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Nordics do have a decent energy policy, mostly covered by nuclear, wind and hydro. To us German fear of nuclear has always seen highly irrational.

For the house burning scenario, a cheap strategy is having one or two old HDD's in USB cases, located somewhere away from your house, in a place you regularly visit and trust security-wise. Then you can just make a habit of dumping the files there whenever visiting. Most important data of mine is safe even if internet goes down and somebody nukes the city I live in, for zero recurring cost.

"LLM clones of eg Photoshop will end up being worthless, like ideas generally. The software will be worthless for the same reason ideas are: they're too easy. Users are hard, software will be (relatively) easy."

I doubt that. If a clone out there offers all the Photoshop's features for free or much lower cost, without additional learning curve, then many professionals will switch to save money.

McDonalds would be gone too if somebody opened a restaurant chain serving similar food for free or 80% lower price. But that's impossible to do profitably, while freeware software has existed for a long, long time.

ADHD is a spectrum, not on/off thing. Someone with milder symptoms may do okay without stimulants, and find help from therapy. Those with worse symptoms typically need the stimulants.

Yet people still die in apartment building fires, usually because they panic when there is a fire in another apartment, leave their apartment, and suffocate to the smoke. And then there are cases where the regulation has failed / not been followed, and the whole building burns down despite best efforts from firefighters.

I've seen all these things happen, even though I live in EU country with strict regulations. I sure sleep better knowing that my apartment has entrance directly to outdoor corridor, and a ladder I can climb down from my balcony if the corridor is somehow blocked. I would never move into a modern apartment building where only escape is through indoor corridors.

I think some guidance is necessary. It's not nice to spend years in university, and then end up unemployed, or working a job that requires no higher education. That is the reality for many young people today.

I will street my children towards something that is at least employable, assuming AI has not completely obliterated job market by then.

Maybe some people will like to have artificial friends with genuine two-way relationship, but I think most of us want artificial servants. Robots that clean our house, keep us company, or maybe even act as romantic partner without asking anything in return. Maybe some of them will feel like friends, but in the end, we are their owners and they are our servants. Genuine friendship requires freedom and autonomy for the other side to walk away if they so choose, and are we really going to give that to our AI bots? I doubt it.

You know, things like coups exist. In many, many other countries leadership as bad as Russia's would have been ousted in a military coup long time ago, and the new regime would have pursued saner policy.

What are we Europeans supposed to do anyway? Negotiate about peace with leadership that isn't interested in peace? If history teaches us anything, it is that Russia's leadership respects only military force.

I'm not blaming ordinary Russians who indeed have very little power over anything, except that significant portion of them who support the war. But I am blaming the oligarchy, the elites who actually have some power, and yet let things continue like this.

Germany maybe, not whole Europe. Nordics, Poland and Baltic states certainly understand that stopping Russia requires hard measures.

It's too bad Eastern Germany never managed to deruzzify itself properly after DDR fell.

NATO supporting Ukraine in their defensive war is horrific in your opinion, but Putin sending hundreds of thousands of young Russian men to die isn't? Your moral compass sounds deeply flawed.

Perhaps Ukraine should have agreed to never join NATO, but I'm not sure whether this would have prevented the war. After all, Putin seems to genuinely think Ukrainians are not real ethnicity, and that the land thus belongs to Russia. From a Finnish point of view, Russians have again and again proved they cannot be trusted. Even during the good period between collapse of the Soviet Union and invasion of Crimea, Russian air force regularly violated our airspace. Intelligence operatives kept buying property that made no financial sense, but was located near military installations or critical infrastructure. Why would a friendly nation do this?

I believe in negotiations and diplomacy with Russia, but ONLY when all that is backed by enough military force. Because that is what Russians ultimately respect. The Soviet Union annexed or enslaved its weaker neighbors into puppet states, and that is what Russia ultimately aims to do. Ukraine is only the first step.

This is why societies should make it as easy as possible for people to retrain / re-educate themselves. I highly doubt most white collar workers graduating today will be able to do what they trained for until retirement age. Programmers may be among first to see serious reduction in employment, but other office workers will follow.

Why exactly do you think LLM'S will be unable to do planning, architecting, code review, interface and API design? Given good enough specs, they absolutely can do these things.

I feel like coding will be dead soon, and what will be left are project management / team lead / product owner kind of jobs where you craft specs and steer AI agents on very high level. I would hardly call that "coding" anymore.

What I dislike of the status quo is being stuck between traditional programmer, and such project management role. With AI coding I can't really get into a flow state anymore, and without flow state it's hard to focus on the details.

For what it's worth, I have server with 128GB of DDR4 running 24/7 on cheapo AM4 consumer board. No issues whatsoever.

How exactly are young people betrayed by the system supposed to get that disposable income? I live in country with highest unemployment rate in OECD. We have tons of people with master's degree unable to find ANY job, let alone something that would fit their education. There's fierce competition for jobs like part-time warehouse worker or cashier.

Only thing I can think of is moving abroad, but sending lots of young people abroad is not very sustainable from a domestic economy perspective.

Well, I've been reading on The Economist how China is seriously struggling with youth unemployment right now. Lots of fresh university graduates are sitting unemployed, or doing manual labor. In my home country (Finland) we have had way below replacement birth rates for a long while now, yet youth unemployment is at all time high.

The problem with low birth rates is assumed to be that there are less workers to take care of the pensioners. But right now it seems like even the few young workers available often aren't needed anymore, thanks to increasing automation of industries. I predict youth unemployment will be made even worse by AI soon enough. So, why do we need children, if capitalist economies don't need workers? Unemployed people do not pay much taxes to sustain the non-working age population.

I believe low birth rates might become a blessing soon enough. It just means less people for governments to take care of when robots and AI take away most jobs.

Algeria and Morocco hardly seem "fairly well-off" countries, considering how many of their citizens prefer moving to the low-birth rate European countries you loathe. High birth rate of Israel is also unsustainable from economic perspective, as it relies mostly on orthodox Jews who on average are much poorer, less educated, and contribute less to the Israeli economy.

I'm not saying fast fall in birth rates isn't a problem, it obviously is. However, nearly all countries that don't have this problem offer much worse quality of life than those which do.

Perhaps, but at least there is material and financial support to Ukraine. I doubt AfD would continue it, or provide it for other EU member states if attacked.

I'm worried of what European defense will look like if some day France, Germany and UK are all ruled by populist parties with historical ties / understanding attitude towards to Russia & skepticism towards NATO and EU. Not good for us here in Eastern frontier of EU.

Traditional parties have failed badly in economic and migration policies, and Russia does its best to exploit this. They can't win on a battlefield against united Europe, but if small Eastern European countries are left without support, then Russia has much better odds against them.

When AI can replace most SWEs, it can cost-effectively build systems that can replace most other white-collar workers as well. It's mainly skills involving physical work that cannot be replaced without major advances in robotics. Anything done with a computer in a office will be gone if SWE is gone.

I've felt the same for a while now. On my free time I have completely stopped building projects where the main motivation is professional learning. I now only build stuff I want or am genuinely interested in, and utilize AI in the process to save time.

Eventually I plan on learning some physical skills, like renovating, working with electronics and plumbing. I doubt robotics will render that useless very quickly.

I would love such a future. I would be perfectly content focusing on my hobbies and playing video games rest of my life. Perhaps the UBI would be sufficient even for a little bit of travel.

As somebody else said already, you care too much. It's not your fault things are progressing slowly. As the stoic quote says, you have only power over your mind, not outside events, like how qualified the dev team or management is. I guess you could suggest some more training for the team, though the impact of that would mostly depend on their attitude towards learning new things, which again is outside your control.

I would just treat the job as a source of paycheck while looking for something better. There are lots of people working jobs like that in slow-moving organizations, most simply don't care as long as they are paid. It's best to find meaning to life from somewhere outside work, such as hobbies.

Coming from Finland, the #1 in EU unemployment rate, I've slowly learned to be happy of the fact I have a job at all.

Higher-end Thinkpads are pretty nice in terms of build quality. Trackpads and screens are worse, but they will physically last just as long.

EU is rich, insulation problem can be handled, especially if we build enough green energy to bring down electricity prices, which makes even poorly insulated houses livable. I live in a Nordic country, and people have survived here for since nearly 10 000 years ago, soon after first ice age ended. If they could do it without any modern tech, Germans, French and the others will be okay.

I'm way more worried about food production.

Banning Russian gas is the right thing to do, and good for long-term energy independence & prices.

I had a similar experience when I was young. Bought a vape and some Cannabis, which probably had really high THC concentration as it tends to have nowadays. Took a bit, didn't feel anything, then took a bit more, and boom, a panic attack. Might even had some hallucinations, I'm not fully sure what was real and what wasn't.

After the experience I felt kind of weird and "slow" for several days. Later I found out that there is also a genetic risk of schizophrenia in my family. No way I'm going to touch anything with THC ever again. I've tried CBD oil though and that was okay, slightly calming effect. But ultimately I prefer beer over that too.

Nordic style social democracy works quite well though. Communism sucks, but too much unregulated Capitalism isn't great either, as we can see in USA and many other countries that suffer from extreme inequality.

I can't see much creativity and innovation in Russia. They sell oil and natural resources & use the money (whatever is not stolen by oligarchs) to fund an unnecessary war which they are losing.

If anything, Russia is a prime example of inefficient allocation of resources.

Probably we can blame higher hygiene standards, or some other environmental factor for it. Forests haven't changed much in past decades.

Here in Finland I've never been affected by any kind of tree pollen at all, but somehow timothy grass pollen gives me horrible symptoms, forcing me to take antihistamine most of the summer. I lived my childhood near farmland and forests, so definitely got exposed to both forms of pollen at early age.

The problem I have is that I find generic code reviews really, really boring. With agents I write less code but read more code that I didn't write myself, which makes the job more boring than it was.

I would rather let AI do the code reviews and focus on test coverage.