kelnos

Does 28k-30k in the US get you the same (or better) quality of life than 24k-26k gets you in Europe?

I doubt that; I expect a European on 24k is living better than an American on 30k. But that also depends on where: I'm sure 24k will get you farther in, say, Sofia, Bulgaria, than in Paris or Berlin. Same is true of different places in the US.

"$100k" means nothing without knowing the cost of living in the particular place a person lives. As an extreme example, $100k is not "affluent" if you live in a US city like San Francisco or New York. If you want to keep your housing expenses to a reasonable percentage of your income in those places, you're going to be living with several roommates in a small apartment in an old building in an undesirable neighborhood.

Even outside the most expensive cities, we have lots of affluent suburbs throughout the US, and I guarantee you those households have to earn quite a bit more than $100k/yr in order to live there.

Good luck if you're a family of four making $100k in one of these places. Well, you aren't in one of those places; you live somewhere much cheaper.

Your numbers are just wrong, then. The US federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and 19 US states are at or below that number. That's a hair above $15k/yr. That's quite a lot less than €40k/yr (~$45k/yr).

Let's talk about that $45k/yr. That's an hourly wage of $21.63. No state in the entirety of the US has a minimum wage that high. The current max is Washington, DC (not a state, but they also set their own) at $18.40, which comes out to under $39k.

That's all for hourly work. In the US, there is no minimum for salaried work. If you agree to be paid $1/yr for your work, that's what you get.

So, the minimum hourly wage where you live is absolutely higher than the US, nearly triple that of much of it.

It's absolutely true.

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...

These are not people obstructing or harboring fugitives. They're people who ICE believed "looked foreign" (aka weren't white) and ignored them when they said they were US citizens. They spent days locked up simply because their skin is too brown and they speak with an accent.

It's absolutely disgusting. Educate yourself about what's actually happening out there.

I don't think we're talking about perception though. Europeans can certainly perceive their privacy rights to be greater than they actually are, but that doesn't mean those rights are inferior to that of Americans. Outside of things like the GDPR (which is more about data held by corporations and not the government), I don't know all that much about privacy laws in various European countries (and I expect they vary quite a lot country to country), so I don't know either way.

As for the US, 1A doesn't guarantee any form of privacy. 5A does, but in the very narrow sense of not requiring you to incriminate yourself. 4A is indeed about privacy, but it feels like those protections are constantly under fire, and SCOTUS regularly rules against private citizens who believe the government has run roughshod over their 4A protections.

Beyond that, judges seem to rubber-stamp surveillance warrants all the time, and it's currently very legal for law enforcement agencies to purchase private data on citizens from private businesses that have managed to collect it through whatever means. What's the point of the need to get a warrant before tracking someone's movements if the police can just pay Google or T-Mobile for location data? And don't get me started on Flock... they're a government surveillance agency without the "government" part.

Then there's the border search exemption, which is just nuts. Fortunately it seems some federal judges are sane and think the government shouldn't be allowed to trawl through our phones at the airport, but those rulings are not universal across the US at this point. And if and when that sort of case ends up in SCOTUS's lap, I don't trust them to do the right thing.

Frankly I think the US's privacy posture (when it comes to people keeping things private from the government) is pretty bad. Maybe it's still better then Europe, but that's still nothing to celebrate.

That's... not what a metaphor is.

As counterpoint, though, I've heard some absolutely bonkers impressions of the US made by some Europeans. And that's not isolated; there seem to be lots of Europeans who have some very strange ideas about what it's like in the US.

I do agree with your general point, though: I would expect your average European to have a better understanding of the politics of the US than your average American would have of even a prominent European country like Germany.

Not sure what your values are, but mine don't include decades of apartheid followed by genocide.

"Commit suicide" exists because it sounds crime-y, and in fact suicide was a crime in many many jurisdictions for a long time (and that may be the case in some places today).

The author uses "dying by suicide", which is better semantically, but still a bit wordy. Another option might be to verbify "suicide".

Are you sure about that? "Teat", to me, is a nipple, while "breast" is, well, the whole boob.

"Committing suicide" used to be a crime in many jurisdictions, and "commit" often has crime connotations, so "dying by suicide" is considered a kinder and more accurate term these days. (I still say the former sometimes, though, as that's what I'm used to.)

I do somewhat agree with you, as it feels off, but I don't think it's in the same category as "unalive". "Dying by suicide" is as clinical and non-euphemistic as you can get, really. "Killed himself/herself/themselves" is a bit more direct, I suppose.

I feel like everyone has some sort of justification for why their pet language is now the best because LLMs can work in it better for a bunch of reasons.

Javascript/Python is the best because there's so much code out there that the LLMs can train on, and LLMs can write lots of tests to make sure everything is correct. There's nothing to compile, so the LLM can iterate quickly.

Rust is the best because the LLM gets great feedback from the compiler because of its strong type system, and it can deal with the borrow checker for you.

Go is the best because it's a simpler language with a decent type system, and the LLM can reason about that well, and will never forget to check an `err` return. The compiler is fast, so the LLM can iterate quickly.

I could write similar praise for C, C++, Java...

At this point I don't think any language is the best "because LLMs". I think there are quite a few languages that LLMs are probably not good at, but you have lots of choices if you want something they are good at.

You don't just magically do better than everyone else on every metric on your first go at something. Doing worse than others and refining is how pretty much everything works.

And a much better post would be "Just checked, and X, Y, and Z are funding this. My bet is that Y is funding it because $REASON..."

Asking an easily-searchable question is just lazy.

Are you seriously arguing that every open source project needs to anticipate every single way any of their users might use their software in the future, and also any future change they might want to make to the software, and write up a doc of disclaimers and caveats?

This is ridiculous. The amount of entitlement I'm reading here is gross. This is how you burn out maintainers and drive them away from open source.

> Your downstream should be precious.

No. Every open source maintainer is free to decide for themselves how much or how little they are willing to bend over backward for the sake of serving all possible user needs. If you don't like that, then feel free to build whatever you need yourself, from scratch.

The mold developers are not responsible for what people want to do with their software.

Most LED lightbulb manufacturers cut costs on the electronics driving the LEDs, and cheap out on designing good thermal management. It's actually pretty easy to heat-death those electronics.

The LEDs themselves are probably fine, but the driver is dead.

> Default ping only does 5.

Depends on the OS. Linux and macOS ping will keep pinging until you ctrl+c. Windows ping I guess is what you're talking about? Even then, I assume Windows ping has a command-line option to change the default number of pings.

> Even if you increase the count, after 20 lost packages wouldn't you have decided the connection isn't up?

Maybe not? It feels like you're just trying to come up with random excuses as to why this isn't real.

> Also this story is about problems with the connection of their house, not the wi-fi.

The connection to their house is a point-to-point line-of-sight WiFi link between the house and the author's father's office building.

Because there's nothing inherently wrong with global variables. In small utilities like these, I would argue it would be less readable to do as you describe.

Sure, in anything larger, or anything that needs to be reentrant, global variables are going to hurt. But this is not that.

In SoCal, yes, but things are (mostly) fine in the north and in the central valley.

More frustrating is all the water waste due to "use it or lose it" type policies around commercial and agricultural water allocations.

I'm a little confused, because it feels like this doesn't actually talk much about what it was like coding for a month with GLM 5.3 Flash.

The "hurdles" section was about cost and inference provider instability, neither of which has anything to do with whether or not the model was effective at the tasks.

Then we get to "It wasn't all bad", which... you haven't really described anything bad (or at all, really) about the model's performance.

I clicked through to the article because I've started using GLM 5.3 Flash myself (after being exclusively on Opus 5 and prior versions for the past year and a half or so), and I'm curious what other people's experiences have been actually using the model and having it perform tasks. But I feel like I didn't really learn anything from this article.

If you're that tired that you need coffee to stay awake, you absolutely shouldn't be driving.

Changing the reasoning effort is built in and doesn't require a plugin.

> Now, if only they could fix the very annoying bug of the history jumping back at the beginning if I am not a the end while the model is reasoning that would great.

It's so interesting because Claude Code used to have this bug a long time ago, but it was eventually fixed. Strange that they both had/have the same issue.

I can also wish for a higher-trust society where we don't need to blast light everywhere at night in order to reduce crime. It's possible, but the political will to remove/reduce the things that drive people to property crime just isn't there in many places in the US.

The irony is that usa.gov already exists, and is also a website dedicated to where to find information on various government services. But there's no AI on it, so it must be bad.

What a waste, though: two completely separate government websites with the exact same purpose, going about it in different ways. Maybe DOGE should have been more interested in stuff like this, instead of cutting things that ended up hurting people.

At any rate, the demonym for people who live in the US is "American". That's just how it is, has been for decades, and, frankly, arguing against that is what's making it political.

You do realize that California is a huge state, spanning nearly 10 degrees of latitude, and not all of it is a dry desert like much of inland southern California is, right?

Some of the best and most versatile farmland in the US is in California, and the northern half of the state is flush with water. Before the current system of watersheds was built, there was regular flooding. Some of us in NorCal get to experience some of the tastiest, cleanest drinking water in the country.

What an uninformed take...

A somewhat drier climate is actually a plus when it comes to growing grapes, at least of the type that wine is made from. Sonoma and Napa are also somewhat dry (though not as dry as SoCal), and get most/all of their rain in the winter, so it's easier for farmers to control how much water their grapes get.

> (and have been sorely mistaken)

It's a little hard to feel bad for these people when they already saw how Trump didn't actually push their interests during his first term, and yet they voted for him again.

Meanwhile, the Project 2025 handbook was there for everyone to read, and Trump's rhetoric was based on cracking down on immigration (bye-bye, seasonal labor), beating up our trade partners (need to import farm tools? pay more!), and slashing federal government spending (haphazard and largely a failure to actually save money or tackle deficits or debt).

The 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act was a fine preview for more of the same in 2025, so I'm not sure what these voters were looking for when it comes to tax policy.

Land use is generally a state-level concern, so I'm not sure what they think Trump would be doing for them there.

Most grapes good for winemaking are not good for eating. (And vice versa.)