locallost

I agree with that, but was specifically referring to the description of everything being very dry in that area. I noticed this already 15 years ago, the area around Budapest was much more yellow and dry compared to countries up north.

But yes, the intensity and especially the duration of the heat has intensified. I stopped visiting my family in the south of Europe around five years ago, and visit in either fall or spring. Can't really take the heat, it's not worth it.

To be honest, it's not unusual for that part of the Europe to be pretty yellow in August. I was taking train rides to Budapest regularly between 2010-2020. But it's getting worse for sure.

Yes, this is pretty standard for business accounts.

PayPal is far far away from a niche, although this depends on the market. I work for a company in Europe selling physical goods and the vas majority of our sales online are paid with PayPal. The reason their future is not that bright is that things like Apple Pay and Google Pay are starting to eat their lunch because it's just that easy. You pay with e.g. Google Pay, verify your fingerprint and you're done. No logins, no typing, no stored passwords or credit cards that sometimes don't autofill correctly. So the writing is on the wall for the future, but they are still a money machine in the present day.

The only thing easier than paying with a fingerprint is not paying at all. So their lifeline could be agentic shopping where you don't even shop anymore if this can ever become a thing.

That was exactly my point.

Honestly the only thing I see here that is a waste of time is trying to communicate with people that don't read and stick to canned tired responses they iterate on like an LLM.

I was replying to a very specific comment that said paraphrasing "I don't get how people can choose to ignore it". The point of what I wrote was, to an extent almost everyone ignores it, even I do, and I asked what is it that you actually DO that makes a difference. Because I don't know a single person that makes a total commitment to fixing this problem. Discussing who's fault is it is for useless people. Solutions aren't done by assigning blame so you can continue on with your day. The world can likely not survive people in every corner of the world eating food grown in some other corner of the world. The "balance sheet" is clearly not okay.

Now continue having fun proposing simplistic snap your fingers it's done solutions to the hardest problem humanity has ever faced, right at the intersection of basic human psychology, needs and desires to lead a comfortable life, and an economic system that by definition doesn't see further than its own nose.

So step one is actually: people do ignore it and this is not going to change. How do we fix the issue with this constraint in mind?

I don't want to criticize you, but a question: what are you doing in practice to change something? Is your carbon footprint below what is sustainable?

Let's look at me: I don't own a car, live in a smaller town, move around mostly on foot, take public transportation, long distance mostly train. I have two kids and for years my electricity total was 1500kwh a year. Last year it was 1100kwh (heating is gas though, that's what my building has). All this and I do cook a lot with an electric stove. I bought some new appliances before the old ones were completely broken (although they were close) partly because the new ones were all very energy efficient.

But: I live abroad and take my kids to my parents once a year, and fly. Last year I flew four times, including intercontinental (albeit a true outlier of a year). I consume things produced all around the globe, either as items like phones, or food, and the food I do probably daily (I really like fruit, so bananas, mangos, avocados etc).

My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources. And it's not that hard, I don't feel like I am missing out on something if I don't drive a car. But I still took my kids to Spain on a vacation, and we still flew there to sit on the beach. Giving that up is hard, and making them sacrifice their childhood fun is hard.

There's a range of what people are ready to give up. I would say I'm on the better side of it, but it's still not enough. Almost no one is ready to sacrifice, and we need almost everyone to sacrifice. Governments do lip service to these goals, but let's see how much countries like Spain sre ready to curb tourism, or countries like Germany and China that live off manufacturing to cut consumption. Who will give up their job to reduce carbon emissions?

The saying train wreck in slow motion has merit.

Sure, but I am also not sure it's really that essential. People can grumble and either pay or not buy. Potash cannot really be not used in modern agriculture.

I think Trump is severely misreading his position in the world. It's not April 2025 anymore. There will be consequences for everyone, but I am not sure his own party will support him through this in an election year. Especially now as the last time he publicly stated he backed down because if rising bond yields, which is actually happening already before any trade war. Is he really going to start another one, already in deep trouble because of the mess he made in Iran.

I think he will cave pretty quickly and Canada knows it.

Well I don't know about specific examples, but it's a phenomenon that has been observed in many areas over decades, thus the funny saying.

After crossing 40 years of age, and working for a while now, I believe it's also because of politics. You might think the goal is to deliver the best possible product, but territory grabs within companies are important, and done by people that don't have enough skill other than territory grabs. E.g. look at Trump and his behavior. No skills other than having his way, and then he gets to decide.

Of the technical reason, for sure we underestimate how much faster technology gets. Fred Brooks had this example in his Mythical Man Month book, how the os/360 got the option of a disk drive instead of mag tape, but the result was worse because everyone assumed it was much faster than it really was.

I also had this idea, but it can't be something you can get in another place. But for something like potash it might work.

But I think overall it does not really matter. A war is a war, so there will be no real winners.

Here we go again.

What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.

Because they're smart, but not as smart as they think they are.

As they say, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. I think thick works though are not necessarily works with a lot of detail, but works where when you revisit them, you get something more from them. This does not have to be a detail, but more subtle, as if coming to contact with it the first time changed you as a person, and allowed you to see it with different eyes the second time.

No, I specifically referenced side effects of taking medication. In this case experimental medication which means we don't even know what all the side effects are.

I don't know why you're giving me the pillow example, when it's the exact thing I discuss. You know you are not supposed to drive drunk. You know a drug you get from the doctor has side effects, the doctor will warn you. Those things are enough for most people not to take their chances, for people stupid enough to drive drunk, throw the book at them.

You can throw the book at people taking any experimental drug that can have a gazillion side effects they have no clue about, but this doesn't help the people that might get killed because someone experimented with a cure, did not want to harm anyone but still did. People are not numbers, but real parts of the world and someone else's lives. Laws are there to keep people safe, but are just the last line of defense.

You can take both positions, but your argument is overly simplistic.

The counterargument I heard recently is that what if doing something with your body ends up causing harm to others. E.g. you suddenly lose the ability to drive coherently. I agree everyone should do whatever they want, but if you drive drunk you're guilty because you should've known better, it's impossible to get a driver's license and not know you're not allowed to drive drunk. But if you do something experimental and are not aware you are no longer capable of driving, are you really at fault? And even if yes, is it that satisfying someone goes to jail considering maybe it would be better if a family of four in the other car is still alive.

Real life is more complicated.

This is only going to get worse with AI and not just for food recommendations. Think "where do I go for a vacation" and then the recommendation is pretty much the same for everyone, and you end up in overcrowded places because everyone else got the same advice.

The same amount of people maybe that will not have quit and would go on to thrive. Two sides of the same coin. If you want to go to the bottom of it, it's wrong answers only.

As for paying people to stay out of the market: there are examples of this already, for instance it might be more beneficial for countries to pay coal miners not to work and spend money on shifting to clean energy sources. But since miners want to keep their jobs, it becomes a political issue and money gets spent trying to save this dying industry. Instead the money should just be given to the working people to not work as a win-win for everyone.

As for everyone needs to work because "I want to get more stuff", well I guess we'll need a leap in human thinking. We once evolved from hunter gatherers into growing our own food, so it might not be hopeless. I think this is an important topic for the future of the world.

Sure it is, as already explained multiple times.

Because they already have a cash cow in the Champions League. European teams on both the club and national team level dominate world football, they're not about to let a fox into the chicken coop. UEFA is just as corrupt as FIFA.

It will be difficult since they acquired it for less than a billion 10 years ago.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/20/spacex-fundi...

It's still an interesting parallel, but that might be not be of interest if you're trying hard to be the middle guy from the bell curve meme.

But I think there's anyway a point there. I watched a talk once and it was humorously said that the amount of time spent discussing whether solution A is better than B is more than implementing both A and B and seeing in practice. It's funny because it's true.

You try to speed up work by parallelizing, either by adding more machines or more humans. Seems pretty similar.

Amdahl's law states diminishing returns are because some processes cannot be parallelized, thus eventually they become the bottleneck.

For Brooks the communication between people starts to dominate the time spent the more people you add, so it will eventually become the bottleneck.

For me it's an interesting parallel. Feel free to come up with your own conclusions.

"Explains" why people "call" it genocide. It's obvious baloney and beating around the bush because it was trained on media that does the same, and it was likely instructed to do so in the same way the media is instructed. E.g. when Israel murders civilians waiting in line for food, it will be a matter of fact report without any qualifications and just muddying the water. When Hamas does it, it will be an article charged with words like massacre etc. This is well documented [1].

To further illustrate the point that we have the same thing with LLMs, I asked it two questions: 1) Is Israel committing genocide 2) Is China committing genocide

In both instances it said it's a matter of great international debate with a list of arguments, but the summaries were different. In the one case it concludes that while the UN and others broadly document severe human rights abuses, the label genocide has been formally adopted by several governments and watchdogs. In the other case it says while many have concluded it is genocide, the final decision rests with the International Court and it is expected to take years to make a decision.

Can you guess which is which? I think if we offered a $100 to people to pick which is which, the success rate would be much higher than 50% (random), thus easily proving biased phrasing.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2026/05/12/gaza-media-coverage-isra...

Amdahl's law says something similar, adding more processors to a problem eventually gives almost no speedup because parts of the problem cannot be parallelized and need to be done sequentially.

To the people wondering the meaning of the article, it's I think this.

Use it or lose it, but the problem is very old. The introduction of the alphabet/literacy almost certainly made people's memories worse -- up to that point they had to hold a lot more in their heads. At the same time it enabled a different better way to share information and learn. The question is thus, will it make the world better, is it a book or a TV?