screye

B1 German is about 1 year of intensive studying from zero. With immersion and part-time commitment, I'd say ~3 years is a comfortable timeline to learn B1 German.

I am basing this off my personal experience of going from A1 -> A2 -> half-way through B1 (I dropped after I decided against studying in Germany, but my classmates continued the course). Given that German companies are known for excellent work-life balance, there should be enough spare time to learn German by the 5 year point.

All that being said, I imagine it's harder to learn a language when you have kids and family responsibilities.

Ah yes, the nation's most influential sex-trafficker/pimp was a Mossad asset and the $100b budget CIA knew anything about it. They set up the world's most advanced domestic spying system, and the NSA did not flag anything.

You do realize that such conspiracy theories require all 3 of these things to be true ?

1. American elites are totally clueless

2. The CIA is hopelessly incompetent

3. Mossad has compromised every layer of the American military and elite civilian life

Israel obviously has a ton of influence on American elites and politicians. Just the AIPAC donations and the strong representation of Jews in American elite life is proof enough. You don't have to look much further.

It's the unsubstantiated conspiracy theories (often peddled as fact) that me think there is a certain hysteria going on. It's not anti-semitism per se. More so that otherwise respectable people lose all discernment towards unsubstantiated claims when those claims support their biases about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

It's hilarious listening to CIA insiders talk about spying.

John Kiriakou [1] will spend 3 hours talking about the CIA's torture program (illegal) and NSA spying on Americans (illegal). In the same conversation, he will insist that the US would never spy on Israel because it is illegal.

Who is this fooling ?

[1] Senior ex-CIA official, whistleblower & internet meme phenomenon.

How can a vassal state with 1/60th your GDP 'influence' your nation into a war ? It's a rhetorical question. It can't.

Makes the MAGA military look incompetent. The US has a history of botched wars around the globe, most of which have little to do with Israel. If I'm drawing from data, then the Iran conflict is consistent with the post-war military movements of the US.

Now that the communists are no more, Israel is the next best scapegoat. The way I see it, Israel's current leaders are happy to be scapegoats because the war benefits Ben Gvir and a radicalized Likud. It allows them to consolidate domestic power and pursue aggressive foreign objectives under shadow of the Iran conflict.

I hope Netanyahu has thought this through. He has burned through 100 years of western guilt in the span of 3 years. To break even, Israel's military excursions must secure outsized outcomes, to the tune of decades of security. Because, I believe we are entering a couple of decades of bipartisan & unprecedented* anti-semitism.

* Figuratively speaking. Historically ofc, anti-semitism is pretty precedented.

Nations do not apply a standard of 'total freedom' for most other vices. It is known that grown consenting adults can't compete against an algorithmic assault on their self-control systems.

Nations have established middle grounds for gambling. To gamble, drive a couple of hours down to an exempt casino and set fire to your money if you so wish. Bootleg operations are permitted as long as they stay low. Prostitution has similar regulations. Sports betting, Onlyfans & Prediction markets remove those necessary frictions from each vice, preying on men (it's mostly men) at their most vulnerable.

Prediction markets : gambling :: weed : cigarettes

Aren't we ignoring the elephant in the room ?

Garry Tan has been the primary crusader for AI driven decision making. I'm sure his position is more nuanced, but his twitter driven communication makes him appear like a caricature of a man in AI psychosis.

When the head of YC champions AI driven decision making, companies will inevitably be influenced into doing exactly that. It's unfortunate, because AI is generational technology and the hyperbole distracts from the real sea change occuring in labor markets everywhere.

Google makes money on ads, because its products span the entire internet.

Youtube, Gmail, Search, Maps, Android, Devices, Photos and Drive are how they get the data to make money on ads. Cloud, Android & Youtube would be a 2 trillion dollar company even without Google. They don't make money on these, because they don't need to make money on it.

Meta has 4 identical products, most of which have reached feature complete. They do few things, and make absurd amounts of money from it.

Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.

Different scenarios

If AI winning means that data center companies win out, then the wins for Azure will more than make up for the death of Office.

I am surprised that Microsoft's own copilot product is so far behind though.

I can only describe it being overcome with a sense of love and harmony. I was giggling ear-to-ear the whole time I was there.

Great works of art are meant to be religious experiences. At Falling water, every part of the house & estate feels like it was meant to be there. The shapes and curves feel so right. The emphasis on integrating natural materials makes it feel one with nature. Frank Lloyd wright cared a lot about sight lines, which makes every space easy on the eyes.

I've had similar experiences in great Basilicas[0] such as Sagrada Familia[1]. Smaller objects have evoked similar feelings too. Be that cars (The Ferrari Roma[2] or Alfa 33 Stadale[3]) or intricate jewelery (Earrings [4] or watches [5]). Great beauty feels divine, and Fallingwater is one such example.

[0] Special shout-out to the new Romanesque basilica in DC - https://maps.app.goo.gl/8r59NzbgVnqKYAv2A

[1] https://thebarcelonafeeling.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/S...

[2] https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/5f96f18f0a2396c...

[3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Alfa_Rom...

[4] https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39320

[5] https://www.watchclub.com/upload/watches/gallery_big/watch-c...

TBPN, OpenClaw and Astral - that's 3 high profile acquisitions in a month. I smell a PR push to be seen as the 'good guys'.

I don't buy it. The leaked emails and actions of OpenAI's leadership point to a cynical growth machine.

The winner of this AI cycle will fund the lobbies that decide the politics of the future. OpenAI gives me a 'must escape the permanent underclass' energy. Not the energy I want from possibly the most influential people of the near future.

UV is arguably this decade's most important addition to the python ecosystem. They are a small, but they are important.

What core capabilities of a car need to be improved anyway ?

It's the reverse. Every Waymo on the road saves more lives. The average driver is a bufoon

The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important

We are 50 years into post-modernism. Can't imagine it can get any more important.

I predict emergent design will be the next big thing. Czinger[1] is a great example of what it may look like. Rick Ruben-esque world, where the creator is more a guide.

[1] Czinger uses stochastic optimization to converge to designs - https://www.czinger.com/iconic-design

Yep. Especially when one of the brands is Tesla.

Once Elon put himself at the epicenter of American political life, Tesla stopped being treated as a brand, and more a placeholder for Elon himself.

Waymo has excellent branding and first to market advantage in defining how self-driving is perceived by users. But, the alternative being Elon's Tesla further widens the perception gap.

Surprised Canadians would pick the US as a tourist destination to begin with.

Europe is cheaper and more fun. America's one advantage: nature, is matched and at times exceeded by Canada. Flights to warm places like Miami and SD take just as long as Mexico or the Caribbean.

Other than NYC and Utah-area national parks, I can't think of unique reasons for Canadians to vacation in the US specifically.

2 reasons

Electronics and code ruined replaced pure mechanics. Components aren't physically maintainable or hot-swappable, because they aren't just physically connected.

Second is that maintenance is how dealerships make money, so there is a monetary incentive to make it seem esoteric.

For your purposes, the upcoming slate truck is closest analogue - https://www.slate.auto/en

NYC's city budget is larger than every state apart from California, Texas, NY. At $115B, it equals Florida. By numbers alone, he's very influential.

Now NYC is a over-regulated mess that faces gridlock from both unions and the state representatives. In practice, it makes the NYC mayor a cog-in-the-machine. The real task for a NYC mayor is consensus building first, and allocation of funds second.

It's important in these cases to preserve the lineage of where they came from.

There's a tendency to start calling them 'western medicine' and crediting it to the person who formalized it in the west rather than the source culture where it has existed for centuries.

The conversation is bit 2010, but the point still stands.

It's been a bizarre watch. The automotive industry (and nations that rely on it) has sabotaged itself for a good decade. Unsurprisingly, China has caught up. Classic case of 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas'.

Unions sabotaged automation efforts and limited hours worked. Quarterly financial pressures kept research investments to a minimum. Nations refused to scale up nuclear, and cost of electricity kept rising. The one well-run EV company (Tesla) decided to destroy its brand value overnight. Toyota went on a pig-headed hydrogen tangent and Honda still hasn't tried to make an EV. Korea has done surprisingly well. But, they're the exception that proves the rule.

China's rise as a manufacturing superpower was inevitable. But its rise as an automotive superpower involved major capitulation by the primary competition.

This is out of date by about 15 years.

Top engineering grads are excellent and are being paid high wages. Work culture is cut-throat, but talent is comparable to the US.

India's target universities (IITs, IIITs & NITs) produce ~40k new software-engineers every year. Historically, average graduates of these universities end up in FANG jobs after their masters. If not immediately, then within a few years.

We're not talking about the 1 million sub-par engineering grads produced by India every year, most of whom will end up at infosys, TCS or sadly, BPOs. Big-tech only cares about the top 50k.

This the primary group that American new-grads are competing with. Around 20k new Indians get an H1b every-year as part of an OPT (Masters) to H1b transition. For every 1 of them in the US, there is at least 1 back home of the same caliber.

Not quite. Chinese rivers are fed by the eastern tibetan plateau while South Asia is fed by the western glaciers by the tallest mountains.

Bangladesh would be at risk because the Bramhaphtra sees upstream fresh water use by China. But China's use of Bramhaputra water is mostly energy related, not for drinking water or irrigation.

If decreasing population trends continue then this problem will solve itself.

The world will become unevenly greener. Population density and recent population rise is inversely correlated with places that will get greener.

Polar and Continental regions will get greener at the expense of the tropical and equatorial regions.

Mass migration is the inevitable conclusion of uneven impacts of climate change. Ie. In 2026, Political climate and physical climate are moving in mutually incompatible directions.

Not sure if 'aware' is the right word. More like anxious.

Kidnappings and murders are exceedingly rare, even more so by strangers. Abuse primarily occurs at home, with acquaintances and at places of education. Moving a child from free form play to structured classes is moving risk around, but isn't reducing it.

When there is a big community of kids, there's safety in numbers. Highly supervised play reduces the kids involved, and takes away safety in numbers in exchange for constant vigilance.

An aware person would see the numbers and Calibrate risk accordingly. There is risk involved in everything and helicopter parenting has done little to reduce it.

It's an anxiety spiral.

Can you quote 1 other example of a disgruntled investor that has killed an American academic over the last 50 years ?

Unlikely. He was killed in the foyer [1] of his building in an exceedingly safe city (Brookline, MA).

In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbmBNre5SQ

There are no material conditions that would convince me to live in a cold, dark and culturally introverted place. Anecdotally, my tropical peers agree with this opinion. Seasonal affective disorder plays an outsized role in my ability to like a place. On the flip side, I've heard many people describe living in warm & humid weather as torture.

My point is, aggregating factors for happiness to find the best country is like aggregating people's favorite colors to find the best color. Each individual's needs and circumstances are unique, and what will make them happy will vary widely as those needs and circumstances vary.

Some interesting (suspect?) findings from the quoted 2023 paper: (2008 - 2017 data)

* Somaliland had the 4th least worries

* Russians were the 7th least angry

* Chinese were the 8th best rested

* Icelanders did great on every metric, but felt very tired (rank 190)

* Venezuelans smiled the 12th most (Panama, Paraguay, Costa Rica did even better)

* Laotians smile the 3rd most, but are also among the angriest (202) !!?

This means that they should never be used in medicine, for evaluation in school or college, for law enforcement, for tax assessment, or a myriad of other similar cases.

If AI models can deliver measurably better accuracy than doctors, clearer evaluations than professors and fairer prosecutions than courts, then it should be adopted. Waymo has already shown a measurable decrease in loss of life by eliminating humans from driving.

I believe, technically, moderns LLMs are sufficiently advanced to meaningfully disrupt the aforementioned professions as Waymo has done for taxis. Waymo's success relies on 2 non-llm factors that we've yet to see for other professions. First is exhaustive collection and labelling of in-domain high quality data. Second is the destruction of the pro-human regulatory lobby (thanks to work done by Uber in the Zirp era that came before).

To me, an AI winter isn't a concern, because AI is not the bottleneck. It is regulatory opposition and sourcing human experts who will train their own replacements. Both are significantly harder to get around for high-status white collar work. The great-AI-replacement may still fail, but it won't be because of the limitations of LLMs.

My advice: unwind as much exposure as possible you might have to a forthcoming AI bubble crash.

Hedging when you have much at stake is always a good idea. Bubble or no bubble.

Much like the Hyperloop before it, the core assumption of the Boring company is ill-conceived. Tunnel boring isn't a bottleneck.

The costs of surveys, hvac, seismic research and maintenance required to keep a deep-underground tunnel going are much higher than cut-and-cover. So, even if tunnel boring was free, it still wouldn't make sense to prefer it over other options. There are very scenarios where deep-tunneling makes sense (dense cities, across rivers when bridges are infeasible), but they're the minority.

In most transit projects, cut-and-over is blocked not because it's a bad technical option. It's because NIMBYs refuse to permit on-the-ground disruptions or noise of any type. San Jose is the canonical example. It's a political problem, not a technical one.