I could spend $1,000s on tokens asking an agent to build (some semblance of) Sentry, or New Relic, but why would I bother? I have real work to do in the near-term, and I'm happy to pay for services that help me do it.
All the hard work is always chasing down edge cases, scaling, operational issues and other things that don't show up the user-exposed features. And talking about features, the innovation in coming up with them, or iterating on making them work with real customer experience is a ton of value, even if copying the ideas that work later is much easier - which is why I generally prefer betting on an innovator with just of enough traction to show they can stick with it. The best category leaders both innovate and steal/copy/buy all the innovation they aren't producing in house to maintain their lead.
It's a bit vague, but the idea is right. If your SaaS is built with AI, then any customer you have can also build it with AI, and whatever they build is going to be better suited to their needs and will run cheaper because they aren't paying your margin. AI skews the build vs buy curve massively, because it makes building so much easier
You don't tell agents to build this stuff from the ground up. Someone builds an open source tool, and you get your agents to deploy and customize it. The plumbing and groundwork is already laid, you're just detailing.
> At least it doesn't try to snipe me into feeling bad, or scared about everything.
That's the guardian for you. They can't write an article without making sure the reader comes away feeling like a piece of shit. This piece should just be a celebration of Ginny's remarkable life, but they'll still make sure that you know that there are kids starving in Africa and elderly people working past retirement because they have no money.
I also love positive.news, and I subscribe to their newsletter. It's great.
It sounds to me like Denmark's media and news isn't very valuable from an ad sales perspective. So Google has set their price reflecting what they think that value is: not much. And Denmark is now getting their lawmakers involved because they think it's worth a lot more and they want to force Google to buy it for a lot more.
Honestly, it doesn't sound like a lot of these EU countries are interested in digital sovereignty or developing their own services. They just want to force the American companies to sell their services at rates favorable to them by getting their regulators involved.
Yeah it seems like if they were really struggling to break up then they wouldn't be trying to force Google or Meta to the negotiating table. They would be simply kicking them out and not utilizing their services at all.
But it's actually the opposite. They are trying to get their lawmakers to force Google and Meta to provide them their services at below market value!
It seems like Google and Meta are using their dominant position to take as big a part of ad revenue as they possibly can, and if that means independent news companies where actual journalism is conducted can’t survive, then they don’t really care.
Danish media are trying to survive, as high quality journalism is necessary for democracy to function. They can’t avoid being on the big platforms, as Google and Meta have this dominant gatekeeper position in the market - this is where the media pull new users into their sites.
People who are capable of building things don't go into government. "Bureaucracy" has a connotation of where creativity and innovation goes to die for a reason. The personality type that goes into bureaucracy thinks about this like "why would I put in the effort to build something when I could just use the state monopoly on violence to shake down the suckers who already did all that hard work for me?" Of course they lie to the public, and most importantly to themselves, that they have higher motives, but that is the underlying logic.
The role of government, at it's best, is to ensure the system as a whole benefits the democratic majority as a whole.
The argument that unregulated free markets will deliver has a key flaw - people who work in private companies don't want endless free and fair competition, especially if they are currently in the lead, they are also incentized to dump as much of the true cost of what they are doing on to other people.
So companies will chose cartels and monopolies over competition, choose pollution over responsibility, offload infrastructure and people costs onto others etc, minimise tax rates ( avoid paying for stuff they use ) etc.
Assuming an unregulated market is best is like assuming a football game is better if there are no rules. Turns out cheating is easier than competing almost everytime - and without government to set and enforce the rules you end up with pollution, crime ( people decided the rules don't work for them ), stagnation, and a feudal society.
Take something as simple as rule of law. A free market approach to that is there is no law, everyone negotiates each interaction and enforces their will with personal force. Turns out that's both exhausting and chaotic - much better to collectively agree what is legal or not and then have collective enforcement.
Sure it's slower to change, sometimes unfair, but pretty much every group of people in every country in the world has evolved a system of government rather than go with anarchy.
So good government is all about building - building complex systems - constantly adjusting them as people try and game them - that result in optimal outcomes for the majority of people.
1st gen immigrants from India are almost always well-educated, and oftentimes even entrepreneurial. They are among the lowest-risk (with Chinese) immigrants. That is to say, they typically will not contribute to crime, gangs, or public welfare burden. So it's a pretty big difference between those two countries and all the others on the list.
Europe will just end up doing whatever is cheapest. It's the same story as always. They'll say some stuff publicly but they'll quietly come back to American tech once they see the price tag difference. They're very cost sensitive and their investors are extremely risk-averse.
Would (gently) note that we’re commenting on an article re: American tech risk. :)
Not sure it’s really sunk in for my fellow Americans what’s going on, we’re not exactly used to consequences and it’s still considered, a best, impolite to treat a holistic evaluation of policies as something beyond debate.
But look at solar adoption across Europe since 2022. It’s going gang busters and now with sodium batteries coming online next year, cheap home energy storage is about to boom as well.
Europe doesn’t want to buy Russian gas, but there is also the very real political reality of what happens if your citizens freeze to death. I will be very surprised if any EU state is reliant on Russian gas by 2035.
When people start talking about battery technology that has not even reached scale as any kind of political solution, you know people have lost the plot.
Taking one look at just the cost required for the network, even outside of the cost of any generation at all, you realize this is an insane and slapping a few solar panels down is far from a solution.
And also lets not ignore that places that have done a lot of the 'lets just build renewable and hope for the best' have very high energy prices. And maybe possible maybe sodium batteries might show up will not solve these issues.
I calculated the costs of covering the needs of Germany for a 2 days low production event (as it happened between 6-9 december) and you would need about a trillion dollar.
That's for something that cannot even garantee you more than 48h of runtime for half the country's needs.
You would need at least 4 times that to be safe.
Even if batteries price are divided by 2 (very unlikely, there are large fixed costs) you would need trillions of dollar for a single country.
That's just not happening any time soon and even in 30 years time, I doubt it will be that prevalent of a solution.
I did a conservative calculation if you started around 2000 in Germany and went full nuclear like France did. Not using any fancy new nuclear or anything. Literally just mass production of standard nuclear plants. Plus all the updates of the grid, including domestic fuel enrichment and 'waste' storage. Plus all the investment necessary to great a fully modern grid to electrify the economy.
We are talking in the order of 500 billion Euro and this is very conservative assumption on nuclear construction cost. Much worse cost then what France actually achieved in their build-out. Also much of that is actually the grid, grids are really expensive it turns out. But building nuclear in central location next to places where there used to be coal plants, makes grid cost much cheaper because most of the grid is already there perfectly positioned to feed the population clusters. And that accounts for actually increasing overall production of energy, not decreasing as Germany is actually doing.
On the other-hand for the renewable path that Germany is going since 2000, just the grid alone is going to cost more then 500 billion euro, some estimation suggest that 2000-2045 total gird investment requirement is above significantly above that. Sadly today where everything is in this different private organization, this information is all over the place and 'semi'-private organization doing different parts of the infrastructure.
In total, between all the renewables, the grid and the storage, we are talking 1.5 trillion euro and that still includes gas peakers. If you want to go beyond and really go all in, it would be even more then that, as you suggest.
Turns out, if you plan includes trying to gather solar energy in Greece and Spain (or even Egypt), transporting it to Germany and then storing it into batteries there, well yeah, that's going to be expensive. And the solar panels you import from China aren't the expensive part.
France did the exact right think in the 70/80s build reliable long term energy generation, sadly since the 90s the newer generation of French politicians done literally anything they can to handle the situation as a badly and as incompetently as possible but that's a different story.
One thing that is really important to understand is that power is not something that is uniformely needed everywhere at the same level.
Traditionally, power plants were created close to where industries needed them. Renewables require specific conditions to be viable and those factors are not necesseraly what allows industries to thrive, so you need a lot of additional infrastructure to make it possible.
Turns out this infrastructure is extremely coslty and very hard to make reliable. So, even if you have infinite money, that's a massive challenge in itself. But now Europe does not have that much money, the massive debt burdens being a large evidence of this. Yet we are asked to pay more for this future, in the name of climate change, even though most of the factors contributing to this is already happening overseas, largely out of the control of European regulations. So what is the point exactly ?
In the long run, it just ends up making everyone more dependent on external powers while weakening the position of the countries that believe in that "solution".
Nuclear constructions costs are largely overblown, because of the massive bureaucracy/over-regulation, thanks to Germany in no small part. If China can manage to build twice as fast at half the cost, we are doing something wrong for sure.
But the conversation is dominated by ideologues, that have an sadist like fetish. As if weakening your position will ever make your competition/enemies take pity on you and allows you to dictate the terms of the converstion, because people are supposed to be nice, right ?
Even with perfect implementation, there is no way to make renewables work to allow industries to thrive, and now we are going to pay the price of those poor political choices.
With all the money in the world, it was already a discutable choice, but now it is just replacing depence on fossil fuel with depence on overseas manufacturing (most of it in China). Funny thing is that China is not that stupid, and we are selling them the knowledge/skillset to become dominant on the cheap.
I just can't fathom what was going on in the mind of the decision makers 20 years ago, but now it seems they are just insane. There is no way it will work in 15 years, yet we needed that power generation yesterday.
In the process of trying to make climate change better, we have done the reverse. Now people are burning more wood, and I feel like we might go back to coal if electricity doesn't become cheaper (for residential heat). Gas is hopeless, even if the depency on Russia wasn't that strong.
Electric cars are very nice but if it turns out to be more expensive to run them than just using foreign oil it's not going to happen.
I'm just rambling at this point but it feels like there was a large anti-nuclear sentiment by people who are dominated by irrational fears and they have dominated our politics for the worse. It's really not usefull to fear a nuclear meltdown if you end up making your people poorer overtime. Why would you fear something with such a low probability of problems if you end up having to become dependent on foreing power that has no such quaslm.
France had the right path but then leftist ideologues took power and Germany's sabotaging did the rest. In theory we are not at war but in practice, there is very much an economical/ideological battleground going on and we are losing it.
US says that Europe is their number one enemy. Using American tech is the most risky thing you can do since Trump declared that they are now a hostile enemy with intents of overthrowing European democracies.
Without getting hung up on the exact phrase “number 1”. It’s very literally one of the biggest things in official US national security strategy right now and some leaks of the non-public version talk about explicit plans to try and destroy the EU. So semantics aside, the overall point stands on solid ground.
That whole thing is just incoherent. There's lots about forming a trading alliance against China, and then loads about destroying the EU. You can't have both of those at the same time.
I think there is a lot of broad support, but they're just kind of hamstrung by EU regulation on AI development at this stage. I think the end game will ultimately be getting acquired by an American company, and then relocating.
It's ironic that USA lost 60-some thousand troops in Vietnam trying to prevent a communist takeover, only for American companies just to enslave them all anyway. I wonder how different the dynamic with Vietnam would have turned out if it had been more of a Korea situation. USA certainly never enslaved South Korea.
Huh? What do you mean by 'enslave'? If you mean that people work for low wages in the export sector, well then I have news for you on South Korea.
The reason South Korea graduated to higher wages quicker than Vietnam seems to be doing, is partially because South Korea is more capitalist, so they see more economic growth quicker.
I feel like those laws are different because they specifically target pornography, which is seen as an evangelical moral sin. They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
Obviously the end result is the same, but I think the motivation is different.
> They would prefer to ban it completely, but that most likely runs afoul of the Constitution. So their next best bet is just to try to limit it to over-18s.
They dont care about constitution. And they are in position to reinterpret it however they want to, regardless of its text and meaning.
If that was actually true then states would have banned or blocked already. This is not a new issue and it has been challenged unsuccessfully many times.
Maybe. Most of the debate that I hear feels similar to social media commentary -- teen boys getting their brains fried by constant access to stimulus. I don't hear anything about onanism or sinning.
Mind you, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but just that most of the arguments I hear are saying "we think this is an identifiable and secular harm."
What does this even mean?
I could spend $1,000s on tokens asking an agent to build (some semblance of) Sentry, or New Relic, but why would I bother? I have real work to do in the near-term, and I'm happy to pay for services that help me do it.