czinck

Yes, several studies have concluded that climate change is making both El Niño and La Niña stronger, and making the switch between them quicker. And "stronger" here just means the temperature difference. Climate change is also raising the baseline temperature, so the actual effects of an El Niño of a given temperature difference (which this year is already the biggest on record and climbing) is expected to be worse.

I believe you're misunderstanding OPs point. I read it as saying North Americans drive 200+ miles at once more often than Europeans, and so it makes sense that EV adoption would lag in North America given that.

That explains things. "The stars told me to do it" would be a more coherent thesis than what they posted.

A fun example of this is every NFL team logo except for the Eagles is either neutral (11), or looking/moving right (20).

Saying AI output is public domain is a misinterpretation of that case. The only court case related to the monkey selfies was by PETA, and the court ruled that the monkeys don't hold the copyright. The court didn't rule on who, if anyone, holds the copyright; whether Slater holds the copyright or it's public domain is undecided. The official opinion of the US Copyright Office is that generative AI outputs can be copyrighted by a person "to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship".

That's already the law in the US, the WARN act. It requires 60 days notice before any mass layoffs. The way companies "get around" this is by not actually laying you off, but giving you 60 days notice that you will be laid off and then removing all your access during those 60 days, at the same time they report the 60 days notice of layoffs. It's essentially 60 days severance (plus reporting to the government), which IMO is better than everyone walking wondering who will actually be laid off in 60 days. You can even see that in the email they sent, "today is your last working day" but there will be an email with "details on your [...] termination date". It's unclear to me if this layoff doesn't qualify as a mass layoff (so no warning period needed) or if they just haven't filed it yet, but I'm guessing they'll file it soon enough.

Prescribed burns are a good tool, but they're not a silver bullet. Because of the decades without fires, there's so much debris that fires burn incredibly hot, so you either need people to go in and thin the debris (this is actually a thing they do, as ridiculous as "cleaning the forest" sounds), or deal with the extra damage and risk of a very hot fire. Then you need a decent amount of personnel to make sure the fire doesn't get out of hand (and they regularly do), and do it when the weather is right (wet season, low winds). A prescribed burn is still a forest fire, with all the risks, it's just one that's started at a time and place we control.

The study was published in May 2025, and then revised in March 2026. It's based on data through December 2024, so virtually useless for saying anything about today.

Given that, I actually think the conclusions of the article are backwards. If the gpt-4/gpt-4o era had a measurable 3% improvement in productivity, how much more improvement are we getting from models today that are way way better?

Note: the title of the paper is "Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools", which is 10 characters too long.

Yes, winters are getting worse and worse, but this year was really bad, way worse than any predictions. I was in Park City in February and there was so little snow it looked like summer, and that was before the streak of warm and dry weather this article is talking about. I literally hiked up to the 2002/2034 Olympic facilities in 55 degree weather with no snow on the ground, while the Olympics were still going on in Milan. And I was in Park City because they had more snow than Colorado...

In addition to the current supply constraint keeping prices high, mortgages being fixed rate means higher interest rates don't really drive prices down (although lower interest rates do drive prices up). If you have a mortgage for $600k at 3% interest rate and rates go to 6.6% (like they are now), the naive loan math says your house is now worth $400k. Who has $200k in equity built up in their home and is willing to walk away from it? Virtually no one, so prices stay high until people get desperate to sell.

This leads to the fun conclusion that raising interest rates might actually make inflation worse. Rent/rent equivalent is already 30% of CPI, so increases in housing costs have a big effect on overall inflation.