andsoitis

And you think this story falls into which category: on- or off-topic?

Since linear ranking only tells one story, more context:

US life expectancy reached a record high of 79 years.

Peers sit at 82.7 years (countries like Japan, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, and Western European nations).

So the U.S. trails peer nations by about 3.7 years, a slight improvement from a peak gap of 4.1 years in 2023 due to recent drops in U.S. mortality rates.

Presence or occasional popularity are not evidence of desirability.

So cool. Add Los Angeles, Cape Town, Florence, Cairo, Athens, Vancouver, São Paulo.

Actually, shouldn't it be possible to auto-generate any city via AI on demand?

> Communism is better than capitalism.

Moral high horse neighing.

> then new work is done on top of stuff that "hits" in a way no one anticipated.

Indeed. And when you have freedom to play, you are able to find new stepping stones that you didn't anticipate. And you can combine stepping stones in new ways to make new discoveries.

Greatness cannot be planned.

Civilization is what happens when strangers believe the same story.

> Ignoring for the moment issues of what "counts" as open, won't open models rapidly advance due to stuff like this in ways that it's less possible for the proprietary ones to do? This is exactly how Linux & Wikipedia, for example, overtook their "frontiers", right?

I suspect the advantage that catapulted Linux ahead of the establishment was less technical potential and talent and more organizational advantage. That's not to diminish the technical talent of the Linux crew, but them being unencumbered gave them more degrees of freedom. The rest is history.

So as long as the AI companies don't succumb to "big company" dynamics, they can outlead. To wit: Open AI and Anthropic are kicking Google's ass.

It's not you. It's Siri. They are an empty shell.

> the creative output of the anthropic models is far ahead of openai

other than anecdote, do you have a comparison table or something that I can refer to to see this clearly?

While I notice ad hoc announcements from these companies, I don't have an overall pulse and tally that gives me an objective perspective.

> The problem: thinking models think too much

Analysis paralysis stifles not just human intelligence, but other intelligences too.

This is the way.

Companies building frontier AI ("industry") can put more constraints on themselves that are stricter than what the government puts on them, leaving non-frontier companies able to compete and take bigger swings.

What we don't want is this self-regulation to be adopted by the government because it will then stifle competition, locking in the companies at the frontier. For those companies that are trailing, we want to create more of a Wild West so that they can challenge the status quo.

I, for one, have shifted from being policeman to creator and explorer. It is so much more rewarding and less stressful.

> We have to conclude

That’s not the most parsimonious explanation even if the assumption it rests on (anthropic ahead of OpenAI) is true, which we don’t have proof of.

Concur. Us hackers who got started with BASIC had a more fun and creative ethos.

Here are 3 lines that capture something profound about Lisp: code can manufacture code that manufactures code:

———————

(defmacro twice (form)

  `(progn ,form ,form))

(twice (print "Reality"))

———————

twice doesn’t execute its argument twice. It rewrites the program itself before execution into:

(progn

    (print "Reality") 

    (print "Reality"))

> You are in flow and the brain wants to move along but ai-inference becomes a bottleneck to the extend that we accept the garbage it gives as long the tests passes and loose the flow

The art lies in being in the flow at an altitude higher than the code. Once you discover that stream that exists at a higher altitude, the flow is even more exhilarating than that at the code level. It is almost liminal.

> fascinatingly softened description of both, particularly Lula. Something related to his tacit support for violent far-left terrorism, vote buying or corruption would have trumped "doddering" for me.

My macroexpansion is: he is a democrat, and sound on the environment. But he has done precious little to unleash growth or restrain spending. He has failed to push economic reforms, bar a sales-tax simplification, and calls fiscal discipline “nonsense”. His government is on course to end the term with the largest public-debt-interest bill in a quarter of a century.

Brazil is turning its back on the future. Its next president will either be a vengeful nepotism-baby (Bolsonaro) or a doddering leftie (Lula).

No.

You have transmogrified the conversation from one of comparing the US and Europe (where we started) to Left/Right in Europe.

I don't get it.

We're on the same page. Yes, young Americans are more likely than young Europeans to have traveled intercontinentally / across the ocean.

The headline is clickbait.

> I've met a number of young western Europeans while traveling there who are jealous of the ability of Americans to afford that travel, while feeling like it's more out of reach to them to find a job that would let them.

The statistics tell a story different from those anecdotes: young Europeans are considerably more internationally traveled than young Americans, probably by something approaching a factor of ~2 in the likelihood of crossing national borders in a given year. But they're not necessarily twice as geographically well-traveled. Much of the difference is due to Europe's small countries, open borders, dense transportation network, and cheap short-haul international travel.

Look up what percentage of Americans between 25 - 34 have never traveled outside their own country, vs. Europeans in western or Northern European countries.

etc.

> Is that why they're electing far-right parties at an unprecedented rate?

According to a recent Guardian article, the reasons are immigration and the far-right's ability to masterfully tell a story how things were better in the idealized past.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/24/nearly-quar...

Perception is reality in people's minds and therefor shapes reality, but it isn't necessarily true.

We're laid back.

> But Europe has a population larger than USA, shouldn't they at least be close to us in leading edge companies?

An economy is there for the people. If that larger number of people have a higher quality of life than in the US, aren't they wealthier?

And if they do it for less money, aren't they wiser?

> They invented the Industrial Revolution.

And a lot more, my friend! You're welcome.

An economy is there for the people. The people in Europe seem to have a higher quality of life than those on the other side of the Atlantic, don't you think?

> No one seems to be building anything

The article is literally about ASML, the company that builds the most complex machine ever built by humans.

I can pick a couple of other companies across a wide variety of industries if you'd like.

What are good Persian programming communities that would benefit from this news?