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North Korea has nukes though. Iran doesn't, and probably never will.

Yeah, foreign intervention is probably the best option at this point. If the elites are willing to murder tends of thousands of innocent people, then I see no moral issues with foreign intervention to get rid of IRGC and current government using any means necessary.

Yeah, over here in Finland we have pretty cold winters, but heat pumps are still very popular and deliver value most of the year.

Here in Finland our government decided that best place to store national election related data (including the votes) is AWS data center in Sweden.

Looking forward to Jeff deciding which party wins next year!

If you want to save a ton on cooling costs, wouldn't it be just easier to build those data centers in Alaska? Or if they don't have to be in America, there are lots of options in Northern Europe with better infrastructure than Greenland.

But of course you're right, really it's mostly about map-painting.

Solar panels are being built like crazy in really poor developing countries like Pakistan, simply because it's cheaper than the alternatives. If they can afford it, average American surely should too.

One can only admire China's progress in this area. These days, if I got to choose between American and Chinese product, I always choose the latter for ethical reasons. I don't want to support anything American as long as its regime remains a puppet to fossil fuel companies.

The thing is, not all edible plants like higher temps. Then there's the issue of changing weather patterns, more extreme weather, drought. Agriculture is easier when weather stays predictable and pattern.

Also, it's entirely possible Europe will get a new ice age as a result of global warming, as it might cause AMOC to collapse. Thus, it appears global warming is causing more harm than good to food production.

Yep, building a wrapper for LLM API is never going to build a sustainable business, there's absolutely zero moat. You need more, preferably physical world elements / something else that increases the switching costs.

Yea, the future is either UBI, or employing a very large number of people in public sector, doing jobs that are useful, but not necessary something free market capitalism values right now.

Either way, governments need to heavily tax corporations benefiting from AI to make it possible.

I don't hate Windows 11, I just don't give a shit about it. I can run nearly any software I might possibly need professionally on MacOS or Linux. The latter is also so good at gaming, that I don't really need Windows for that either.

At this point, Windows is just something I occasionally dual boot from my laptop, for the rare piece of software that I can't use on MacOS or Linux easily.

Yea, in 29 Germany, France and UK will have elections, and far-right parties with anti-EU and partially pro-Russian attitudes are leading the polls. If they win, there will be hardly any unified "Europe" left. Why would I then trust Germany ruled by AfD over MAGA-America?

At least with China there's some consistency. I can reliably trust them not to give a shit about me or my privacy, and to further their geopolitical interests. Meanwhile populists in the West aren't really even acting rationally from geopolitical perspective, they're more unpredictable.

Yep, it's way better to overbuild than underbuild. Lack of houses for young people looking to start families / move in for better jobs has big negative societal impacts that we're only starting to see.

It may be illegal, but shady stuff certainly happens in EU too.

Recently investigative journalists here in Finland found out that a significant percentage of job postings over here are indeed fake. Unsurprisingly, worst offenders were recruitment companies, which sometimes listed fake jobs to generate a pool of applicants they can later offer to their clients. Doing this is easy, as no law requires these companies to disclose who their clients are when creating job postings. It's also very common for same position to get posted multiple times.

Other than wasting applicant's time, this behavior also messes up many statistics, which use job postings to determine how many open positions there are available. Basically the chances of finding a job are even worse for unemployed people than stats would imply.

Median income doesn't tell much if you don't factor in the cost of living. My salary sucks compared to what I would earn in America, but when I factor in things like free healthcare, daycare and higher level education, I'm better off here.

Yep, almost always in rich world "labor shortage" = I can't / don't want to pay a livable wage.

Over here in Europe my country has a sky high unemployment, yet picking tomatoes is mostly done by immigrants from Southeast Asia. The pay for that hard work is so bad that most natives won't bother, but it's okay if your plan is to save for a few years with absolute minimum budget, and then return to somewhere with much lower cost of living. I guess it's just the same with Latin American migrants in America.

Japan has historically been pretty anti-immigration, so they might prefer robots over this arrangement.

"I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that serve their customers better."

I'm not sure most of those organizations will have many customers left, if every white collar admin job has been automated away, and all those people are sitting unemployed with whatever little income their country's social safety net provides.

Automating away all the "boring jobs" leads to an economic collapse, unless you find another way for those people to earn their living.

"The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value."

I wish corporations really acted this rationally.

At least where I live hospitals fired most secretaries and assistants to doctors a long time ago. The end result? High-paid doctors spending significant portion of their time on administrative and bureaucratic tasks that were previously handled by those secretaries, preventing them from seeing as many patients as they otherwise would. Cost savings may look good on spreadsheet, but really the overall efficiency of the system suffered.

Here in Finland we have the world's highest coffee consumption per capita, and also long, dark winters. Is it a coincidence? I don't think so.

I've found combination of coffee and light therapy to be quite effective against seasonal affective disorder (the kind of temporary depression where lack of sunlight is a significant cause).

I can understand the use in agriculture, but I've never understood why anyone would use the stuff on their own lawn. Who cares if there are some weeds growing, when you can cut them down with lawnmower anyway?

Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to keep weeds away.

What is the point of removing weeds from those cracks in the first place? Do they cause some kind of physical harm to creatures or objects that move on that concrete or asphalt surface?

Older generations have no more integrity. Just look at the last US presidential election results - older generations were more likely to vote for Trump than younger ones. I don't think a person with integrity is likely to vote for such an openly corrupt conman.

Nah, the reality is that people have always been greedy and selfish, gaming the system where they can.

I had a work-issued Dell Latitude for several years (2021 model, 11th gen Intel). Overall it was a mediocre machine, but battery life really sucked (like, max 2 hours of light browsing). Several years older Thinkpad T480s gave me way longer usage. Older Dell models had better general build quality IMO, but also problems with expanding batteries.

For personal stuff just dual boot my old Thinkpad, at work I use Macbook.

I live in Finland, with over 10% unemployment according to official statistics (second highest in EU, just after Spain). From what I can tell, things really suck especially for fresh grads. There's fierce competition for jobs like cashier at supermarket, hundreds of applications for one position is normal. Lots of fresh grads with bachelor's or master's degree compete for those jobs too, since they can't find anything better. Also, of the few open positions, many are the kind of "rental work" that offer only limited hours a week, at unpredictable times.

So, this is what an objectively bad job market looks like in Europe.

"I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT."

I'm not sure that really is the case. Most non-techies I know use ChatGPT far less than they use Google search, let alone various social media apps they're addicted to.

Perhaps it is a threat to Google search, but I can't see how it's going to be threat to ad revenue from Meta, Youtube etc - the services that are actually addictive due to the content they serve. At least for me there's absolutely nothing addictive about ChatGPT. It's just a tool that helps me solve certain types of problems, not something I enjoy to use.

Yep, the lack of commons sense is sometimes very evident.

For instance, one of these popular generative AI services refused to remove copyright watermark from an image when asked directly. Then I told it that the image has weird text artifacts on it, and asked it to remove them. That worked perfectly.

The pipeline thing may have annoyed Russia, but it was the Maidan revolution which resulted in the invasion of Crimea. Russia simply doesn't like having neighbours that aren't its puppets. When Ukrainians got rid of Yanukovych, Ukraine stopped being a Russian puppet, which annoyed Putin very much.

Russia has a long, long history of being mean to its neighbours that choose to pursue independent policy. As an example, Finland and Baltic states have been subject to countless of intentional airspace violations since the collapse of the Soviet Union, even before the Ukrainian war.

There's a middle-ground between a big city and full countryside.

I lived my childhood in a place with about 4000 people in it. School, friends and everything else I needed was within walking, or at least biking distance. My parents didn't have to drive me everywhere. Obviously there weren't as many possible hobbies and events as in big cities, but mobility wasn't an issue.

It's about time to start preparing for global geoengineering. Spraying our atmosphere with stuff that reflects light would buy us time to get emissions under control, and help avoiding the worst scenarios. Best of all, we know it works, thanks to emissions from maritime traffic and the spike in temperature rise after they got cleaner.

"If you understand everything the LLM wrote then you’re holding it wrong."

If you're using LLM to build production code, then yes, you should very much understand everything the LLM wrote.