WoW has a lot of mechanics involving line of sight (eg a spell you begin casting when the target was in LOS will fail when the casting time finishes if the target moves out of LOS) and positioning (AOE spells, spell ranges, NPCs/objects you can interact with only within a certain range, among many others)
If you look at UNDP historical HDI data [1] you will see that Egypt barely caught up with the HDI levels of poorest Eastern European countries like Moldova from 10 years ago and is still well behind the HDI levels of better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990.
And there was no guarantee that Egypt would have reached this point today in 2026.
A decade ago, the safer bet would have been that Egypt would collapse just like it's then developmental peer Syria.
The fact that Egypt is at this point today is a testament to the fact that it's has robust enough state capacity that it was able to execute on projects.
> better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990
Czechia is not Eastern Europe and was a very developed country. I'll wait for inglor_cz to eventually jump into this convo and give context around Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the 1980s to 90s.
Syria had an extremely destructive civil war and one of the worst collapses in living standards ever of any country (measured by however you want to look at it - HDI, GDP/capita...)
Meanwhile Egypt was overtaken by Vietnam and performed similarly to peers like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Algeria, Philippines.
Egypt's and Sisi's performance is decidedly average.
And if you remember 2010-13 Egypt was also on the verge of collapsing into a civil war like Syria and Yemen yet didn't. That took a Herculean amount of effort.
"Top 10%" is such a misleading slice here. The guy who's at the 9.99th percentile is a normal salaried worker not doing better. The gains are entirely concentrated in the tiny billionaire slice buried inside that 10%. In fact wage growth for the top decile has been recently slower than bottom deciles [1]. Incomes still grow fast in the top decile, but mostly due to assets. And those assets are disproportionately in the hands of the billionaire slice of that top decile.
The top 10% incomes have tons of assets, especially homes.
Saying that billionaires "disproportionately" have more assets than non-billionaires is a tautology that says nothing. You might as well say that tall people have disproportionately more height than people who are not tall. Billionaire is a statement about wealth, not income.
> In fact wage growth for the top decile has been recently slower than bottom deciles
Which is a very good thing, but also doesn't address anything. The bottom deciles live from their wages. The top decile either put most of their wages into assets, are already so wealthy that their wages don't matter, or live in luxury they can't afford.
The macroeconomic purpose of inflation as a tool is to lower the wages of high wage earners - because socially you can't really lower people's wages, at best you can refuse refuse them raises. It's easy to raise the income of lower deciles to offset inflation, either through legislation or safety net. Middle-high wage earners who do nothing under inflation face an effective pay cut.
> The guy who's at the 9.99th percentile is a normal salaried worker not doing better.
He is not normal, he is in the top 10%. His income triples or quadruples a median income. He is of course not doing better than himself, but he is doing better than 90% of other people by definition.
Point is that income from dividends, rent and capital gains far outstrips the $150k the 90th percentile guy makes [1], which you have conveniently ignored. The $150k 90th percentile earner has more common with the $50k 50th percentile earner than he does with the billionaire earning $100M of capital gains, dividends and rent from assets. The 90th percentile guy is a wage laborer like the 50th percentile guy; they are effectively the same class. The only different class is the capital owning class.
Being able to afford a slightly nicer car or house does not change your class. Being able to influence elections, buy lobbying power, play power games, being in the "in" group of capitalism changes your class.
Household income at the 90th percentile is about $250k per the US census. [1] And wealth disparities tend to be much larger yet still since a significant chunk of the $250k spending is going to go into things they have equity in like mortgage/low depreciation assets/etc, as opposed to food and rent. Especially in modern times where seemingly every industry is trying to figure out ways to charge rent while providing as little in return as possible.
They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.
Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch.
Germany’s austerity policy after 2008 may be one of the largest economic blunders in history. It would be one thing if they merely committed self-harm, but they also used their pull in the EU to drag the rest of the continent down with them.
Reminded of Matt Yglesias’s excellent headline from 2010: Angela Merkel Lucky the Bar for “Worst German Leader” is Very High
One thing that I will never understand - how can german population not see through all that socialist bullshit she produced, promises undelivered, how much long term harm she generated across whole Europe (not just EU). Hard push for (now visibly) failed immigration at all costs, nuclear energy rollback (and she was nuclear physicist at least by her studies) and subsequent buying of foreign coal-based electricity, fragmentation of EU.
She literally licked putin's boots well into Ukraine war and still thinks licking his ass is the correct course to solve war in Ukraine (which started 2014 and it was pretty nasty already back then, the world just didn't care also thanks to her).
She is by far the biggest catastrophe modern Europe encountered after Hitler. She helped remove any proper fighting chance for the top dog Europe had for 21st century. She singlehandedly caused proper hate against EU in large parts of (not only) eastern EU population, and hence the rise of populist left or right wing politicians whose whole success story was just point at her failings and criticize, enough to get 20-30% of the votes and even win elections, repeatedly. She literally made people like Orban or Fico.
She still admits no mistakes, even wants to become german president. How effin' out of touch with reality she is.
... what? How's that the first thing that comes to mind about her, before "neoliberal", "conservative", or "austerity"? For that matter, when has the CDU ever been anywhere near socialist, in Germany or in the EU parliament?
100% agree we're still dealing with the fallout from her policies though.
Yes people voted for her, she is still very popular. Doesn't change anything I said about her negative impact on entire continent that is extremely visible.
Maybe she did tons of good so it somehow averages out, but I certainly haven't heard about it (now is your time to defend her), everybody saw consequences of her disastrous policies that affected entire bloc.
This is untrue, entire eastern EU screamed like crazy against such immigration when she started importing immigrants en masse, "wir schaffen das". France faced the same with entire communities from Maghreb, most didn't work, 0 integration even after a generation or two spent in Europe, they knew language only if it was also their native one. Nobody in the east wanted that, entire political blocs before elections formed on opposing this and other fun EU moves (remember banning regular lightbulbs without good-enough LED replacements in entire EU market? Pepperidge Farm remembers... Or cutting down most of Borneo ancient rainforest to have effin' EU-subsidized bio fuels that ruin car engines quicker? Same story, I know this is EU but Germany is by far the strongest voice in and these are typical merkel moves - big moves regardless of consequences and picking up pieces later).
East had no prior experience with migrants due to living for decades in effectively prison camp guarded by soviets, no travel or other exposition to other ways of life. We were very monolithic cultures (and still mostly are).
The voices were completely ignored and overruled by behemoths like Britain, France and most powerful voice in the bloc - Germany.
Don't revision past, I lived through it, saw masses of people getting absolutely mad pissed off and feeling helpless and unheard with arguments which over time proved them mostly correct.
I don't hold those opinions myself, some of our best friends are muslim immigrants but oh boy go to the eastern EU without camera and ask random folks on the street outside capitals, or just listen to them. Or look at election results, this gave russians and their constant influence very good arguments since they position themselves as 'guardians of traditional family values in society', regardless of how its true or not (clue - its not but thats detail here).
> Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.
Absolutely, Germany essentially abandoned its position in industrial leadership solely due to neoliberal ideology. Just compare the trajectories of Germany and China in the last 20 years. One country planned and implemented a proper industrial policy, the other hummed and hawed about the infallibility of the market and thus essentially just gave up.
There were plenty of other DRAM manufacture before them as well. But the Boom and bust cycle wipe out those who weren't big enough or adequately prepared.
Nearly every single DRAM cycle we go through the same thing. People are saying memory are so cheap we are going to get 32GB/ 64GB / 128GB very soon. Just like they did 2-3 years before. Then every single DRAM up cycle they were earning insane amount of money, with this one being exceptionally high. Not only covering their previous lost but also extra profits. And every single time people cry out price fixing.
And every single time, Interviewer, financial reporters or share holders will ask TSMC's CEO Morris Chang the same question, and this is before TSMC was even well known in Tech cycle, will they make DRAM given it is just Fabs, TSMC could do it. And every single time in the past 20 - 30 years Morris had to explain the whole thing again.
Frankly speaking I have been rumpling about DRAM being commodity on HN for nearly 20 years. It is the first time I have seen a few comments finally picking this up as shown in the current top comment.
I don’t remember any time in recent history where demand skyrocketed so fast and so far away from supply. In previous cycles you mostly had supply driven shortages (remember all the fires?).
Maybe crypto surge was the closest to what we observe today? But again completely different magnitudes of demand. No company put 1T of capex for mining
His research is in Game Theory. He should have realized that, in a situation where all competitors are (possibly) using LLMs, the game theoretic optimal choice is to use LLMs.
Students aren’t optimizing for what is best for society. They are optimizing for themselves, which almost always means getting a job.
The credential is a prerequisite but skills are a differentiator. Problem is, not all skills are equal.
Amazon isn’t going to ask you about your opinions on The Illiad, they are going to check if you can write an efficient algorithm to rob houses or merge sorted linked lists.
> They are optimizing for themselves, which almost always means getting a job.
Instead they should optimize for keeping a job.
Since you mention Amazon, I work there as a senior software engineer (almost 10 years of tenure) and the quality of interns has massively degraded since LLMs are available. The result is that where the majority of interns used to receive return offers, now the vast majority doesn't.
Similarly, a lot of new grads get kicked out quickly, before the end of the trial period, because they suck. A lot more than in the past.
That is funny, because job hopping has been the recommended advice on this forum for 2 decades, especially job hopping away from Amazon to greener pastures.
The fundamental issue is that for almost all students, college is really job training in academic clothing. Universities will never admit this, and some professors delude themselves into believing it’s not true. But it’s the only explanation for why students would take enormous loans rather than simply get jobs.
But why else would you have a bunch of students join a class and cheat? Something like 22 out of the 27 perfect midterm students didn’t show up to the final? Obviously these people are not in it for the joy of learning.
So the answers to your questions are 1) learning 2) job-worthiness 3) measurements of 1 which accurately and plausibly reflect 2.
If a course does not plausibly reflect job readiness, or students’ grades do not reflect competence in the subject then the course must be fixed.
I think you're missing the fact that everyone knows. He just got reliable data from a natural experiment, which makes the chancellor can't just look away any longer.
People for sure have always cheated in these take home exams. This has to have been to protect rich kids with parents who give money to the university. It's insane to learn how many fancy universities have garbage blatantly unmeritocratic evaluation systems like this
That is true, and it was always a bad idea. But hey, economics. If economists should be aware of anything, it's that university financing in large parts of the world have perverse incentives.
Game Theory seems sort of useless in the real world because people are not rational players, and the real challenge is in getting an accurate model of their behavior. The honor system would work probably fine in a tiny close-knit liberal arts college, while it would obviously wouldn't in a place where the degree itself is the target.
Aside from evolutionary biology, cancer research, embryonic development, economics, internet routing, spectrum auctions, counter-terrorism, kidney exchanges, generative AI, and preventing nuclear apocalypse...What HAS game theory done for us?!
Game theory seemed kind of useful when the US was negotiating nuclear weapons control with the Soviets. It allowed successful negotiations in an extremely low trust situation.
Also, your own example is an application of game theory; you've basically stated a 'prisoner's dilemma' problem. You state that in a high trust society, most people will choose cooperation, while in a low trust society, most people will defect.
It's worse than OpenAI or Anthropic. However their lower tier consumer offerings can sometimes be had for <$10/mo on offer and come bundled with other Google services like cloud storage.
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