as I have linked?

> Having to move the goalposts to the 1850s to make a point about relevant European businesses should be alarming to you.

Please actually have a look at the EU list and click through to the companies. They are all directly linked in Wikipedia. The majority is from the 1980s and younger.

bildungon U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

These just compare market cap. As the US economy is disproportionally financialized, that outcome is hardly surprising: This was just measuring market financialization by proxy. I mean two of the largest on the left, Google and Meta, are essentially just ad companies.

Now compare companies by actual revenue:

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

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

I omitted the 50 years distinction because, unsurprisingly, the companies in the US are younger.

None of these are actually relevant for founders, however, as even in the US you only have a couple dozen large cap companies, but millions of founders.

What is relevant is the share of employers per capita, as that shows us how many founders actually exist.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.EMP.MPYR.ZS?most_rec...

bildungon Brain scans of infants reveal the moment we start making memories

There's research that has shown that stress in the early years of life delays development of the hippocampus - and without sufficiently developed hippocampus you can't have these kinds of memories.

So the generalization ("all kids") is wrong, but some people, being exposed to toxins or stress sources (fetal alcohol syndrome, cigarettes, lead, premature birth, asthma, ...), can really only develop memories later. 10 years is a bit much, though...

bildungon Brain scans of infants reveal the moment we start making memories

"The early years are chaotic. The brain undergoes extensive rewiring. This makes it a difficult to form lasting memories."

That is reduced too much from the actual state of research, presumably for the sake of accessibility. We obviously already learn before the hippocampus starts to really develop (18-24 months). But what episodic memory means is that the learned things have no episodic context, i.e. they are learned and applied more broadly, not just in the situation where they were learned in the first place. Learning in the early years isn't "chaotic", it is just very generalized.

bildungon Tesla deliveries down 43% in Europe while EVs are up 31%

Teslas market share in the EU is currently at around 15% of EVs - Musk hardly "won" that market.

The only EV market where that looks to be true is the US, which has a protectionist policy of 100% tariffs in place to keep out the competition.

bildungon Supply constraints do not explain house price, quantity growth across US cities

Feel free to explain to explain to these economists what they did wrong in their paper

bildungon Tesla loses ground as Chinese EVs dominate global markets

It's tariffs. The US has a 100% tariff on Chinese EV already since 2024.

bildungon This is no world for an axolotl

> We’ve seen Germany turning to lignite to heat homes due to the Russia Ukraine conflict.

No, this is false, as you can see here lignite consumption actually dropped: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

It also doesn't make sense because the installed heating infrastructure for gas almost never can't also burn lignite.

bildungon How far neuroscience is from understanding brains (2023)

> CBT as proposed and studied in lab settings can't really be applied in the wild like most evidence based therapists try to,

Because that part is wrong, apart from the underlying inner working being dissected in labs (the cognitive science part), the therapy part it is well studied in the wild - and it works.

> and the results of therapy I come across always seem extremely underwhelming.

So you mean anecdotes? Of course you recognize the underwhelming results - the people where it worked well are less noticable, by definition.

> Maybe for some cases like severe phobias there is something to be solved, but do we really need to be paying thousands of dollars a year

That you have to pay money has been a decision of the society you reside in. It doesn't have to be this way, and in fact it isn't in most industrialized countries.

> for a therapist to say "hey, maybe if you'd invest more in hobbies, social relationships and a healthy lifestyle you would feel better"?

That is a strawman, not CBT.

bildungon Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

Looking at how they earned their 100s of CVEs, script kiddie almost looks like a compliment

bildungon How the U.K. broke its own economy

Here's your wakup call: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/worlds-largest-sodium-io...

bildungon Tesla sales in Europe down 45% in January

If you look even deeper, at people's actual attitudes[1], you'll see that far-right positions are approx. equally distributed in Eastern and Western Germany - the kind of people voting AfD in Eastern Germany (currently) just vote CDU in Western Germany.

[1] = Leipziger Autoritarismus-Studie, https://www.boell.de/de/leipziger-autoritarismus-studie

bildungon Tesla sales in Europe down 45% in January

Apparently overall EV sales went up over 37%: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/europe...

bildungon Breaking into apartment buildings in five minutes on my phone

How does it work in iOS?

On Android User A taps on the wifi they are connected to and gets a QR code, and User B taps on the icon for scanning wifi QR codes, so one tap each once you are in your wifi settings.

bildungon How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

EU car manufacturers are also heavily subsidized. Subsidies are really hard do compare because you can structure them very differently and still achieve similar results (think direct loans or land leases, lower taxes, state sponsored infrastructure like rail, electricity, water, large state-sponsored orders, research grants, workforce education, consumer grants for EV vehicles, lower taxes for EV vehicles etc.).

Here's an article stating VW got over €9b over 8 years, for example: https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/dax-subventionen-gel...

If that is true, BYD actually gets about the same as VW.

bildungon What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

It's a strategy, called Starve the Beast. The idea is to collect taxes, which then forces the current government to cut expenditures. The current Trump administration is no difference, this is what all the talk about government bloat is about.

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

It's pretty clever in its cruelty: Once you have cut taxes, it essentially doesn't matter which party wins the next election: The have to gut expenditures anyway.

bildungon NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders

Obviously not, otherwise the dynamics would be the same in other developed countries.

bildungon Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

If it was faster with ollama, then you most probably just downloaded a different model (hard to recognize with ollama). Ollama only adds UX to llama.cpp, and nothing compute-wise.

bildungon Complete hardware and software setup for running Deepseek-R1 locally. ($6000)

Thanks! TIL.

bildungon Complete hardware and software setup for running Deepseek-R1 locally

I think the point of the two socket solution is the doubled memory bandwith. You propose using just a single one of the same CPU, or am I missing something?