marcyb5st

On Antrhopic side Claude 5.5 improved over 5, but honestly in this dimension the bar was extremely low.

Amen to that. For the first time in my life terrible UX costed me money and I'm highly suspicious that fucked up UX is because of AI slop.

Basically, I tried to buy a train ticket on sbb.ch (it was an eurostar crossing the border, so I couldn't do it through the app).

I selected the day and start looking at the available trains. Before continuing I logged in with swisspass to get my halb-tax discount applied. Once done the page reloaded, I got the updated prices, I selected the train at the time I wanted and I purchased the ticket. Only when I got the ticket delivered on my app screen I notice that it was for the current day and I couldn't reimburse it.

Basically, the page reload after the swisspass login changed the date to the current one and, of course, I didn't notice. It is now fixed, but it costed me 90 bucks and couldn't really do anything because technically is my fault for not noticing it was on the wrong day.

I was wondering about this recently. I visited my parents in Italy and got to watch some TV with them (at home we don't have the TV even connected to the Antenna as it is only for YT or through the media center).

I noticed that a good percentage (between 30 and 50%) is AI generated and I was wondering what impact it had on the actors/musicians/... . I mean, with a few 10s of Euros now you can achieve something that before it would've costed you several thousands or tens of thousands (depends on the quality of the production I guess).

I assumed at the time it must've been a slaughter for that part of the gig economy and this seems to confirm it.

I agree. I was looking at a night train from Milan to Lecce. It costed waaay more than flights+ the extra night in the hotel. Crazy if you think about it

Poison the responses with massive ai slop dumps.

Yeah, good luck parking that anywhere in Europe parking spots or drive it through downtowns.

I grew up close to the US base Ederle in Italy. Plenty of the cars that the US folks that brought over were in rough conditions (scratches, dents, ...).

Do they? Last I checked French colleagues enjoy 36 holiday days and retire at 62 (at least used to).

That's much more holidays and ~3 years earlier than any other country I know of

Very whataboutist view.

The problem is much more complex. Yeah, France with it's generous holidays, substantial pensions combined with a young retirement age has allowed their boomer population to live above its means. However, this is true for most of the western world.

The other problem is that the era of cheap money has come to an end, and France, like many countries, hoped that they could kick the can down the road a little bit longer so that, by then, the boomers would be dead. Without the biggest cohort (which is the one that votes the most) you could do reforms to lower lavish pensions, make them pay a bit more for healthcare, ... .

So now, with an oil shock that is slowly spreading to other facets of the economy France is fucked because it can't lower taxes to give their population more breathing room because of the above mentioned problems. Italy for instance, has now a lower yearly deficit than France and can borrow at considerably cheaper rates and It used this freedom to lower taxes on fuel since Hormuz closed.

Metals/commodities?

High inflation and and high interest rates with debt this high means that eventually the Fed will print (IMHO).

Indeed, also even the air cooled ones are designed for high static pressure fans (ie small fans that spin at really high RPMs). Those fans are really really loud.

You can just mod them to run on consumer fans that are designed to spin much slower but have higher diameter

Not sure I agree. The credit default swaps have been extremely expensive lately, meaning that someone is already thinking about an AI bubble popping that will take private credit down which will make banks take a serious hit (11% of their outstanding loans are to linked to AI). On top of that we are in a time where the economy is propped up basically by AI spending and delinquencies on all sort of debt are at historically high rates.

I am panicking a bit TBH

The problem is that nobody knows how really bad this is. For instance, if I, a private individual, asked for a loan to put money in private credit there is no way to link these two actions.

The 11% I mentioned above is the verifiable exposure for banks. It could be a much much higher number and at a time where delinquencies on all sorts of debts are historically high that for sure doesn't bode well.

The money printing that the Fed would do to fix this would be gigantic (several Trillion dollars basically) and on the same scale as the covid intervention which sent inflation to 9+%. And we are already waiting for the oil shock to spread to everything else.

Yeah, the financial system might survive, but the pensions, savings, ... will be fucked up.

Yes, but you are partially wrong IMHO.

The problem is that private credit agencies also asked for loans from banks and therefore they are exposed to this as well. I believe the current estimate is that 11% of outstanding loans from the big 4 US banks were issues to private credit firms which then very likely lent themselves to the AI industry complex.

Additionally, by the Fed's own admission, they will never let another "Great Depression" happen again. So they intervened in 2008 and they will intervene again by buying up those worthless assets. And the average person will see their savings real value plummet without even mentioning that a lot of private credits come from pension funds...

Finally, if private credit really goes belly up, private investors will likely lose a good portion of their purchasing power, meaning that the economy will at best correct and at worst crash only because of that. And this effect will be in addition to the AI economy grinding to a halt which will already hit the worldwide economy HARD (also IMHO).

A reckoning is coming. I believe the "let it burn" is not doable as it will take a few banks and the economy with it. A more measured slow bleed with the Fed printing money to buy these junk assets will be more likely.

With the rank and file I am not 100% sure. I mean, they get paid a fraction of execs and potentially don't have the whole picture.

Additionally, it is really hard to draw a line. For instance, I can develop some logic that could take a screenshot of your phone. It is perfectly fine for debug builds or with explicit user consent while using an app to provide some additional context on some issue. The same logic used to spy on users is not.

I "enable" them, but I won't consider myself responsible or even remotely involved.