I mean, it’s in western Asia, next to Azerbaijan and Georgia. “Complicated definitions of Europe” are part of the point here, but it’s pretty clearly not Europe in my mind, but given the Turkish border, it’s not far from Europe like Australia is
Australia, Armenia, and Morocco are all outside of Europe, and have completed too. Basically all European countries are eligible, plus those whose public broadcasters are part of the European Broadcasting Union.
This is one of many examples of a class of problem where the technology is the easy part. There’s room to improve the tech certainly, but the technology sufficient to solve the problem is already well understood.
The hard part is how to get people to actually do the necessary changes. To consume less, get fewer gas cars on the road, increase the amount of nuclear, hydro, solar, geothermal, and wind in the grid, and minimize coal and gas use. To reduce land use by cows, and increase land use by trees and native plants.
But maybe AI is the secret here. We have tools that are in the hype moment whose training data already contains several reasonable solutions to climate change. Maybe if AI “finds” the solution to climate change, people will finally listen
What’s really wild is that not only are games good enough on Windows, but tests lately are showing a consistent trend where the two are often indistinguishable in performance, and where they’re not, Windows isn’t consistently winning.
If you’re not into the genre of competitive multiplayer games that have kernel anticheat, Windows isn’t really better for gaming anymore, outside of being more familiar for many people. Today we’ve reached the point where it’s a few fps either way, and people should use whatever they want, but if Microsoft keeps bloating Windows, it might soon be that the “Windows tax” also refers to the performance penalty you pay for using the familiar OS instead of learning something new.
The thing is business is more booming than it’s ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool’s errand, at some point you’ll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.
If you make a hammer that’ll last 100 years, you’ll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you’ll be punished when sales fall because you’ve solved a problem for most people.
Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that’s actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it’s great, and you’ve spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it’s good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it’s profitable. And that’s all they care about. It’s basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they’re told they’re allowed to care about.
Suddenly cutting off a lot of trade suddenly is a stupid and reckless move that would hurt people in their countries as much as it would hurt the US. It’s basically the same behavior as Trump with his absurd tariffs, banning trade with a country, and taxing people obscenely to buy things from that country mostly work out to the same effects in practice.
Incentivizing other trade partners, and maybe slowly disincentivizing the US makes a lot of sense though. Maybe it made more sense years ago, but as they say, if the best time was yesterday, the next-best time is today.
There are like 3 different routes that make sense for me to get home from work, depending on where there’s traffic
The field of artificial intelligence has also made incredible strides in the last decade, and the decade before that. The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they’re trying to do.
Certainly, some interesting developments have happened, and we’ve realized our old models/thinking about progress towards AGI needed improvement… and that’s real. I think there’s a serious conversation to be had about what AGI would be, and how we can know we’re approaching it, and when it has arrived.
But anybody telling you it is close either has something to sell you, or has themselves bought it.
Yeah this is it, the problem is that even once you solve the technology problem, it becomes the choice between two logistics problems, distributing liquid fuel for refilling, and moving large amounts of power on the grid on demand. The latter is a solvable problem, but the former is just so well understood.
Certainly, most people are better served by EVs today, for their personal vehicle needs. But I think hydrogen will be a compelling option for people with specific needs beyond the short term. Especially with continued investment in that technology in Japan.
There are two hydrogen fill stations between my home and work, they definitely get used, and the price per kg of green hydrogen is still trending downwards. It’ll never be the next big thing, hydrogen is heavy and has several of the other problems of gasoline that EVs always solve. But for people who need personal transport, and need to frequently go larger distances than one battery charge will support, hydrogen fuel cells solve a problem EVs have, without going back to fossil fuels; fuelling up takes negligible time.
I think hydrogen cars will have a niche for a long time to come, enough to keep the technology around and evolving.
Critically, the people who build these machines don’t typically update drivers to port them to a new OS. You buy a piece of heavy equipment, investing tens, or maybe even a hundred thousand dollars, and there’s an OS it works on, maybe two if you’re lucky. The equipment hopefully works for at least 20 years, and basically no OS is going to maintain that kind of compatibility for that long. Linux might get the closest, but I’ll bet you’re compiling/patching your own kernels before 20 years is up.
This kind of dynamic is unavoidable when equipment vendors sell equipment which has a long usable life (which is good), and don’t invest in software support (which is them being cheap, to an extent), and OSes change enough that these time horizons likely involve compatibility-breaking releases.
Hear me out, The Avengers, but Agent Coulson is the human. Muppet Cap tossing the shield, just imagine. And Coulson’s actor I think would be very much like Michael Caine in Muppet Christmas Carol, interacting very sincerely with the Muppets as fellow actors.
I would also accept “Hulk is the human, but only when he’s hulked out” just for the sheer surprise of it
It’s a structural challenge more than a fallacy, but I don’t entirely disagree. This sort of thing works best when one of two things is true, there’s some way for people to organize, or it’s relatively small and there are real options.
The former clearly isn’t true here, but I think the latter is. There’s a lot of companies trying things with AI, and some are working better or worse. This particular use is relatively small, and I think the downside of doing it is also small in the short term. (This is a giant red flag, avoiding a red flag isn’t a large cost)
In a very real sense, applicants are first and foremost deciding if it works. If they can do something resembling standing together, and refuse at any reasonable scale to take part in AI making hiring decisions, it will fail.
A job at a company that won’t respect your basic humanity isn’t worth having. If you’d rather willingly step into that trap than proceed with whatever you’re doing, or go with other options, are you okay? Like if this sounds like an opportunity and not a giant red flag, I wish there was something I could offer to help you.
Honestly? Especially if it was only for cops
You don’t get to be a billionaire without some malfeasance.
And even if you don’t assume actively malicious intent like you should with Musk, there’s a lot of potential danger with technology like this, and if you don’t stand a lot to gain, and have reasonable controls against things going wrong, it’s probably not a good idea to be an early adopter. It’s just like a pacemaker, there are a narrow segment of people who should want to test a new model/concept for them.
I just upgraded from Win10 to Debian on my primary/gaming desktop; every game I’ve played in the last 4 years in my Steam library is listed as compatible, most things I do on my computer are either a website, a game, or an application with a native Linux version or good wine compatibility.
As a personal user who does a wide variety of things on my computer, I don’t really need Windows anymore. I’m dual booting for the time being as I configure things, but I’m quickly running out of reasons to use the old Win10 partition. And all the weird slowdowns it was exhibiting? Totally absent in Linux. I expected performance to be a wash, but it’s noticeably improved.