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cezart

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Not OP but, EU economy is being squeezed by China on the industrial and tech front, and by the US on the innovation/startup front. It is clear EU is no longer at the technological/economic frontier like it used to be 10-20 years ago. At the same time there are serious demographic, budgetary and political challenges all across the continent. Dragi's report covers some of these. It feels like the whole system might fall into a crisis soon if measures are not taken

Depends what you compare it with. I grew up in the post soviet union. That system allocated resources to various monopolies who were too big to fail. Turns out allocating capital based on who can make things that people want/need to buy, and do it with a profit, multiplies said capital way faster. From this point of view, over time your initial base grows into all kinds of industries etc. That's probably why the USA won the cold war.

I've been thinking about this recently. The centrality of the stock market, while historically a great tool to allocate resources efficiently, might actually be a big weakness for the USA today. A capable adversary, like China, can kill entire strategic sectors in the US using the stock market. If they undercut the US companies and are willing to accept low returns on their investments, then the respective USA competition will be driven out of business by their investors, because there will be other sectors to invest in, with higher RoI. Do this at various points in strategic value chains, and over a decade or so it might kill entire verticals in strategic sectors, leaving the US economy vulnerable to any kinds of shocks.

The Elephant (2003) has my favorite Title drop, and of course, is not marked in this database. As I remember it, at some point in the movie we are shown a drawing of an elephant randomly hanging in the room of one of the protagonists. Both the drawing, and the main protagonists are easy to ignore, yet are the main subjects of the movie.

Thank you for sharing this! I think a focus on shrinking personal projects to the point I might actually finish them, might be just what I need right now

Sanding UI 2 years ago

I still just throw in default bootstrap in a .container div when I need a fast prototype that looks decent.

I remember what I liked about Rijks upon visiting was that it was organized by decade, and had not only paintings, but various historical artifacts as well. Like state corporation sealed opium, which offered a context for the contemporary relaxed attitude of the Dutch towards drug consumption. And in general offered many windows into how the country grew up to be what it is. So yes, much history!

Not dismissing, but being realistic. I observed all the AI tools, usually amaze most people initially by showing capabilities never seen before. Then people realise their limitations, ie what capabilities are still missing. And they're like: "oh, this is no genie in a bottle capable of satisfying every wish. We'll still have to work to obtain our vision..." So the magic fades away, and the world returns to normal, but now with an additional tool very useful in some situations :)

At a company I worked in, we had a joke about this: "Good thing we don't build nuclear reactors".

In some software projects the level of rush, and the fact that bugs sometimes would leak into production was kinda horrifying. It would've been way more so, if it would've been the kind of project that could kill people in case of failure. Like it happened in Chernobyl with nuclear reactors, or at Boeing with planes.

I can't really imagine what these engineers feel when they rush this kind of work knowing what's at stake.

I had the opposite problem, the languages I usually typed in(Romanian + English) didn't have a multi language mode on iOS. So it was a constant pain to switch btw them when I needed to insert some English terms in Romanian sentences. IOS didn't support multi language for this language pair. On Android it always worked like a charm.

They lived frugal lives, with everything needed covered for probably 10'000 years ahead. Large families, plenty of friends and a lot of wisdom. Yeah, I think Charlie and Warren's life's have way less stress than most people do.

I think there is great irony in the fact that probably 90% of the people involved in crypto don't understand the math behind the systems they trust so much. They could swear these systems are more trustworthy than traditional banks cause decentralization, smart contracts, cryptography, etc. But all of these are just abstract concepts for them in which they just chose to place their trust, because of vibes or smth.

People like SBF, Holmes etc, fucked over other super rich and often way more powerful people. That's why they are being punished. If they did smth like screw up 5 milion normal citizens for a 1000$ each, they'd still have their billion dollar fraud, but no serious punishment for it.

It's never too late to start doing what you think will make you feel accomplished. Be it when you're 17, 40 or 80. You still have plenty of time ahead, and there isn't even much reason to rush. Just pick an inspiring idea and slowly work on it in the little free time you can allocate to it. The key I guess is to feel proud of working on it. The end product will result on it's own eventually.

A.I. (1981) 3 years ago

Could you please share the name of the lecture, university, maybe course and professor? Would be very interested to search for any related materials, since I had some similar intuition for a while now. The goalposts keep being moved.