As is everyone?

Alcohol, bad diet, smoking, no exercise.

Fix these problems and you will look younger than your peers.

When I spoke about European countries under socialism I meant East Germany (Stasi), USSR (KGB), Czechoslovakia (StB), Hungary (AVH), etc.

None of these countries were capitalist at the time and maintained gigantic security services to spy on the entire population.

Do you not think that a hypothetical state without Capitalism could also generate an automated surveillance state? It feels to me to be less tied to the market system and more to authoritarianism. I would simply point to the fact that many European nations under socialism did have very strong secret police spying on the public under the pretext of protection from counter-revolution, which is not really any different to the countries under capitalism today, minus the technology.

Needs to be that everyone agrees at once, otherwise the Palantirs of the world will keep going.

Yeah just like how it isn’t a chickens farmer

Anthropic is projecting a half a billion dollars profit this quarter

What’s the joke

Yes, there is a literal UFC event at the US Presidential Residence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFC_Freedom_250

AI is getting cheaper every year and the output is becoming better. Look at token prices. The so called frontier models are not that far ahead of the open source models that you or I can run essentially for free, either.

The reality is that you can sit down and automate significant tasks with AI in an afternoon, today. I work in an industry where a significant amount of time is spent auditing and QAing output. A properly trained skill for Claude is able to do the same QA task to 90% of my (senior) level in 2% of the time. Similarly, it is able to coach the junior staff to produce work that is a much higher level than would be otherwise expected of them, reducing the actual audit length on that side too.

I am hugely positive for the future of AI. I am hugely negative about what it means for people.

Companies are competing for the same market share.

As an example, what are you going to do with four times more accountants than the total market needs? There are only a limited number of companies to do the accounts for. If one accountant can do four times the work as before, he might be able to expand. If every accountant can do four times the work as before, they cannot all expand. On a company level, why would you keep all the staff doing only 25% of the work as before? Their labour has been significantly reduced in value.

In my view it is. It’s a race to the bottom. What is a company going to do when they are in a competition with other firms that have less staff but the same output (i.e., a much lower cost base)? The options are either to go out of business or to restructure to the market reality. This is a problem that needs to be solved at the government level.

The pretty displays of food are essentially a rounding error. The majority of food waste is caused through 1. crop spoilage, 2. supply chain inefficiency, 3. consumer overbuying.

If you ignore societies where there was starvation, you will always see that there is significant food waste. You mention capitalism as being a big cause of food waste, but millions of tons were also wasted in communist countries for reasons 1 and 2 above.

every american police movie

Coccinelle is just a derivative of the Latin name, which is from the Latin word for scarlet.

Essentially you need all streets to be serviceable by trucks, ambulances, etc., and therefore the general minimum is 1 lane. As you add car infrastructure, it becomes relatively more convenient to drive to a destination than take other modes of transport. You are also typically investing in the car infrastructure at the expense of alternatives, a straight opportunity cost and a sort of spiralling trap, as development becomes more and more centred around the car.

Braess’s paradox outlines adding a route can actually worsen overall network flow, and more broadly, new capacity just attracts new drivers until congestion returns to roughly where it started. Suboptimalities like the accordion effect are compounded as more traffic is added to the system.

Induced demand doesn’t imply the current number of lanes is optimal, just that expansion tends to be self-defeating.

Lane reduction alone would just increase misery, so the answer is redirect road space into transit, which absorbs displaced drivers at higher capacity. Otherwise it’s just misery.

I have a civil engineering degree with a focus on transport but never really used it for that, so this is something that I was taught, but had over a decade to devolve more into opinion.

I went in knowing nothing about the book other than there was a supernatural clown in it. When I read that scene I had to stop, then go online to find an explanation of what the fuck I just read (to be fair, I was also pretty confused by the denouement in general) and how it is related to the plot. I was absolutely baffled by the amount of people saying they thought it was fine to have, some people even said it was a good allegory for leaving childhood.

No, it is even more bizarre. They have sex because the group is lost in the sewer and apparently this makes them know where they are, somehow, so they can leave, which they then do. It adds literally nothing to the plot, apart from really shoddy symbolism of growing up.

I have never heard of the water being reused like this in practice. The majority of datacentres I have seen in Europe have a closed glycol loop and a large air based cooling array (i.e., air handling units), the remainder have adiabatic cooling.

Having a closed loop is more expensive and energy intensive than running cold water through the heat exchanger.