locallost

"Explains" why people "call" it genocide. It's obvious baloney and beating around the bush because it was trained on media that does the same, and it was likely instructed to do so in the same way the media is instructed. E.g. when Israel murders civilians waiting in line for food, it will be a matter of fact report without any qualifications and just muddying the water. When Hamas does it, it will be an article charged with words like massacre etc. This is well documented [1].

To further illustrate the point that we have the same thing with LLMs, I asked it two questions: 1) Is Israel committing genocide 2) Is China committing genocide

In both instances it said it's a matter of great international debate with a list of arguments, but the summaries were different. In the one case it concludes that while the UN and others broadly document severe human rights abuses, the label genocide has been formally adopted by several governments and watchdogs. In the other case it says while many have concluded it is genocide, the final decision rests with the International Court and it is expected to take years to make a decision.

Can you guess which is which? I think if we offered a $100 to people to pick which is which, the success rate would be much higher than 50% (random), thus easily proving biased phrasing.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2026/05/12/gaza-media-coverage-isra...

Amdahl's law says something similar, adding more processors to a problem eventually gives almost no speedup because parts of the problem cannot be parallelized and need to be done sequentially.

To the people wondering the meaning of the article, it's I think this.

Use it or lose it, but the problem is very old. The introduction of the alphabet/literacy almost certainly made people's memories worse -- up to that point they had to hold a lot more in their heads. At the same time it enabled a different better way to share information and learn. The question is thus, will it make the world better, is it a book or a TV?

I disagree with the analogy, where the fish can develop eyes again and see, if placed in another environment because the genes are still there. I don't think that companies that went blind have genes anymore. It's debatable if they ever had them or if their success was based as much as being in the right place at the right time. If the times change, the successful way may no longer be successful. What is the dog and what is the tail? But more simply, in the end you need good people because in the end the work needs to be done well. In that case the genes might be physically gone because those people moved on to other companies.

To be honest, Apple's pricing has been up to a point pretty user friendly the last few years. Two years ago I bought an iPad for around 400 because everyone thought they'll announce a new one. That didn't happen until last year where they announced the new one but for 350 or so. Macbooks are also "cheap" considering what you get for them with the M chips.

I'm not sure that's true, although I don't know which SUVs you mean. I don't know all regulations in all countries in Europe, but think in principle they're all the same. So with the B permit, which is for basically cars, you can drive a vehicle up to 3.5 tons, which can be something like Iveco Daily 35S. It's basically a small truck, a popular rent a car option when moving to a new apartment/house.

They're not building anything. The French are building it and doing a terrible job for the third time straight. Flamanville at home, Olkiluoto in Finland and now Hinkley.

Germany was a net importer of around 20TWh of electricity in 2025. If you want to tack that on be my guest, but coal use is still 2/3 down since 2000. It was in the 300TWh range then and it's now in the 90TWh range.

The only farce in the energy world I can see is that a positive example of emissions reduction like Germany is being singled out on ideological and political grounds, whereas the biggest offenders get a free pass. Examples are Poland which will accomplish nothing for 25 years despite the technology being cheap and available, and globally the US which reduced coal use by almost completely switching to gas instead of renewables like Germany, and additionally it uses almost twice per capital than Germany. Basically Germany could be 100% fossil fuels for electricity and be less bad than the US. Wild no?

My claim about the repository is that there isn't one since 60-70 years nuclear has been used worldwide as an energy source. Instead of wasting time interpreting what I mean, you should just ask me. My answer is: it might not be technologically infeasible (I don't know), but it's expensive and politically difficult since nobody wants to store it. That's just the reality of life -- technology is not deployed in a fantasy but in reality. In general, nuclear is a fantasy technology where large problems are handwaved away as if meaningless, but are difficult to tackle. For Sellafield I already said what I had to say. You either understand it or you don't.

All this maybe made sense 50 years ago, but we have better options now. And despite the occasional brouhaha the world is marching on without it. We'll soon have clean cheap energy and nobody will remember this failed attempt, nobody will remember coal, nobody will remember Trump trying to slow down the transition.

Made in Germany.

Germany replaced 2/3 of its coal use in 25 years while simultaneously inventing a whole new industry and a new way of thinking (some people still fail to understand it). This way of thinking has led to hundreds of gigawatts of new clean capacity per year in the last few years and continuously growing. This has already now been way more beneficial to mankind than nuclear has achieved in the last 60 years. The biggest problem in the world right now are people actively resisting this by wasting time and money. Poland could be on Germany's level right now for a fraction of the cost because Germany already did the heavy lifting for the whole world, but they refuse to do so on political and ideological grounds. This is a big problem, the biggest problem we have right now.

But anyway: Danke Deutschland

As for Finland and Onkalo, so my list is correct and there is no country in the world with a working permanent solution right now? Or have we invented time travel and are currently in later this summer period of the year?

Most of Sellafield's problem are related to faulty thinking that we'll figure it out no big deal, which is the exact attitude I was commenting on. But sometimes you don't figure it out later as they found out. Don't let it happen to you.

I think you need to stop overthinking. Yes it can make you sick, but the only thing you can do is be on the lookout for it and be smart about avoiding it. I've had around 4-5 ticks in the last years, my kids and family probably around 15-20, one recently near my ankle that probably could've been avoided if I wasn't wearing short trousers. But anyway nobody ever got sick from it and we live in a region with a high prevalence of tick caused encephalitis. There's a vaccine for that so we're all vaccinated now.

Otherwise just enjoy your life.

I have a better list:

* every dollar spent on building new nuclear will be put to use so late it effectively increases CO2 emissions

* A country like Poland is the biggest emissions perpetrator in Europe, and the fact they are building nuclear means they will stay that way for literally decades

* The fossil fuel exporter countries are pushing nuclear as their agenda. Why do you think that is?

* Not a single country has a working permanent solution currently for waste storage.

* The UK cannot clean up Sellafield at all. They had the bright idea to process waste and are now sitting in hundreds of billions of pounds of estimated costs to dispose of it.

Did someone mention Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy yet? It's not one organization, but there's just so much money in tech and it's so mainstream, that it just attracts more people that want to be successful not as a byproduct of skill, but just on its own. This bit me recently when changing jobs, I underestimated that despite all the problems I had, at my previous job there were a lot of people prioritizing being good at their job. Now it's just kicking the can so it's someone else's problem.

I imagine it could be done like thus, but it is not, there's no infrastructure like this, so it's a moot point. Balcony solar was allowed so it's a hassle free DIY solution. You also don't get any money for feeding into the grid, but because you save a lot of money on installation costs it's still worth it.

It can't be more or much more than the 800W as currently done in Germany because it would not be safe with the way electricity is delivered to a home.

The reason is: when you pull electricity from the grid, the fuse would blow if you tried to pull too much current (e.g. you connect four hair dryers on the same outlet). It blows to prevent the wiring in your home from overheating and catching on fire. With balcony solar, you plug it in your home outlet which is already behind the fuse, which means the fuse cannot react and cut off power if you try to feed in more than the capacity allows. You could be maxing out on the current you are pulling from the grid, and then on top of that you would be adding your balcony solar.

Why it's allowed at all in Germany and other places is because the fuse will blow above 10A and the wiring in the house is 16A, so there was always a buffer or overcapacity in the wiring, presumably just in case. So they allowed 800W of balcony solar which is roughly 3.5A and still there is some wiggle room left.

Also why pull from the grid at all: your appliances actually just use the electricity from the grid. In Germany and I guess most of Europe they run a three phase system, so your balcony solar might not be in the same physical circuit as your appliances in use. With balcony solar your meter just offsets your consumption with whatever you are feeding it at the moment. From the grid standpoint if you are running something using 800W and feeding in 800W, it's 0.

Of course it can work without this too, but this defeats the purpose of balcony solar, which is plug it in and it works simplicity.

I don't want to pretend I can explain LLMs, but the same "math" can be applied for visual and non visual things. The dot product of two vectors gives you the angle between them. This is true in 2 or 3 dimensions. But it's also true in 4, 5, 6...n dimensions even though we cannot visualize a 4d space. That it's an angle is relevant for you in the space you can comprehend, but for math or a machine it works in any number of dimensions. So it does need to understand anything visually if the math checks out.

"Understanding"

There could be many alternatives, but not valid. Polymarket and Kalshi have banned insider betting.

This still doesn't mean they are good at it. For them it's like flipping a coin with two identical sides. It's just cheating.

I don't know. Buffett had a good example of, if you organized a national coin flipping contest in the US, you would have people that won 25+ coin tosses in a row. Are these people good at calling coin tosses or is it just chance? You cannot reliably and long term predict if Bitcoin will go up or down within 5 minutes, or something similar. You can cheat maybe somehow, but that's not within the rules of the game.

I don't think that's surprising because the alternative would be that some people are able to predict the future. Whatever strategy one might figure out that works is long term destined to fail, as other people start using them. The only real way to make money there is by providing liquidity since it's a zero sum game. For the stock market this is not true because it's not zero sum, it grows over time.

Because you need to install things to get things done. In the world of perfect security and order it's impossible to get anything done, much the same as it's impossible to do in complete chaos.

I am telling people to wear helmets when they drive a car, this would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year in the world, but somehow I cannot convince them.

It's not the next phase, it's the current phase.

The report of my demise was greatly exaggerated.

I see 10 people in my address book that I could theoretically send money via Wero. Hundreds of people in my address book have a Visa or a MasterCard. It's not a bad thing to have competition and ambition, but to say goodbye is premature to say the least. Online payments especially between regular people (so not businesses) are still dominated by PayPal. And even online shopping is dominated by PayPal although Apple and Google Pay are taking a bigger slice because it's just so convenient. And they're just again using Visa and MasterCard.

I'm not sure Wero was developed to be very practical. I registered with my phone number, but now have second thoughts because I don't want to give my phone number to strangers when buying on second hand marketplaces. But guess what - you cannot change it. You cannot register a second number. It just feels very rigid in its design.

There were other systems already that were supposed to do the same. Girocard/EC... All dead and buried now.

It's a good idea if you're driving looking at the rear view mirror. Roof tiles are a thing of the past. It matches what I think a roof is, but if you can do the same thing for a fraction of the price it will win out, and for the new generations, solar panels attached to roofs will be just as normal as tiles for me.

I do think it's an interesting idea to use panels everywhere, but it can't be a complicated and expensive solution. You could maybe use them as a facade or lately people have used them for fences.

I wrote my first CSS 20 years ago, and one thing I can say for sure is that it's impossible to really structure your CSS in this way. The structure will break down over time and it will anyway be buggy and you'll be chasing your tail, as long as everything you do is global. It might work if you're a solo developer, but the reality is most projects involve multiple people trying to get things done. As long as a style is global, changing it will break something else. These days I use scoped styles and that's it.

My favorite is when colleague A broke something from colleague B, who fixed it but broke sometimes from me, and I fixed that and broke what colleague A did. The process repeated once more and it landed again on my desk, where I said wait a minute, I've been here already. We were than able to fix all three things at the same time.

So it's difficult to keep track of everything.

Thanks for the hint. I'd always thought the movie was inspired by Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. The premise was the same, and even the aliens looked somewhat similar. Vonnegut jokingly described them as an upside down toilet brush.

It would be difficult to judge me as being upset because of your criticism since I've never responded to your criticism before.

And for not needing to say it: actually yes it is needed. Nobody said consumer rights are performative, it was said that Rossmann is performative and trying to generate drama and clicks. Even if not true, it's a valid opinion that doesn't make anyone a mindless consumer, quite the opposite. But regardless, those are not the same things, unless you see Rossmann (and possibly yourself) as the gatekeeper of this issue.

They never said they don't care about consumer right, but that your over the top comments and ad hominem attacks smell more of drama than of consumer rights. I hope I never produce the words "return to mindless consuming" just because someone dared to criticize my idol. Ditto for "when you care so little about consumer rights". Pretentiousness is not a virtue.

Flowers for women's day is another ultimately weird tradition in many countries. Weird because the point of women's day is equality and not to be treated like our little special ladies. I always half jokingly said a more suitable gift would be a mini wrench or a screwdriver.

Yes, that's what I meant with crazy expensive, mostly the concessions. The tickets I am ok with, I am in th end going there for the big screen and experience, not to eat crappy food. I go with my kids, and it's just painful. We watched Mario 2 recently, and because my youngest didn't watch the first one, we watched that one at home first. 3.99 to rent 4k and 2.50 for popcorn and drinks for three kids. Puts things in perspective.