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France spent ~5% of its GDP on education. 5th in the EU in spending.

France is in the top 20% of the world in terms of resources and probably around the middle of the OECD.

When I went to school we had classes of 35 students. Often in the heat with no air conditioning. And we didn't go riot, burn city halls, loot stores etc. We didn't mask up and go throw rocks at the police either.

Whatever is going on in France, thinking about it as "students protesting for better schools" doesn't feel correct at all. You see organized groups of masked protesters attacking the police, looting etc. Are there a lot of people who think they're out there for some supposed good cause? Sure.

This is an extremely weak argument.

Pre-1967 Israel didn't control the West Bank or Gaza. So most of the bad stuff people claim about Israel today didn't really exist.

Yet all its neighbours wanted to destroy it.

Lebanon who in theory should have no dispute with Israel bombarded it with ten's of thousands of rockets, mortars, anti-tank munitions etc. After Oct 7th.

The bit you're missing in your overly simplistic analysis is that Israel is really surrounded/attacked by a single religious/political ideology. There is no "everybody else here".

I think some still do. But writing a few lines of code in some computer architecture course isn't really enough. It's not just the language, it's the libraries and not understanding how things work under the hood.

Online dictionary (Merriam-Webster) says: "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence". So sure, semantic diffusion (I see you read Martin Fowler), I donno. Life is semantic diffusion.

In practice code gets worked and reworked and reworked. I work on code where every single line in a huge file was written by a different person. Even the initial implementation could often fit your definition of slop. Isn't human training also mushing things together?

But cool. I think the discussion mirrors the gap Andrej was talking about. Interesting times.

Is a table saw a tool? It's not deterministic. Every cut is going to be slightly different. It can go "rogue" and toss the work piece back at you. It can even kill you or cut your fingers off.

Virtually nothing in woodworking is deterministic because wood is not deterministic. Every piece of wood is different.

Now that I've nitpicked and feel better ;) ...

I'm not quite sure why this matters. LLMs are definitely not you writing code using a tool. An IDE is more like that. They write the code. Is that even a debate? That doesn't mean the human can't be in that loop, the human can review the code, change the code, change the instructions. I can ask an LLM to mill me a cube on a CNC. Or a more complex object. It's not the same as me doing it on a mill. But I can still control the end result to the extent that I care to control it. I'm not going to learn how to mill a cube by having an LLM make me a cube. I'm not going to become a better machinist by asking an LLM to make me a cube. I can also send my G-code to a vendor and have them make me a cube. Or hire a person and give him a rough idea of what I want and have them make it.

People keep talking about AI slop but then I go maintain our largely human written code base and it's like worse than any slop I've seen from my AI usage. This is with code reviews, tests, and a supposedly strong engineering team.

That said AI feels a bit alien.

My experience with frontier models is that in many areas of software engineering they outperform the average software developer. In some they blow everyone away. In others they're not as good. But they are getting better. The problem is often not the model's capabilities but rather what you ask it to do and are you able to understand what it does and give it guidance when needed.

What I like to call at work "this is not a technical problem". There are many problems we could easily solve if we had the right structural incentives. But instead we have politics, processes, layers of management, etc. All that doesn't disappear (yet?) with AI.

The article is behind a paywall :(

Having lived through hyper-inflation the only thing that got that under control was price controls. Wages going up can't stop inflation - they fuel inflation. Inflation psychology is that your money is going to become worthless so you don't save it, you spend it, which keeps prices going up. It wrecks havoc on loans and debt as well. If you lent money with a fixed rate hyperinflation erases your returns. If you borrowed with a fixed rate your debt is effectively erased.

Not to mention that governments in general don't control incomes. They can lower taxes (which is good IMO). They can pay government employees higher wages (which is hard to do when you lower taxes).

At the end of the day governments make things better by making smart investments (or policies that enable smart investments) and make things worse by making bad investments (or policies that lead to bad investments). Everything else is second order effect.

Isn't age also a factor?

What's "regular old high protein food"? Do you mean something like meat every meal? When I recorded my meals I found my protein intake to be quite low (I don't eat meat. I eat fish but not every day.).

Not everyone needs to live in a hip neighbourhood?

My intuition agrees with the supply side argument. Also higher interest rates to reduce demand? Isn't this how we got here, to these very high house prices worldwide, by a combination of the two? Taxes seem a second order effect here at best.