flexie

Do anyone here know if OpenAI plans on introducing a Word add-in, like Claude for Word?

I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector.

I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software.

"Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans around it.

Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT.

But Trump explained to us yesterday, how wind and solar is for losers. Surely, we should be looking in to how we can transition back to fossils.

The Substack post takes a rather childish approach by confusing happiness with smiling and laughter.

Personal safety, good health, financial stability, access to education, job security, low stress, and strong family and social ties do not necessarily make people smile or laugh. They create a sense of contentment. That is precisely where Scandinavian countries excel.

Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI to throw them decisively off the AI throne, just like another company would need a far better search engine than Google to throw them off the search throne. ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio?

Brands matter, and when regular people think AI, they think of OpenAI before they think Google, even if Google has more AI talents and scores better on tests.

And isn't it good? Who wants a world where the same handful of companies dominate all tech?

Almost all automobile manufacturers are valued with P/Es around 4-15. This is true for GM, Ford, Stellantis, VW, BMW, Toyota, Hyundai, SAIC, Nissan, Honda, Suzuki, etc. Why? Because no-one expect them to grow much.

Right now, after losing almost half of its value, Tesla's stock still has a whooping 122 P/E; Tesla is still valued as a growth company while their sales are collapsing in the US, in Europe and in China, and with no other obvious market to compensate. Tesla hasn't launched a new mass market vehicle since March 2019, when Model Y was presented. That's 6 years ago! What other car manufacturer would survive so little innovation for so long? There are no new mass market vehicles in sight, just some robot taxis and robots and dreams of somehow generating a trillion dollar market on that in the very urban markets in the US and Europe where politicians and consumers despise Musk. Good luck with that. Already in 2024 - long before Musk went full throttle MAGA - Tesla stopped growing.

By now, European and Asian competitors have caught up with Tesla. Yes, Tesla is among the best on some measures, like price and range, but notby much, and it's also far down on the list on other aspects; the market is saturated with its 2 main models, it's not very luxorious, it's not of very good quality, etc. It's one good choice out of many good choices. The growth is gone, the moat is gone, and the Musk brand is now a liability.

Tesla shareholders are in for a rough ride.

Top 10 percent of who?

According to this source, 40 percent of US stock is owned by foreigners: https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-owns-us-stock-foreign...

Ukraine has the right to defend itself against the Russian invasion. That's not nationalist. It is basic survival. Ukraine cannot be asked to refrain from defending itself in order to secure that Germany has cheap energy import and an export market for its old combustion engine cars.

German economy is facing difficulties because of a number of reasons:

- Closing all nuclear power plants

- Relying on Russian natural gas

- Relying on export to Russia and China

- Being too slow to transition its auto industry to EVs

- A number of other factors

By now, most schools in Denmark are banning phones during school hours. My kids' school did it two years ago. I have no idea if it has improved my kids' "cognitive skills", and frankly I don't care that much about their academic level. They are kids. They should run around, play and be happy, and then they will learn what they need.

As a parent it's wonderful to know that the kids have this 5-7 hour break from the screens. Just wonderful.

The American numbers are still incredibly high. The EU (with a much higher population), has around 6-7,000 drug related deaths per year: https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/european-drug-report...

Drug use is usually seen as a poverty problem, and on this platform we are constantly reminded that the US has GDP figures that dwarf the European.

It's not a clone. What is ethically murky about it?

You want Brad Pitt for your movie. He says no. You hire Benicio Del Toro because of the physical resemblence. Big deal.

Having seen "Her" and many other Scarlet Johansson movies, I didn't think for a second that GPT-4o sounded like her. On the contrary, I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman, and whether that was about being woke. It wasn't until social media went hysterical, I realized that the voices were sort of similar.

As someone who actually uses the API for real products, I don't think the OP understands what the reduced latency and reduced cost means: Everything related to building a more advanced RAG, for example building agentic features into it, sooner or later runs into the same issues of speed and cost. GPT-4 Turbo was simply too slow and too expensive for us to really use it fully. GPT-4 is plenty intelligent for many use cases.

Also, why on Earth would OpenAI launch a dramatically better model as long as their competitors don't force them to? The smart solution for OpenAI would be to almost let their competitors catch up to GPT-4 before launching GPT-5 and no competitor is truly there yet.

The court just ruled and it did indeed find that Switzerland had failed to comply with its duties concerning climate change:

https://www.echr.coe.int/w/grand-chamber-rulings-in-the-clim...

"The Court found that Article 8 of the Convention encompasses a right to effective protection by the State authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on lives, health, well-being and quality of life. However, it held that the four individual applicants did not fulfil the victim-status criteria under Article 34 of the Convention and declared their complaints inadmissible. The applicant association, in contrast, had the right to bring a complaint. The Court held that there had been a violation of the right to respect for private and family life of the Convention and that there had been a violation of the right to access to the court. The Court found that the Swiss Confederation had failed to comply with its duties (“positive obligations”) under the Convention concerning climate change."

For some of these it also applies the other way, doesn't it:

Richer societies can afford to heat their homes with more sustainable solutions.

More educated societies are more likely to introduce nuclear power or build windmill parks.

War could worsen the greenhouse effect.

Not sure this kind of rhetoric ever worked. As far back as I have followed the news - so perhaps for 35 years - it was about to be too late. We were at the brink of a catastrophe. Humankind had to do something now. Tomorrow, it would be too late.

Look, global warming exists, it's (at least partially) man-made, and that's really bad.

But it's one issue out of many man-made or man-fixable issues. Fighting poverty is another. Curing diseases like malaria is also important. Curbing starvation. Spreading democracy and the rule of law. Then there are women's rights. Education. Racism. Avoiding WWIII. I am sure I forgot many large issues. How do we prioritize? Do we have to prioritize or can we deal with all of them at once?

It's a unique form of American subsidies: You don't have to directly pay your businesses to get a competitive edge. You just don't require companies and individuals to pay any way near enough tax to keep basic government functions like education and healthcare going. Then you solve it by printing more money.

When a less powerful country does that, it bears most or all of the cost itself. When the US does it, much of the inflationary cost is borne by all other countries that use the dollar as a reserve currency. Other countries don't have a reserve currency like the dollar.

Yes, technologically, this is amazing. But I honestly think it's sickening that a company controlled by one man is allowed to send 30,000 pieces of junk into space.

The fact that the one man who controls it is a billionaire demagogue (yes, by now Musk is a political leader) with his own media company just makes it worse.

Tesla's revenue in 2 days are roughly the same as the yearly GDP of Tonga. Space X's revenue is 10 times the GDP of Tonga. There will be no real oversight of this billionaire on the loose.

12.6 EUR

This is the paper the post is based on: https://earth4all.life/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/E4A_People...

Here in Denmark, all universities are state owned and with no tuition. In fact, you get paid to attend one (around 900 euro monthly). But I can assure you that Danes place a lot of value on the free universities. Some universities are considered slightly more prestigious (often the older ones), and some programs are also more prestigious than others, for example the ones that are difficult to get into, or that lead to jobs with higher salaries, or which are considered particularly difficult.

So how does one compare the "free" (tax paid) Danish universities to the US/UK ones? By citations? Nobel laureates? Amount of foreign students? Salaries of alumni? Patents? GDP per capita? Number of high value companies per capita? I think you'd find that as a whole, Danish, and other Scandinavian universities, easily compete with Anglo Saxon universities, and that the main drawback of Scandinavian universities is the language.

What is so interesting is that back then, you needed to live on Manhattan or very near Manhattan if you worked there. Subways, trains, new suburbs, bridges and tunnels, and cars, enabled people employed by Manhattan businesses to live further away, like further out in the boroughs and towns on Long Island, upstate New York, and New Jersey. Now, the Internet and acceptance of remote work enables people employed by Manhattan companies to live even further away.

It's astonishing to think of the fact that NYC's total population is down from 8.8 million in 2020 to 8.3 million. That's a steep drop.

With merely 48 percent of office space occupied, and desks in the so-called occupied offices partially empty due to people working from home a few days every week, it's not hard to imagine that the service sector is hurting: restaurants, cleaners, shop owners etc. Many of the people employed in these jobs lived in the other NYC boroughs.

It's not unlikely that the NYC population will decline further in the coming years.

The HN crowd largely consists of people who make a living creating or working for businesses that create material which is protected as intellectual property rights.

Source code to computer programs is protected under copyright law (and in America often also patent law). Databases such as the core of social networks are protected under a version of copyright law. Algorithms and procedures are often protected through confidentiality agreements and laws requiring confidentiality from employees and business partners. Names of companies, websites, URLs, games, characters, URLs (google.com) etc. are protected under trademark law. I can't just register "google.con" and make a search engine and sell ads from that domain. Google will come after me. And those on HN that don't work yet, often study at expensive universities that awarding fancy degrees. Not everyone is free to say they graduated as a Ph.D. in engineering from Harvard.

Yes, many developers on HN open source part of or all of their work. But then the get paid creating some other intellectual property right. Very, very few people just give away all their work.

Yet, that's literally what most commenters here seem to ask that publishing houses and authors do. Publishing houses make little money compared to many other businesses and especially compared to big tech. Authors typically make next to nothing.

If publishing houses don't try to protect their digital works, they will not be paid enough to cover costs, yet alone turn a profit. Simple as that. An e-book can be copied and spread much easier than a print book. Without publishing houses, there will be less screening of published works, and less marketing of authors and new books.

Before anyone makes the argument that the EU should have no jurisdiction over an American entity, please remember that Google sells its services in Europe. It's well within the jurisdiction of the EU to regulate how anyone does business here. Google Ireland alone had a 50B euro turnover.

The breaking up of monopolies used to be in the toolbox of American antitrust policies, back when America enforced antitrust legislation on its own companies.

Apart from

1) measuring activity that doesn't contribute much to society in any meaningful way (war), and from

2) failing to measure activity that actually contributes to society (like the grey economy),

3) GDP also fails to measure old activity that is still contributing. In a company's accounting that would be the assets, incl. the IPR and goodwill. In a country, it's the roads that our forefathers built, the education that our parents still have, the peace that was brokered with neighboring states 500 years etc. I wish there was a better tool for measuring that. Even if the GDP of China has surpassed that of the EU for a few years, it will be many years for China to catch up with the GDP (and other contributions) added to the European economy in the past hundreds of years.

Yes, thank you :-)

Yes, it does have an element of bragging, but Northern Europe, and particularly the Nordics, do very well and there is no purpose in trying to hide that.

What is interesting to me is that much of what the Nordics do is widely known and freely available to copy for other countries. But they rarely seem to want to, even when they can afford it. Some of what the Nordics do, like free healthcare for all, is expensive and requires strong governments with little corruption. But much of it is - like education the Nordic way - is not necessarily more expensive than the way they do education in Southern and Eastern Europe.

For the vast majority of Americans, turning the US more into a Scandinavian style social democracy would mean an improvement of life. But they don't seem to want it.

For most Southern and Eastern Europeans, taking hints from Scandinavian education with less focus on root learning and grades, and more acceptance - even encouragement of making errors - would increase their kids' chances. But they still spend significant time having kids memorize old poems or historic facts, and they still punish errors and grade even little kids. And most parents seem to want it that way.

I base this on what I read in US media, and what I gathered from having lived in the US, in a Nordic country, in a Mediterranean country and in an Eastern European country.

What I find fascinating is that it took so long for this to become reality:

Originally, office space was needed for secretaries, typewriters, meeting rooms, desk telephones that were hooked up to a central company number. Eventually office buildings were needed for mainframes, other servers, copy machines, fax machines, printers, desktop computers etc. Offices were truly needed until around 1998-2008 or so.

But after that - which is already some 15-25 years ago - most of us worked on a laptop that hooked up to whatever screen was available, and used email, chats and perhaps some collaboration software, and where data storage was in the cloud. Our cell phones were easily connected with office numbers. Lately, we don't need to sign anything physically anymore, and we don't need to write actual checks.

Nevertheless, going to the office kept being the preferred working mode, new office buildings kept being built, and rents kept increasing, long after the office wasn't strictly necessary. Only when the pandemic showed management that remote work works, did offices finally come out of fashion. Now, it's hard to imagine that companies will keep the office spaces when their leases expire without asking for large reductions.

Often it takes long for new tech and new habits to be adopted.

A few things:

1: Indian wages are going up. The difference gets smaller every year.* Note that many of the best Indian developers are paid in USD, and even for the developers that get paid in Rupees, the company they are hired by locally often does get paid in USD by the American company that buys their services, so the fact that the Rupee goes down doesn't necessarily offset their wage increase for the American company that hires them.

2: American workers can still meet in every Tuesday. It's hard from Hyderabad.

3: Time difference can be a real issue (but of course it can also be an advantage).

4: It's often easier for Americans to understand American English than Indian English.

5: American developers might understand the American market and competing products better.

* https://www.statista.com/chart/25729/india-annual-average-sa...

From the point of view of spending less resources, a smaller world population is good. However, most resources are consumed by the relatively smaller, wealthy populations who's populations have been stagnating for decades, not by the larger and poorer populations of India, South East Asia and Africa, that have seen most population growth.

The main worry I have is how we are going to manage financially. For hundreds of years, we've only had growing world population and it has been a driver for much economic growth. Industrialism and the increasing world population has gone hand in hand. Will we see more inflation now, when there will continuously be smaller working populations? What about investments: Will it be more difficult to attract investment when many markets are naturally shrinking due to shrinking populations?