piva00

So why do waiters in the USA keep pestering me every 5 minutes asking if I need something else? It's part of the culture, and it gets plenty annoying when I'm trying to enjoy a meal but have to stop mid-bite to say "no, thank you" when I'm clearly not in need of anything else.

The feeling I get from those experiences is that I'm being rushed to clear the table, not that the service is great and always there to help me.

If using simple metrics like GDP growth, I'm more in the camp of Paul Krugman's argument[0] that such comparisons with simple naïve metrics are insufficient to analyse it.

I agree the USA has grown more steadily than the EU and the American software/tech industries have a leg up but the devil is in the details.

I travel a lot for work to the USA and I do not experience what this GDP growth has brought to the US in the past 10-15 years: infrastructure in general is worse (worse airports, worse roads, etc.), urban life is worse, rural life is worse, quality of food is worse.

[0] https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-v-america-whos-rea...

> This is not just a matter of regulations. It's the whole mindset that is too conservative to go fast. The whole 'throw 1000 things at the wall and see what sticks' is not something we europeans are used to.

It's also a matter of two advantages the USA has:

1. being a homogeneous market culturally-linguistic, there are dozens of countries with very different cultures and languages in Europe, it's not as easy to scale continent-wide as it is to scale country-wide in the USA.

2. exhuberant privilege of the USD, it gives a major advantage on capital markets where capital is sloshing around in the economy, it's much easier to find billions of USD parked somewhere wanting to get better returns. The EU doesn't have this privilege, investments need to be more conservative.

Did I offend you by asking a question?

The EU has more people than the USA but emits 1/3 of the USA's, what's the exceptionalist excuse for that?

That's the initial impact, it's exactly the incentive that over time will create native competitors.

Yeah, there will be immediate pain but if EU competitors can spring up because the American software giants are disadvantaged it'll slowly erode the reliance on US's software.

No need for a nefarious plot, as usual with capitalism it just needs incentives. They will have the data, if at some point it's beneficial to Google to re-identify it then it will be done.

Do I believe they have incentives to do it now? No, as you point it out for their advertisement cash-cow they can already just rely on their own data (GMail, Search, Google Flights) but nothing stops them from the potential later on, the data is now theirs.

Likely its value is just to train LLMs but the funny thing about data is that you can always try to find ways to extract more value out of it. I'd prefer there was no possibility for that without requiring me to trust Google (or any corporation).

In an ideal world my data would be mine to control, not to be traded in deals among 3rd parties, it's valuable and I've spent time generating it so in a sense I've done free work to be extracted by these corpos.

Their Condor cameras are not ALPR, they are normal surveillance cameras with pan-tilt-zoom.

Even if they follow to the letter a deidentification process, Google and Meta have so much data about individuals that re-identification shouldn't be very hard for the majority of airline passengers' data they put their hands on.

Of course, takes a lot more effort than not doing proper deindetification in the first place but if they wanted to appear like caring about data privacy they still have enough data points to correlate the sets later on (and/or over time).

This cycle might need more competitors, not only more fabs. It's in the interest of three companies to keep supply constrained to raise prices, and they act as a cartel so until the cartel breaks or a competitor grows large enough to have fabs that can make a dent in the demand we will keep seeing high prices.

For a relevant competitor to show up takes much longer than building a fab (which is already a long enough endeavour).

I'm not that hopeful the price for RAM and other PC parts will come down in any meaningful way for the next 3-5 years.

It's not BRICS as a whole, it's China and a little bit of India.

Brazil is a major risk given political turmoil and generalised corruption; Bolsonaro attempted a coup in a country already plagued in history by coups, his son is going to run for presidency and has a chance to win it.

South Africa's economy is in shambles, their electricity grid can barely function, the country is going backwards socially and economically.

Russia I don't think we even need to talk about.

That leaves China and India, China has capital controls and is notoriously difficult to invest in.

I don't think there's much in common with BRICS as it was in the early 2000s when the acronym surfaced, as of now they are very dissimilar societies and economies.

RAM bandwidth is the main issue for running LLMs on consumer hardware...

I was quite surprised on how difficult it is to tell when chatting with an uncensored LLM a friend is running (it's too big to run on any of my computers but he got some B200s). You can input your own "system prompt" to make it behave like a normal internet user and the prose writes very similarly to internet comments with none of the LLMisms from ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc.

Not the original parent comment but for my life I don't need to carry a wallet most times, my ID is also digital, I leave the house with only my phone the vast majority of times.

I only carry my wallet with my physical ID card when I know it will be needed: doctors' appointments, traveling to other countries inside Schengen, etc.

Not necessarily, a bodybuilder or very athletic person might be overweight in the sense of above average for their height but not overfat.

For that to change they need to not depend on expensive power plants (such as coal, gas, etc.), the bidding process for the electricity market in the EU will price the 15-minute window kWh price to the most expensive source providing power to the electricity zone being supplied.

Unless there's a revolution in this pricing mechanism the only way for Germany to lower its electricity prices is through renewables build out to push away the more expensive sources.

Sure, if they are extremely passionate about it and make it their life's purpose they will keep fighting even against hugely unfavourable odds.

I'm not one of those, I just commented somewhere else in this thread that I spent 10 years of my life engaged in political activities, from 18-28 (right before I moved out) I participated in organisations that tried to have some impact with nothing to show for it. It's not my passion to do that, I got tired, and there was nothing tethering me to that society after feeling like a fish out of water since I was a teenager.

In that case it's much better for my life to simply give up, I had my run while youth energy existed, nearing my 30s (which was more than a decade ago) I simply didn't want to waste more of my life swimming against the current.

I don't think many people understand how disheartening it is to run a civics education project for 2 years to try to educate people to vote better just to see they go to "church"* and vote on whomever their "pastor"* told them to.

* (Evangelicalism is not church for me, it's a money-grab scam to exploit poor desperate people)

> I haven't suggested someone should wait it out, but the notion that nothing can ever change because it's "culture" sounds absurd to me and as an excuse to not try

I simply did not want to waste more of time by feeling powerless, I spent 10 years in civics organisations from 18-28 which didn't effect any change whatsoever even though we organised protests, education outreach for people to understand how government systems worked at each level for more conscious voting, one of my closest friends is a constitutional lawyer and helped to write motions to the state assembly.

Nothing of that ever helped anything, I wasted 10 years participating in civics for absolutely no gain. Much the contrary, I've been beaten by police, tear gas'ed, had a rubber bullet shot on my thigh (with a visible mark still there, 15 years later).

At some point you run out of steam, you are more than welcome to pick up the fight I gave up though.

> That's never true, countries changed extremely, also cultural-wise. If talking Germany the basic example is changing from a very militaristic society (far before the Nazis) to a rather pacifist society.

After suffering a massive defeat, losing millions of lives, and being occupied for decades.

Otherwise culture changes slowly, I won't waste my lifetime to see 5-10% improvements, you are totally free to move to Brazil and fix it for us since it seems to be an easy task for you.

> If talking corruption, my own country has progressively became far less corrupt over my lifetime

In mine it only got worse, religious nuts like Evangelicals only accumulated more power over my life there, in my almost 30 years living there progress outside of economical terms got stuck.

Corruption is only one issue, violence is another major one, macho-culture and sexism is yet another, religiousness in the form of Evangelicalism with tele-pastors only grew to become >50% of the population.

It's an absolute fantasy that me staying there for my next 30-50 years of life would've made any difference. I only have one life, I won't waste it at a place where I always felt like a fish out of water with no power to change it. My life won't be dedicated to politics and power plays to the point where I could have any meaningful impact, I'm just a normal person trying to live a decent life, not an agent of change, lol.

You are completely invited to move there and change it though.

That's what happens when a culture is broken to the point of requiring generations of work to fix it: people who are unhappy will leave because there's no hope for enough to change to keep them there.

How do you imagine that me staying in Brazil would have helped fixing major issues with corruption and violence? It's my life, I won't waste it living in a fantasy that as an individual I will have any meaningful impact on lowering corruption, homicides, robberies, so on and so forth.

I'm just a person trying to live a good life, my home country didn't provide it while I tried to live with my values, I decided to move on and had the privilege to be able to do so, of course I will take it.

> If you like how a country does things, why not change the country you originate from instead of going to that other country?

Because it's neigh impossible for an individual to meaningfully change parts of the culture they dislike which are ingrained for hundreds of years.

How am I supposed to change one of the major issues plaguing my home country: corruption? It's ingrained at all levels, from politicians to the police, and people participate in it because it's simply the way it is. By rejecting corruption I just made my life harder at all levels, it took me months longer to fix tax issues because I didn't want to pay someone who knew someone and could have it fixed in a matter of days; registering my car at the time took a whole week of visiting different offices, paying government fees in-person at banks so I could get receipts officially stamped, ordering a plate was a 2-day endeavour, I could have paid a person who would have fixed everything in a day but that involves being part of corruption so I rejected it.

I cannot change that, it's part of the culture, it annoyed me to no end, and my individual actions didn't matter at all while making my life harder.

It was much better for my life to emigrate, and live at a place where society is fundamentally more aligned to my values and ways of living.

There's no need to be technical about a social aspect of human life, there's no paradox of the heap when considering the human aspect: people alive have felt in their skin and soul the displacement of their parents which is not true at all for a claim 1300 years old.

Same for me, have Philips Hue bulbs for the past 10 years, some 50 of them and only had one failure unrelated to the LEDs themselves.

78 years is not that far ago in terms of human generations, the children of the people displaced are still alive, and they've disputed it all the time since then.

Don't understand why you think 78 years is a long time, even less why you think it's equivalent to 1300 years.

> Also the Arabs took the land from the Byzantine empire in the 7th century AD.

A historical event from 1300 years ago is a bit irrelevant to contemporary issues.

> It's your responsibility as a scientist to step up and say that some research is garbage when you see it.

The only case I personally know of someone doing that during their PhD didn't end well.

My friend couldn't replicate the results from a known professor in the field, asked for the data + model to re-run because he assumed his own work was wrong and wanted to benchmark against the known study. Got stonewalled for more than a year, brought it up with supervisors because he started getting the feeling the results were tampered and the professor didn't want to be found out. He pushed it but got ridiculed by the professor's university ethics committee.

After a couple of years he could show that the research was at least sketchy and he depended on that model/results for his own work, he lost 2 years of research and completely left academia after finishing the PhD (delayed by almost 2 years).

Zionism can be both the nationalist movement for making Israel a Jewish state as well as the interpretation that such a movement is inherently colonial and racist.

So Zionism for Israelis might just mean "we support and advocate for a Jewish state in the land of Israel" which also includes two-state solutions but it can mean "we are a colonial and ethno-religious racist state" to the ones being displaced by the movement (like Palestinians).

My cat almost doesn't chew at all, she's only fed wet food which she swallows in chunks and the rare prey she catches outdoors is teared and swallowed in chunks as well.

Germany still has expensive thermal power plants which dictate the price of electricity given the bidding system used for pricing it.

Sweden and Norway have very cheap electricity while mostly being renewables.

Vance's support of Orbán; Musk's support of Reform, AfD, and other far-right parties across Europe; Thiel's shadow interference through his "gatherings" with other countries' elites while being explicitly anti-democracy. Many other oligarchs are likely involved with different levels of visibility and effort for this push, I wouldn't be surprised if Zuck is part of it by providing the machinery of social media while keeping a safe distance from the more overt acts.

It's a whole concerted effort by many figures in the US political landscape (in this I include moneyed elites) to tear down democratic pillars of European countries.

The USA already had massive issues with corporate power in politics, the Trump admin just made the merge of state and corporate interests even deeper and more overt. The pressure has only been building up the past 10 years, the Biden years were a short respite of a movement ongoing for longer.

Unfortunately we will only see how this ship continues to sail after the US's midterms, it will be the defining moment to see if American society can find ways to right the ship or if it's going to be cement the plunge into the abyss...