> US also doesn’t produce that much, unlike EU and China
China OK. But a criticism we hear all the time inside the EU is that manufacturing is gone and that the number one export of the number one economy in the EU --that'd be cars from Germany-- are taking a serious beat up atm.
> The software industry is about to be decimated by AI anyway and US isn’t ahead in AI in any meaningful sense.
How is it not? China has some models but it's basically US, US, and more US: Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI... With chips made by NVidia and Google. So US and still more US. Is that not basically it?
The EU loves to posture a lot but until I see that turd that Windows is kicked out of all the EU institutions and Microsoft Office replaced for good by something else, I'm not believing it.
> USA used to have an amazing brand but that’s being destroyed at outstanding pace.
USA has 35 of the 50 biggest companies in the world ranked by market cap. China has 6 and the EU has... One! (Switzerland ain't the EU). One company for the EU in the top 50: that's ASML and even that is very mainly US owned.
I think you give the EU way too much credit and the US way too little.
> ... and will always use ASCII for most kind of source code files
Same. And I enforce it. I've got scripts and hooks that enforces source files to only ever be a subset of ASCII (not even all ASCII codes have their place in source code).
Unicode chars strings are perfectly fine in resource files. You can build perfectly i18n/l10n apps and webapps without ever using a single Unicode character in a source file. And if you really do need one, there's indeed ASCII escaping available in many languages.
Some shall complan that their name as "Author: ..." in comments cannot be written properly in ASCII. If I wanted to be facetious I'd say that soon we'll see:
> Something remarkable and unsettling is how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU.
The nearly unique tune sang worldwide around Covid-19 was quite something too and I think this should be examined for it gives us information as to how they operate.
As I've spent time in several countries, I took the habit to read the main newspapers' headlines of those various countries (in three different languages). I'll typically read headlines from major newspaper from France/Belgium/Luxembourg/Spain and the big ol' USA. When you do that, you realize how weirdly "synchronized" everything is. Not just the debate on age control.
Some countries resist but nearly every media repeats the same thing, everywhere.
And the sad thing is: most people here on HN (but certainly not me) kept repeating like parrots the same lies and half-truths the media were pushing everywhere.
These lies and half-truth are now exposed in the official report by Congress on the origins of Sars-Cov-2 (link below).
A few of us knew something was not right but every time we'd point it out it was to be met with downvotes. One investigative journalist pointed, very early on, that Peter Daszak was implicated and that this whole thing smelled of a lab leak. For the record: Peter Daszak has now been debarred. He's basically the "expert" who explained the virus couldn't possibly be a lab leak while... Being funded to do research on gain-of-function bat viruses.
Here's the report and it's not "nice" to those who believed and repeated the media lies:
- The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
- Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
- Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
I think that if we want to understand how the US/UK/EU and others all work together to lie to people, to scheme to advance their dirty pawns, we should look at the worst psyop in history (SARS-Cov-2 / Covid-19) and how it was handled. At what turned to be true, at what where lies, at what they fully know where lies and yet where presented at truths, etc.
And that's only the lie about the virus. Don't get me started on that fast-tracked "vaccine" I got in my arms and which I now deeply regret. For all we know in a few years we'll also learn about the lies and half-truth around those various vaccines.
> With the same logical fallacies.
I think books could be filled with those logical fallacies we read about Covid. Including those we read in comments here on HN. I stand my case and it's here: FINAL REPORT: COVID Select Concludes 2-Year Investigation, Issues 500+ Page Final Report on Lessons Learned and the Path Forward [1]
> Pretty telling about how transnational lobbies and their interests work.
Yup I think so. And to me the SARS-Cov-2 / Covid-19 is a very interesting example of that and what happened should be studied more to understand how a select group people is scheming behind the scenes.
The oldest NVMe SSD I have at home is a Samsung 950 Pro (the 256 GB version!) which I bought in late 2015 IIRC (and put on a ASUS Z170-A mobo, that already had a NVMe slot) and which has been in use that whole time (but mostly light desktop use):
Percentage Used: 27%
Data Units Read: 48,801,760 [24.9 TB]
Data Units Written: 84,590,914 [43.3 TB]
Power Cycles: 228 <-- only 228 power cycles in 11 years, that's about 17 days uptime every time I think
Power On Hours: 37,153 <-- not sure about this one, this comes out at about 9 hours / day of uptime
And after 11 years it's still going strong!
Now it's not on my main computer anymore: I'm rocking a WD-SN850X (recommended here on HN when it came out) but the old Samsung 950 Pro is on the desktop computer my wife uses daily (and she WFH).
> I think SSDs can take quite the beating nowadays
For regular use definitely. In my servers I've got ZFS in mirroring though: you never really know when a drive is going to RIP.
> Their entry level Macbook before the Neo you could buy and it would be a laptop that would see you for many many years.
I hope they fixed the ultra brittle screens of their Macbook lineup. I bought a MacBook Air M1 a few years ago and I've been royally pissed off when, after 13 months (one month out of warrant in my case/country) the "bendgate" hit me: the screen died overnight, without any reason (was fine the day before, woke up: screen dead. MacBook Air didn't move). Many people had the same happen to them and they called this the "bendgate" (except there was no "bend").
This prevented me from buying a MacBook M2, M3, M4 and now M5.
Well... Unless I can be convinced that this time the screen isn't going to die overnight.
Saddest thing of them all: I'm the kind of person to only ever use the laptop at home on my lap and never ever put it in a backpack (I don't even own a backpack).
Personally, I would not buy any laptop without 2-3 years of warranty support / Apple Care. Laptops are expensive and things can stop working for lots of reasons. It's why I've loved ThinkPads, though I now use Apple as my usage these days is less dev / more fun.
> This is an interesting issue: what constitutes a valid military target?
I can tell you what's not and then why it's important to know what's not...
The islamist ruling Iran are already using cluster bombs and these are banned in 120 countries because they indiscriminately target civilians: cluster bombs killing civilians aren't aiming at "valid military targets".
Note that the same islamist regime also sent its guards into hospitals to finish the wounded. They killed 30 000+ of their own civilians a few weeks ago. Killing 30 000+ unarmed civilians is not a valid military target.
And the regime in Iran applauded loudly, like in nearly every country ruled by sharia law, when 1200 young people were having fun at a music festival on Oct 7th and considered it an "act of resistance". Killing 1200 young people dancing and enjoying life ain't a "valid military target".
We've now established that the Islamic Republic of Iran won't hesitate to target civilians and shall celebrate the "resistance" when thousands of civilians (including but not limited to their own) are killed.
So, no matter whether the targets are valid or not, nothing they say about the validity of the targets they pick should be taken into account: they're murderers slaughtering and celebrating the slaughter of civilians.
There, sadly, needs to be some gatekeeping and then it can work.
For example I'm member, since years, of a petrolhead forum where it works like that: a fancy car brand, with lots of "tifosi" (and you don't necessarily want all these would-be owners on the forum). To be part of the forum you must be introduced by some other members who have met you in real-life and who confirm that you did show up with a car of that brand.
If you're not a "confirmed owner", you can only access the forum in read-only mode.
It's not 100% foolproof but it does greatly raise the bar.
It's international too: people do travel and they organize meetups / see each others at cars and coffee, etc.
Or take a real extreme, maybe the most expensive social network: the Bloomberg terminal. People/companies paying $30K/year or so per seat each year probably won't be going to let employees hook a LLM to chat for them and risk screwing their reputation. Although I take it you never know.
It is the way it is but gatekeeping does exist and it does work.
China OK. But a criticism we hear all the time inside the EU is that manufacturing is gone and that the number one export of the number one economy in the EU --that'd be cars from Germany-- are taking a serious beat up atm.
> The software industry is about to be decimated by AI anyway and US isn’t ahead in AI in any meaningful sense.
How is it not? China has some models but it's basically US, US, and more US: Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI... With chips made by NVidia and Google. So US and still more US. Is that not basically it?
The EU loves to posture a lot but until I see that turd that Windows is kicked out of all the EU institutions and Microsoft Office replaced for good by something else, I'm not believing it.
> USA used to have an amazing brand but that’s being destroyed at outstanding pace.
USA has 35 of the 50 biggest companies in the world ranked by market cap. China has 6 and the EU has... One! (Switzerland ain't the EU). One company for the EU in the top 50: that's ASML and even that is very mainly US owned.
I think you give the EU way too much credit and the US way too little.
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