clarionbell

This seriously needs to be repeated again and again. It's not that Mittelstand got greedy. Neither did most other small and medium companies in Europe and US. They gradually became less competitive by overregulation, high input costs, and complete lack of state support. The last sometimes bordering on hostility.

I won't discount the possibility of someone getting into this of their own free will out of hand. But I seriously doubt that it's going to remain this way long term. We have recent examples from Cambodia and Myanmar after all.

It would be nice if that led to lower prices. All the comparisons I could find are showing Germany near the top for electricity price.

https://energyfactbook.com/world/electricity-prices-by-count...

Pretty much. Average household doesn't see this though, not directly. The industry on the other hand does, very much so.

Who is making all those solar cells and batteries? I'll give you a hint, it's not a European country.

I feel like there is an unspoken assumption of long term maintainability when it comes to LLM generated software. We are still very early in this, so I don't want to make assumptions. In principle, it shouldn't be impossible to both write and maintain stable software, purely with agents.

At least, I'm not aware of any actual reasons, backed by a proper theory.

On the other hand. I've noticed some persistent issues with code generated by agents, especially poorly supervised agents. If engineers become less vigilant, agents never get to the point of not needing supervision and juniors never pick up required skills, this could lead to real trouble.

Cultural revolution?

Not really. I've found that they often believe that they understand the code. They obviously don't. But they do feel like they do.

I can see lot of potential in this, but I somehow doubt it's going to be used for good.

Sometimes I feel that EU has an unhealthy obsession with safety, at expense of almost everything else. This is one of those times.

Not really. EU is actually trying to decouple. But in many cases there are not any homegrown alternatives to support. There is not a single company in EU that could replace, even a considerable part, of software stack provided by Google and Apple.

And, unless the regulatory environment changes., there probably never will be.

I like how balanced their energy mix is. It is very obvious that China is optimizing for capacity and availability. There isn't really a push for clean energy sources for political, or climate, reasons. They are deployed when it makes sense, backed up by robust coal and nuclear sources.

In Europe, we approach energy generation as a political, or climate problem. We are building solar and wind power sources, not to make energy cheaper, or to make grid more resilient, but to fulfill an ideological goal.

The results are, not great, to be honest. The energy prices have increased substantially, and are now driving our chemical industry bankrupt.

Edit: I do not dispute the climate change. I am only highlighting impacts of current policy.

Good luck convincing old building protection pressure groups about it (yes, around here these people are real and have power). Not to mention the bureau actually in charge of landmark protection (in some areas everything is a landmark).

People underestimate how difficult it is to seek buyers for the amount of produce we are talking about here.

Farmers are specialists at growing things, not at moving them across great distances, marketing them to dozens small buyers and or starting up packing plants from scratch. They don't have enough trucks, people or packaging machines to move them around.

Maybe, they can take some portion for local use. But the rest will spoil, and rest of the land will be effectively unused, and a burden. The best option is to cut that as much as possible, and plant something else that actually sells.

Of course, people who never approached agriculture will be appalled at this, and call it great injustice.

You may be surprised, but there are countries in Europe where gun ownership is relatively wide spread and it just works. Czech Republic for example has it access to guns guaranteed in Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms[1].

One of the reasons why it works, is that there are reasonable conditions. For example, regular health checks, strict registration, passing gun safety examination and, last but not least, not being a criminal. And it works. Despite steadily rising number of guns among people, it is one of most safe countries in the world.

Canada, Finland, Austria and many other countries, prove, that you don't have to impose blanket bans to have a safe country. You just need sensible laws.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic

Please don't buy into that stereotype. People with aspergers are capable of getting sarcasm. Especially if it's over the top like this.

That is disappointing. One would say that with all the budget and compute, Google would be able to create something that beats methods from 70s. Maybe we are hitting some hard limits.

Maybe it would be better to train an LLM with various tuning methodologies and make a dedicated ARIMA agent. You throw in data, some metadata and requested window of forecast. Out comes parameters for "optimal" conventional model.

Pinned to 1.74.9, so not compromised.

This has a lot of potential. Especially if the compiled "code" can be efficiently shared between models of the same architecture. That would easily overshadow LoRa and finetuning in general.

He didn't give lectures at Vatican, not even at the Catholic university close to Vatican, and even Catholic University of America didn't have anything to do with it.

Modding is one of the better ways to get into coding. I myself have fond memories restoring cut content to Fallout: New Vegas.

It's unfortunate that modding support is relatively rare among game developers. Blizzard used to do quite well in this regard, in their W3 era. And tools they packaged with SC2 weren't bad either. But nothing since then.

Obviously there is Valve, that goes without saying.

Recently, CD Project did make some moves in that direction, but nothing close to what Valve is offering.

You could make similar site about much of Europe to be honest.

It seems to me that there is a fundamental disconnect, between what society needs to function and what some societies are willing to tolerate. Almost everything we take for granted, like potable water, air conditioning, personal computers or long distance transportation, relies on industries generating some sort of externalities.

Regulating these industries is necessary. But we have reached the point, where the regulation makes many of them almost impossible. This has several effects.

First, the society is now dependent on delivery of these dirty products. This is obviously problematic if there is a major crisis that disrupts supply chains, or if those who manufacture them are no longer willing to deliver.

Second, working class collapses. Manufacturing jobs are one of the more stable available. They are generally unionized, or are conductive to unionization. This is unlike service sector jobs. White collar professions can mostly cope. But those who were already disadvantaged find themselves in an even worse position.

Third, the externalities move in locations with less oversight. This can, obviously, cause greater pollution and environmental degradation globally. Further, delivery of the manufactured goods across great distances adds to carbon footprint. This, again, leads to greater environmental toll.

Taken together, benefits of overregulating "polluting" industry to oblivion, are at best local and temporary.

I would also like to note, that the collapse of manufacturing jobs can be easily linked to increased political radicalization.

That being said, it's not all gloom and doom. I firmly believe, that as the impacts of this approach are felt more and more, there will be a push for sensible deregulation. Europe is already leading the way, weakening or delaying some of the more absurd regulation schemes.[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

When people can't afford homes, food and medicine, environment ceases to be a priority.

It's mostly a question of when, not if.

From what I understand, in USA schools are accountable, and funded, locally. This puts more direct pressure on educators not to fail children.

Recently, there has also been a movement to drop standards based grading and advanced classes, under guise of equity. That I find more troubling.

France was not a major imperial power at the time. It was much smaller than today, lacking Savoy and much of Burgundy for start, with Normandy and many other areas only nominally part of it and technically under control of English king (who was just a duke in France, but that changed only a very little on the battlefield).

Crusades in middle east started as an attempt of Eastern Roman empire (although they just called it Roman empire / Basileia Romaion) to recover from recent advances of Muslim invaders in Anatolia (modern Turkey). But turned into an overwhelmingly religious effort in the west. The first crusade especially was largely ill organized and chaotic affair. Where on one end of the spectrum you had nobles arriving with somewhat well equipped forces and idea of what to do, and on the other you had pilgrims, with whatever they just picked up in their hands and not answering commands of anyone, but their priest.

The economic side of things came into play after the process started and gradually became dominant. But it didn't start like it.

Finally. Interest of France in Mongols can be easily explained precisely by the influence crusades had on French and other Christian elites in Europe. The initial victory of 1st Crusade was followed by a series of setbacks. Muslims gradually begun to push crusaders out, the fact that crusaders started to fight amongst themselves helped a lot.

And then mongols arrived, almost from nowhere, crushed one of most powerful Muslim states at the time, and didn't stop there. It did seem like an immense opportunity, and in a way it was. If French, or someone else in Christendom, could convince khans that some form of cooperation is possible, or even better, if Mongols converted to Christianity, there would be a decent chance to not only save Jerusalem, but to move on to Egypt (still majority Christian).

You are aware that China is building dozens of new coal power plants right? Just this year they have commissioned 50.[1] Granted, it's less than before, but still much more than other developed countries.

[1] https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/china-building-c...

He would be among those who lack "healthy inclination to skepticism" in my book. I do not doubt his brilliance. Personally, I think he is more intelligent than I am.

But, I do have a distinct feeling that his enthusiasm can overwhelm his critical faculties. Still, that isn't exactly rare in our circles.