tuatoru

> Most energy consumption is for transportation and housing.

Of course it is, if you have offshored energy-intensive industries.

And still others who think he has an difficult personality and set of beliefs, but who greatly respect his achievements.

Good point. Only have one new tech at a time.

Generation II then.

Surprised they are not using linear opposed piston crankshaftless generators to make an extended range EV aircraft.

Smaller, lighter, simpler, cheaper, and more flexible about fuel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeG4zLlFkak

Linear engine starts around 11:19

Things can still go wrong locally, for you and yours.

I recommend "Practical Doomsday" by Michal Zalewski. [1] It's useful as a set of topic reviews and checklists if nothing else.

1. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09BKKQN4Y/

Tagline: "What You Really Need Is an AI That Gets Things Done"

Does not have a mechanical arm or any ability to move itself.

Fernandez-Villaverde says he goes to each country's national statistical agency's website, and uses their numbers for births and deaths and population, and computes fertility and replacement rate, and the trajectory of population for each country from that.

He says he has no idea where the UN gets its numbers, despite asking several times. He is a professor of economics and demography, so he's not going to just make stuff up.

The tech connection on this is that phones expand the radius of the circle of peers - people that a given person can see and copy. But most of the problem is as Fernandez-Villaverde says: modernity itself, the expansion of money into more and more areas of life.

> The part I'd take elsewhere:

Please, please do not write like an AI.

With all the world's knowledge freely available on the web, people still do this.

Unless it's an April Fool joke, in June.

> it feels… deeply uncomfortable talking to a machine like you would a person.

That's why the form factor should be a wand. Flourish it to activate, and speak your spell.

Now imagine them with a big lever in the form of AI.

TL;DR

And saw a few AI tells on the scroll down. The use of the the word 'honest' in any of its forms, and short sentences in headings.

Rule One for writers: respect the readers' time. Strip out every unnecessary word. Every.

The UK. It wants to steal Norway's vast stores of electricity.

Germany had no good alternative because its politicians deliberately put it in the position of having no good alternative.

Something is wrong with Germany. Go to Our World InData's Electricity Production per Capita page and have a look at Germany, Vietnam, and say Israel.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-ge...

"It's just brute-forcing the search space."

In accounting this is the concept of "materiality". If some asks "is this material?", they are asking if it's worth spending significant time looking at it or deciding.

Remember to * 3 when assessing. Choose wrong, and you do the job, undo it, and do it again.

Early on Raspbian didn't specify noatime or even relatime; every time something was read off disk, a write happened.

Let alone things like putting /var/tmp and/or /var/log in RAM, or long commit intervals.

No idea what the current situation is; Pis are too dear for the likes of me now.

On doctors, I read a substack by a doctor who stopped using an AI notetaker after trying it for a year. They weren't his notes, and there was too much extraneous detail.

Can't find it with a quick search, but the point of the essay was that making the notes by hand reinforced the essentials of each case in the doctor's mind, so they were there for the next appointment two weeks later.

Baron von Masoch was European.

Yes. Many industries are zero-sum-ish in nature,have winner-take-all dynamics or reputational costs for cheaping out. Financial trading. Big law. Military. National Security. Big insurance. Management consulting. Advertising.

For others even a small edge can be important. Pharma and Biochem research. Research in general. Any industry where there are major reputational risks.

It may not make sense to use the most expensive model to replace your payroll clerk, but there are plenty of use cases for the best available.

Europe has Mistral.

You and readers may be interested in Europe 2031

1. https://europe2031.ai/

Cheaper until you factor in security and liability, which are going to get increasingly salient over time.

Deepseek's price looks unsustainable. Ant have said their operating margin is 70%. A leaner company could maybe raise that to 90%.

Most of the cost of supplying inference compute is depreciation of the GPUs. Maybe Deepseek is anticipating a 50 year life for theirs.

Far canal, why is this news?

"Comeback" or "quip" for a low-latency sub-Haiku model.

Industrial market economies.

The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion).

Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households.

Edit: Japan, China, Korea, and Thailand are speed-running the process. Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and India are not far behind - all states of India except Bihar already have sub-replacement fertility for instance.

Fear the time when lobbyists realise they can use AI to draft new laws...

Good question.

With a lot of old people, healthcare costs go way up. In practice that means taxes go way up.

(Maybe smart AI can magically cure a lot of degenerative diseases like dementia and atherosclerosis and COPD and osteoarthritis and cancer and diabetes and kidney failure. Let us hope.)

The infrastructure we have (roads, bridges, water supplies, power lines, etc.) need maintenance. With a falling population, a greater percentage of the population needs to be dedicated to these tasks, so career choices get restricted.

(Maybe robotics can help here. Let us hope.)

With a falling population demand for any given product is falling on average.

When the population is growing, there is an implicit cushion for investment. 2% growth means that the population (TAM) doubles in 36 years, making investment less risky. With falling population, new investment is taking market share from existing vendors: competition is zero-sum at best, mostly negative sum.

Every investment is more risky so the rate of interest on loans goes way up.

With falling GDP, wages are stagnant or falling. At present young people take on debt to buy houses and things, partly in the expectation that their wages will rise so the debt gets easier to pay off over time. Falling wages make debt repayment harder, not easier, so people will not take out loans. so sales will be lower, leading to a downward spiral.

Difficulty accessing birth control is greatly overstated by UN and other development agencies.

In surveys by far the dominant reasons for not using it are "my husband does not want me to" or "my family does not want me to". Those are included in "unable to access".