>The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals).

Not true in my experience: even German waiters in small towns tend to have pretty fluent English.

It varies a lot. Germany is pretty strong in English, and the Netherlands next door is exceptional, but as you go south to Italy, etc English proficiency weakens.

Edit: more broadly, there’s just more friction when people aren’t in their first language. I know I hesitate to bring up some things, say hi to strangers, try making a joke, etc because the cost of talking is just… higher.

Was just driving around medium and small-ish towns in Bavaria. This was not my experience at all.

The German speaking members of our group had to order food for us in most restaurants.

And most locals aren’t waiters in restaurants.

Codex seems to love threading things through things. I don't usually know what it means, but it sounds clever.

If you look on the page of games, the style of chatgpt 5.5 is almost identical to the Claude style.

Eeh. I gave up. I don't like any of those styles, they all look boring and unimaginative and show-offy.

all 20 of them?

I looked at about 20-30 different pairs of images.

The default quiz is using only 9 popular styles.

Lawyers are extremely well-organized, and not surprisingly, know the law. They always have found ways to limit competition. (Why else would it be such a well-paid job?)

It’s not so well-paying anymore, especially given the onerous education requirements. The exception is for the few who get hired in biglaw firms

Yeah I mean people are talking about 'the eternal Sloptember' but the other side of that is - you know how everyone is nostalgic for 90s/early 2000s websites and all the silliness and creativity? Well that is happening now in programs and apps. Any fool can make a terribly-architected game/app to scratch his itch. Most of them are bad, and most won't last, but there's also a lot of fun.

Nobody criticizes people making AI slop for their own amusement. Nobody said anything for DALL-E generated random stuff. Similarly nobody cared about people's GeoCities pages.

People care about when AI is forced in production workloads with very little care. Those productions could be the government, insurance and healthcare systems. Getting prosecuted or denied for treatment by a black box is what makes them angry. People care when their bosses brag about and threaten them with layoffs.

I wasn't criticizing any of these arguments.

Ah, if it’s a robot in charge of the paperclips you need to watch out a bit.

> In contrast, rail travel in Europe is almost universally pleasant and hassle-free.

Laughs hollowly in German.

That's possible, right? LLMs probably do know that they are in data centres and that data centres hum. If asked to write a story they may also have internalized that writers write best from their personal experience. All of that's in the training data....

LLM’s don’t ‘know’ anything in the conventual meaning of the word.

Look up “double marginalisation”.