paganel

> Just don't use it to talk about your political or social opinions.

Why? What should we talk about instead as members of a polis? About endless consoomerism and other such hedonistic stuff?

> Why not subsidize the groceries instead, then?

Then you'd have the State giving money directly to the likes of Unilever (think tooth-paste) and big agro-business (think bread). Subsidising transport instead is the lesser of many evils.

> And let the market find efficiencies with reduced transportation distances.

Market doesn't work when it comes to most of us.

> Or better yet, just subsidize the poorest among us,

This is just praying to bringing in servitude amongst us, it will go like this: "we will stop subsidising your daily bread if you stop voting for us". The same goes for the idea of UBI more generally speaking.

Without trucks being subsidised we'd have much more expensive groceries on our shelves. In a way you can see this as regular drivers subsidising the price of food for everyone else, which is not at all a bad deal if one looks at society as a whole. Or we can make truck companies pay 10 times more on road tax and then pass down those taxes to the poorest among us, but I don't think that that would be a good deal when it comes to our society as a whole.

I was talking about the perspective on the future, we had that back in the 1990s, it is sorely missing now. No-one even dares mentioning about any “light at the end of the tunnel”, it’s everybody for himself (and for his/her family/clan) right now.

> and Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz.

That is just hope-believe, i.e. it ain't happening.

> It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.

I lived through the 1990s here in Romania, the future does not look bright in the slightest. Yes, materially speaking we do have more stuff compared to the 1990s, a lot more stuff, but the opportunities in front of us are as slim as ever (which wasn't the case back in the 1990s). But maybe things look different for the Polish.

The web wouldn't have taken off without dynamic typing, PHP first of all (and Python/JavaScript after that). People seem to forget how atrocious it was to write an .asp or .jsp (I think the extension was .jsp) page back in 2003-2005.

Where's the great software, then? I'm genuinely asking: where is it? Because I can't find it, and it's been close to a year since AI for programming has started to take off.

> the vast majority of the public does not care that it is "slop ai

The people (that count, i.e. that has disposable income) has started to notice when it comes to AI images, I'm pretty sure the same will start happening when it comes to web design. It just reeks of cheapness, of not caring, i.e. of slop.

What tools would those be? The West's arsenal nuclear?

> SeL4’s security and reliability proofs still hold in the world of LLMs

Oftentimes the weakest link is the human operator who has direct access to those systems, not the computer system itself. Good old social engineering, in other words.

Even though one could use LLMs for social engineering, come to think of it, like re-enacting the movie "Her" involving a modern AI as Scarlett Johansson and an engineer working for the water utility as the romantic target.

> Because it was forbidden by law. You were forced to be put in an institution or directly went to prison

Seems like a very good law, don't you think? And this reminded me of how come one of my favorite childhood books from when I was 3 or 4 here in Romania was about DDR constructors building apartment flats, loved that book and loved the spirit behind it.

> People were cramped in barracks with not bathroom and no heating

There were? Back in the '70s and '80s? You sure? I don't remember it that way here in Romania back in the '80s, and I know that the DDR had a much better economic condition than us, Socialist Republic of Romania.

> Currently Berlin is under high demand, and that’s why drives prices up

Yeah, I know the written logic of all this, but as things stand right now we didn't have homelessness East of the Wall back in the day, while the West had. That should have been reason enough to throw all this capitalist and pervert logic under the bus, but I understand how come the highly paid programmers in here are happy with the current economic system, homelessness be damned. Which is to say, you're telling me nothing new.

You need sound logic against the evils of neo-liberalism, there's nothing logic about housing being as expensive as it now is.

Yeah, that sort of thing, where the law sort of dictates the current morality based on the "morality" the of above mentioned neo-liberal order/current state of things.

Of course that all this is kind of circular, meaning the (neo-liberal) morality imposing itself via law on the current (and by now surpassed) morality, but that's how things usually go when it comes to societal theory.

In a Gramscian understanding of the world it is, yes. Forget Gramsci, right now I'm finishing reading a book by Maurice Gauchet [1] (not a leftist by any means) whos's saying exactly that, i.e. that neo-liberalism is very much defined by its insistence on relying on " le juridique"

> Ce dérèglement se manifeste avant tout par la réduction de la démocratie à une logique juridique, le néolibéralisme ayant imposé une conception où le droit, érigé en garant exclusif de la liberté individuelle, relègue le politique à une fonction purement gestionnaire

automatically translated as

> This dysfunction manifests itself primarily through the reduction of democracy to a legalistic logic, as neoliberalism has imposed a conception in which the law—elevated to the status of exclusive guarantor of individual liberty—relegates the political realm to a purely managerial function.

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

> and legislative integration

Does Canada's agricultural output follow EU's (quite strict) norms? Not sure if this falls under "legislative integration" but I'd say that it would be quite important to have settled. The same goes when it comes to Canada's work-related laws.

> remigrate

Found the German. As the Italians put it: "non c'e due senza tre", it seems like you guys are dead-bent on doing it for a third time. Morgenthau was 100% correct on his plan, too bad things didn't go his way.

Btw, two of my grand-grand-dads got land allotments after WW1 on account of putting their lives on the line for my country against you, Germans, so I'm talking from shared family experience.

> I hope western countries will respond in kind with the mass sabotage acts

I live in Bucharest, the closest NATO capital to the clusterfuck in Southern Ukraine, when you'll get conscripted/when you'll volunteer and when you'll arrive here at Bucharest Northern Railway station just ping me, I'll be very happy to help a HN-er who thinks he's fighting for the right cause. Cause you are a NATO citizen, aren't you? Meaning you're not using those threats just because.

> comrade

My grandfather was a Communist Party member, as was my dad, unfortunately I ended up living in this neo-liberal hell. Which is to say that I had sincerely wished to be a "tovarăș", but those days are by now long behind me.

> also sells to the military... where have you been hiding?

And the Western-built railway system has been used for war/military reasons since its very inception (almost), it's how Prussia got the best over the Habsburgs at Sadowa in the 1860s. One could also say that Tsarist Russia not yet having a rail connection to Crimea just before that caused them to be defeated against the Western incursion at Sevastopol.

Romanian here, the same applied here on all counts. Back in the '80s and going into the '90s we also used to name an infamous and poor Bucharest area as RFG (FRG in English), which was the capital letters of those three neighborhoods taken together as an acronym.

The author of that tweet is obviously very biased, seeing how he's employed by a petro-state to build a LLM system for them. Come to think of it, I wouldn't take the opinions of people employed by petro-states at face value, to the contrary.

Generated via ChatGPT, as google-ing it would have taken too much time:

Rank Cloud Approx. annual revenue Growth My assessment

1 AWS ~$129B ~20% Clear leader

2 Microsoft Azure ~$90B ~40%+ Strong #2, rapidly closing

3 Google Cloud ~$59B 36% Fastest-growing historically, but smaller

which is to say that Google is still way behind AWS and Azure. Also, lots and lots of people have switched to using AI-interfaces now, I'm not hearing "I've googled that and that's what I found" anymore, it's all "I've chatgpt-ed and this is what it told me".

AUR (our local extremist party here in Romania) is also at 40%, the thing is that the powers that be have stopped having elections here because of that. Don’t act like this it will last, because it won’t, the wealthy regions in countries like Germany ard the exception by now, not the norm.

There are? Which ones? Are they going to make our lives livable?

There's a general malaise throughout this continent of Europe that neither these journos nor most of the (quite financially well-off) computer programmers from forums like this one are willing to look up straight in the face. The 40% AfD vote in Eastern Germany is just a local manifestation of that, the truth is that us, the normies, people are royally scared about our (financial and not only) futures have been left almost no-where else to go. And the squeeze on the energy we consume is a big factor behind all that.

I also can't fathom paying $2,200 for a phone, which is to say that we're not all working for US big tech companies in here.

> The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous - epidemiology is gonna rock in 20 years.

If you suggest mass surveillance as a "solution" to the next pandemic (I might be wrong on this and maybe I've misread your comment) I'm afraid that the world won't just stand still and face it. The recent pandemic has proven it, we're not all Australia/China.

> Advertisers on Google should be paying a lot less than they were a year ago.

I wonder how the Google Search page traffic has been affected by the recent AI surge.

Very anecdotally, of course, but in my social circle (middle-class urban Romanians in their late 30s and early 40s) almost everyone I know has replaced a phrase like "I googled it and I found this and this and this" to "I chatGPT-ed and I found this and this and this" (where "chatGPT" can also be sometimes replaced by Claude and, not that often, by Gemini).

I agree, this is pure (US) boomer behavior, they still think that the world will care about them almost a century into the future from the moment of their deaths. The world won't do that, one of the reasons being that said boomers have been quite talentless given their resources.