schnitzelstoat

It's one of the most annoying.

I have a dishwasher so I do minimal washing up. I don't have a dryer as I air-dry my laundry but I could get one if I wanted to. I have a Roborock although I don't use it much since having a toddler.

But folding laundry is the one chore which still can't be automated. Even cooking itself has become much easier with air fryers etc.

Or we can use the free time to go to the gym.

Anything that frees us from labour is good.

In Europe, I think it is more common tbh. Even in the UK my dad would let me try making cocktails etc. at the weekend when I was 17.

It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.

I don't drink any alcohol nowadays so it's not like it turned me into an alcoholic either.

You can also be a resident, paying plenty of taxes, yet not be a citizen.

It's not uncommon to see people (and young people) reading on public transport here in Spain. The odd thing is how popular actual paper books are vs. e-readers. Since I got my Kindle in 2015 I haven't read a paper book since.

That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.

And if we look at stuff like the PISA scores, it doesn't seem like this supposed higher rate of reading is paying many dividends.

The new Xbox CEO was on the guest list. But yeah, I agree it's a bit like a conspiracy theory.

He's referring to this list of invited guests: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/24/peter-...

They are talking about purchase plans like Klarna etc. and like people have for their iPhone. Because it's going to cost as much as an iPhone.

Yeah, there's lots of stuff in Steam that I never use and don't even understand. Like the Steam Points and the Trading Cards and Steam Level and so on.

But the purchasing experience is top notch and they even have a generous refund policy. It's just lightyears ahead of the competition.

It's good for emulation too and it'll run GTA6, so I'll get mine out of storage.

Yeah, they could have spent the money on founding new studios. With that sheer amount of money you could pretty much poach any talent you wanted too, but it wouldn't be as obviously anticompetitive.

Instead, they paid way over the odds for IPs that seem past their prime.

I lived there for around 6 months like 15 years ago so perhaps it's changed a lot since then.

But even as an Englishman, it was very different to home. I remember the supermarket was shut all Sunday and was only open until 12 on the Saturday, and it shut early in the week too (at like 5pm or 6pm or something?) so by the time I'd got the train back home from work it was already closed. I had to get up early every Saturday just to make sure I could get the shopping done.

I remember once I waved at my neighbours who were sitting eating in a common garden area and they acted super confused that I would wave to them.

It didn't seem like an especially friendly place and there were so many rules about everything too, like just being able to take the rubbish or recycling out you had specific days and times.

I'm not American so I don't really care if it's Chinese or not.

But at work I can only use the approved Enterprise Plans we have and we only have those with Anthropic and OpenAI.

It gives them a massive advantage because they can cut the cost per token by a lot and eat Anthropic's market share.

In what universe is any company going to give that advantage away?

In any case if they take away a lot of market share it's basically the same in the end - most people will be using these optimisations.

My company has a Claude Code and Codex one and I use Claude Code because I am more familiar with it. That said, I just use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation and it's pretty cheap. Codex seems decent too so I should try it out some more.

But you can get an awful lot done even with just like $200 a month at API pricing if you are careful not to waste a powerful model on an easy task, or carry around a bloated context window etc.

I think a lot of the 'tokenmaxxing' people spending thousands every month are simply using the tools ineffectively (like having loads of Opus agents doing tasks that Sonnet or even Haiku could do). I suspect this will only get worse now with the release of Fable, but Anthropic must love it.

When you say the cheaper models do you mean like Deepseek or GLM? I haven't tried those but they look interesting. It'd be nice to shift to open weights and not be tied to one company.

Thanks! I don't tend to use the GitHub discussion very much (just commenting on a few Issues) so I didn't know!

The Talkyard example is interesting - how does it differ to the algorithms Reddit uses to sort by "Best" or "Hot" when looking at comments (I think Best is the default now too, not Top, so presumably it takes recency etc. into account somehow).

The troubles over copyright infringement in AI training data remind me a bit of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin.

There he suffered massive patent infringement, that basically stopped being enforced due to the sheer economic importance of the cotton gin.

In a similar manner, I think there is a reasonably strong argument that it was wrong to use copyrighted material for AI training without paying royalties nor even asking for permission. But equally, every country wants to have the most powerful models and enforcing such royalties would make it effectively impossible to train them as the amount of material required would cost an insane amount in royalty fees.

So I expect the law will continue to turn a blind eye (perhaps enforcing some token payments like that $1.5B mentioned in the article) because "if we don't make these models, the Chinese will" etc.

Ignoring the bizarre inclusion of training compute for the AI company estimates, the other comparisons are still valid.

The rest of the software market trails. The top 1% of companies spend $89k per engineer per year on AI, 40% of a fully-loaded $224k senior engineer salary. The median spends $137. That is the gap : ... 0.4x at the top of the market, near zero at the median.

So it's not more expensive than an engineer it's 40% as expensive, and for many companies use-cases the cost is virtually negligible.

Even here in Europe where developers are much cheaper than in the US, it still makes sense to pay for the LLM Enterprise subscriptions.

I wonder if a hybrid might work well - a Reddit/HN style system for comments, but a simple forum style method of post ranking by last activity. So if you make a comment on a post, the post goes to the top of the page.

This could work for comment threads too - where the comment threads on the post are also ranked by last activity.

It keeps the nice branching comment threads we've grown used to, but avoids having upvotes and downvotes and the opaque algorithm deciding what gets shown first (or at all).

How much time and money has this ban wasted? Policemen out arresting harmless old ladies with placards like they've nothing better to do.

People wouldn’t be willing to pay those prices for food, so they’d just end up importing it all.

You could force people to accept the low wages by removing all welfare but that has its own problems.

I haven't read Accelerando but I found Blindsight really difficult to read and like visualise what is going on.

It felt like he tried to jam way too many story threads into what is a reasonably short book too. The vampires are a good example of that.

That must be outside of Valencia city at that price. And anywhere near Madrid or Barcelona (where most of the good jobs are), forget it.

It'll be 350k for a 100m2 apartment or even more expensive in the popular neighbourhoods.

For me, expat implies a temporary stay, often tied to your job.

It's crazy the science funding was cut so much, but I wonder if even after the cuts it might still be better than what we have here in Europe.

There's been a Europe -> USA brain drain for decades due to the better funding, salaries etc. they can get there.

It reminded me more of Blade Runner, especially with the gold lighting.

As you descend you pass through a ring made of half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone.

Is this actually possible? It seems really ambitious to aim to open by the end of 2027.

Why? I can go and fire up my own Unreal Tournament (1999) dedicated server right now, loads are still running.

It means the customer needs the option to run their own servers.

Most of these non-fiction, non-technical self-help books are just trash.

I say non-technical because the ones about specific subjects like "What to expect in the first year" etc. can be pretty good, but the more general "improve your life" ones are usually awful.

Food is a solved problem. We can grow far more food than we need and we stop doing so simply because the low prices mean it's not economically viable.

In the places where famine remains a problem, it's due to political issues, not that we can't grow enough.

And growing all that food requires a tiny workforce compared to 400 years ago before the Agricultural Revolution. AI might extend such a massive reduction in labour requirements to many other industries.