kaon_2

As much as I sympathize with the message I don't like the way it was brought. I cannot help but feel that this "indignation journalism" hurts more than does good. Everybody knows the UN is imperfect, and yet the people that win from its disenfranchisement are tyrants, billionaires and certainly not you or me. In fact even the tyrants need a UN because you need to cooperate somehow. We need to improve and strengthen international institutions, not discredit them. The article could have been written with that in mind

I don't want to come across as the China pisser because most big countries do scumbag things of have done them (cough colonialism). But some more of China's vices that are out of sight:

- Keep the war going in Myanmar with terrible results for the population of one of the biggest and most populous countries in the world. You just don't hear about it because no journalist goes there. - Keeping North Korea in the saddle whereas they could have gently pushed for improvements. - Keeping the war in Ukraine going. If Chinese leadership has any moral ambition, they could stop the war quickly. But they don't. Their own agenda comes first, as is the case with any superpower.

But yes man I would buy a BYD immediatey and it pisses me off to no end that hey are 5x more expensive in Europe than in China. I guess the whole morality of free trade was only 'good' as long as it benefited us.

Poland is doing fine. Southern Europe is doing very well. Greece is growing superfast. Switzerland is still one the richest and successful countries in the world. Denmark is amazing.

Germany and the UK are the sick men of Europe. France is going brankrupt. Careful with confusing the 19th century superpowers with the whole of Europe. Yes cost of living has increased by which i mean real wages have stalled in many places, but this is worldwide and mostly due to external causes such as rocketing gas and oil prices. If we succeed in making lasting peace with Russia and getting access again to their natural resources, a new golden age may well commence.

Why would Anthropic margin's be negative? Inference is practically free for them, so what costs do they have for an additional subscription?

Does it make sense to talk about "the government" in this age? It probably misguides us more than informs us. I've always felt the perception of government at the time is closer to our perception of the captain of the local football team - at best distant and upholding the honor of the village, at worst a thief with a title - rather than how we view it today. Authority of information lay with the church. Maybe replace by "Persons of wealth in positions of power"?

"Distinguishing hype from reality is not easy. But recent developments mean that ambitious promises could be fulfilled. "

Just like AI is changing the world before our eyes, this may be just such a technology. Maybe I will come to resent them when they are omnipresent, but a person-transporting drone (EVTOL) flying on a solid state battery would be transformative in connecting people, and I cannot wait to see it happen. The EU has committed 500bn in inter-european railway investment by 2050. Maybe it will be entirely disrupted? Who knows.

Yes. It is both a little funny, and true. Often departments don't even want to start a software project if it is being perceived as "legal and IT are going to have all kinds of opinions on this". When we say everything runs in Europe, by European companies, it actually signals "there will be no problem with GDPR and data sensitivity, and your legal and IT departments won't complain, and the CEO will love it".

Matt Lakeman writes in one of his blogs that wherever he goes, people tend to love the USA. Except in Europe where he faces a constant storm of criticism. And that was before February. Just like you cannot explain the taste of chocolate to someone, it is hardly possible to explain the mental shift that happened everywhere when the US threatened the EU with military invasion. Like a broken egg this is diplomatic damage that cannot be repaired.

If you sell software and you tell your customers and prospects that everything runs in Europe, by European companies, this instills an enormous amount of trust. Risk averse sectors like manufacturing love this, and it will help you gain customers immediately.

So no, these posts are not tiring to many of us. In fact, we are only at the beginning of the beginning because many of us will be making these migrations. I wish things had run a different course.

Of course. But then again, it was the US that threatened the EU with military invasion, so if you want your service to continue uninterrupted, it helps being prepared.

Amazing to read through the list. I had no idea about Orkut. To kill an application with 300m users seems insane.

Anyone here knows why MSN was ever killed? The brand was so strong. I am sure usage was still there. You'd think Microsoft could still bring it back somehow. In a similar vein, it was never clear to me why hotmail was killed to make place for "live" mail.

True. And yet, as an organization when you buy OP's training, you don't buy the material. You buy the feeling that you make your organization becomes more productive. You buy the signal to your boss that you are innovative and working to make your organization more productive. And you buy the time and headspace from your engineers that they are thinking if at least for 2 hours about making the organization more productive. The latter can be well worth the cost, and the former surely too.

Agreed. Actually - maybe no? Maybe the hourly wage is the problem. It's been too low for too long so there was no pressure to innovate. Denmark and Switzerland are big manufacturers with high wages that are continuously innovating. Maybe the Euro was a curse for Germany afteral? Without it their wages would have been higher.

I am hearing rumors that B2B sales is rebounding back to more in-person meetings. Cold emails don't work anymore. I've heard similar tales of current teens early-twenties that there is a trend of doing things in real life again. But... more likely if you start measuring it people are more reclusive than ever, and doing things that used to be normal is now considered "niche and trendy". Our sales process at least is very online-meeting oriented...

Sure those are impressive. But they weren't sudden. It was already there before I was born and slowly evolved.

If I look at the most useful technologies around me, then Google Maps ranks high. But it wasn't sudden. It was on the desktop first. And then slowly crept through mobile.

LLMs on the other hand, suddenly just kind of appeared.

I was born in 1989. The most impressive sudden technological advance I have experienced have been LLMs. This video is a good candidate for second place. I am mindblown... That they even dare having children dance with them. The trust they must place. An acquantance bought a chess board with a robot arm, and it accidentally broke his finger because he picked up a piece that the robot arm wanted to pick up. China isn't just a few hours in the future, more like decades it feels like.

Not to take away from the seriousness of the moment, but I feel compelled to share my feeling shere: My inner teenager was hoping to see TeamSpeak and Ventrilo listed just to honor the good old days. Between 2005-2008 it felt as if Ventrilo had about 90% of the market, with TeamSpeak having the rest. I guess the hopeful message is that nothing lasts forever and alternatives come and go.

Am I the only one that is simply scared of running your own cloud? What happens if your administrator credentials get leaked? At least with Azure I can phone microsoft and initiate a recovery. Because of backups and soft deletion policies quite a lot is possible. I guess you can build in these failsafe scenarios locally too? But what if a fire happens like in South Korea? Sure most companies run more immediate risks such as going bankrupt, but at least Cloud relieves me from the stuff of nightmares.

Except now I have nightmares that the USA will enforce the patriot act and force Microsoft to hand over all their data in European data centers and then we have to migrate everything to a local cloud provider. Argh...

Urgh... Elon is famous not for things he's done, but for saying things he is going to do. Do people still buy in to this? Elon Musk always promises things far in the future but doesn't make good on them. He hasn't succeeded in self driving cars. He is never going to mars. He is not solving the LA traffic problem with tunnels. His robots are the equivalent of the Metaverse. He's a phenomenal businessman, and understands that a story is part of that.

This. Phillips and ASML share the same regional and cultural heritage. Many ASML employees will have first-hand experience of Phillips' downfall. They certainly do not want to repeat that mistake.

Not strange at all! If you want to go by car you must build even more tunnels. Mountainous regions favor rail just like urban areas do. Furthermore, 19th century investments into rail still pay off in mountainous regions, because once you build a railway bridge or tunnel, you are kind of dumb not to use it. In the USA competition from trucks or cars is much tougher.

Is Atlas Shrugged really that bad? Heh, I started reading the fountainhead in my mid 30ies. The natural way you get introduced to new characters is great, but man I got so angry with the unrealistic robotic personalities I kept putting the book away and after 200 pages I really just could not continue. So Atlas Shrugged is similar? What a disappointment!

Anybody here that loved the books and would care to elaborate it speak to them so much?

Here's a story about how the mere perception of "regulations exist and are strict" is dragging down my european AI start-up:

Our product makes it easy to capture and share knowledge on the factory floor, which is very important when many of your workers about to retire. Interest is enormous. It is a simple SaaS. You'd think selling would be easy. And it is: In the USA. In Europe the mere existence of the regulations (not what's in them) delays us by 6 months at least per deal.

No european executive really understands what is in the GDPR, and eventhough we are 100% compliant, there is nothing we can do to take away this fear. This means that when we talk to European companies, IT and Legal departments always have to be closely involved, leading to all sorts of political games; each department conjures up non-existing risk by talking vaguely about data privacy, just so they appear important. Half a year later when the dust has settled, the executive buys the product, or their mind has moved to other things.

My point is this: What is in the laws is not important to me. What is important is that current perception of laws turn companies into slugs. I want us to mentally move back to 2018 where we could "just buy SaaS" without worrying endlessly about data privacy. I understand hesitency when it comes to cyber security, but that is not what is slowing us down.

One of our workarounds currently is simply never to mention we use AI.

I once read a fascinating booklet that made the argument that "intelligence" as we call it evolved out of the ability to track better. Early hominids had many different skills, but improved reasoning capability paid for itself evolutionary speaking by making you a much better tracker. You spot measure the temperature of droppings, and reason that a gazelle was here only 2 hours ago. You see the tracks and notice that the gazelle was probably in the shade to avoid the midday sun. Now it must be thirsty and is therefore likely to go visit the stream nearby.

In that context, "Intelligence" is just one part of a collection of useful skills for a band of early hominids. You only need a few great trackers, but those trackers would be grateful if they also had some "meatheads" in the crew that are phenomenally atletic. And who knows; early hominids would mock each other for not being good at tracking, but would they call each other dumb? I somehow doubt it.

Happy to oblige. Basically we digitized a company from spreadsheets or paper to ERP. We'd introduce accounting software, stock management software, help desk software. But the biggest thing you need is some kind of "Loan Account Management Software" which is the center piece.

This centerpiece tracks the outstanding loan amount that each customer has. It sutomatically sends payment reminder SMS messages a few days before payments are due. It connects to the hardware with internet-of-things to turn it off if payments aren't made. It connects to the bank to ensure payments are there, and confirms when payments are made. Really fun software to build with many different parts.

There were SaaS providers for this. In the beginning (2015) there was only 1 player, Angaza (Reed Hastings mentioned in the article is one of their sales guys). Nowadays there are a handful; PaygOps, BBoX pulse (not sure if that still exists), and a few smaller ones. They charge like $2-$7 per device managed on the platform.

Convincing customer to take this up was not hard at all. You pretty much needed it to run your operations on anything more than 100 customers, and as the above article shows, scale had big advantages. Moreover; if you could show to investors that you had the software infrastructure scale, they were significantly likely to give money. It was boom time until corona hit. Everyone was expecting 30% YoY growth like until 2019, but then everything stagnated. Many companies went bankrupt and a lot of consolidation happened in the distributor market. Companies saved money on their software first, and we called it a day.

In the manufacturing industry where I am now, I fully agree with the mixed bag. Companies are old, with many old people, they stay small and don't necessarily need to scale or "grow forever". They are conservative and happy with the way things are.

I oversaw that thank you :)

Yes and no. You are right that indoor cooking (or outdoor on wood) is indeed one of the biggest causes of death worldwide. It dwarfs deaths by malaria. And where people don't die, it causes respiratory issues. I don't know the math but it is similar to smoking X cigarettes a day.

- sidenote - You always learn that in centuries past, people didn't grow old. I never knew why but my current suspicion is that air pollution by stoves and hearths was probably the top 3 cause.

However, cooking isn't (yet) solved by solar. Making heat from electricity is hard! Clean Cooking solutions often use propane, butane, or wooden pallets. Clean Cooking companies face all of the same issues as the Off grid solar companies of this article. But you'd be surprised that it is really considered a different industry. Customers and price plans are the same, but funding often comes from different sources.

Making affordable, electric, clean cooking solutions would be one of the most impactful inventions of our generation. Even then, challenges remain: No cultural activity is as steeped in tradition as cooking, and convincing people to change this, resulting in different tasting meals, is hard. Particular if it is the man deciding on the money, and the woman doing the work.

Thought provoking question! I am not an electrical engineer, but arguments I heard went along these lines: Almost all existing appliance markets are AC. Are we really going to be building a complete parallel appliance market? You wouldn't be able to sell a TV from the city in the country side and vice versa. I would be keen to hear what an electrical engineer on hackernews has to say!

Interestingly, when I visited the countryside, I saw some AC electrical appliances. One elder couple had an enormous 80ies style stereo-set gathering dust in the shed. I was told they were a wedding gift.

I worked in this industry as a software developer. Companies like SunCulture (who used to be a customer of ours) started maintaining all their customers on spreadsheets. But with high volume low-value sales, you need to have good software to manage this. We were a player.

I once had to do a mobile money integration with a Zimbabwean bank. A dozen skype calls led to nothing. Then I visited the country, bought a local cell phone, made a few phone calls, and within several days I'd reached the developer I needed. He said: "Wait all I need to do is add this string?". "Yes.". He did so at midnight and our integration worked. Next evening we partied.

It shows how integrations are often more of a human/organizational navigation more than anything technical.

As for the article; the tone is hyped, and it is also somewhat true. Hundreds of millions will be using electricity. Still I want to point out one thing: This is all Solar powered DC electricity. No inverters! So you are looking at powering DC only appliances! Inverters are generally simply too expensive for this. Also the impact on income is very limited; you can't really do anything significantly more productive with the electricity, as several reports have shown. But I don't want to downplay the impact; The quality of life improvement is hard to overstate. Maybe somewhat comparable to say; you are forbidden to use any form of transport (bike, car, bus) to suddenly having all 3. Life becomes so much more convenient. For example: You don't have to take the bus anymore to town to charge your phone - yes people do this.

I worked in this industry, visited several rural areas. Spoke to many people. Sunculture used to be a customer of our software company. The article doesn't quite do justice to the introduction of electricity; it claims that people replace kerosine or diesel with electricity.

From what i've seen this is rarely true. Most people just sit in the dark. This means you go from total darkness at night to electricity. Even the smallest 100lumen light is transformative. You can talk to your family at night. You can make love while seeing your spouse. You can see the spiders and the snakes. You are less afraid of bandits in the night. The biggest impact isn't made by the pumps or the larger systems, but by the significantly more affordable $5-$10 solar lanterns. The poorest of the poorest will get this and pay $0.20 per day or week for this.