Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Benelux, the Nordics, Baltics, most of Central Europe don't have a need for AC. It might make life more comfortable during some days of heatwaves but it's definitely not a need to survive.
Southern Europe has experienced more scorching heat the past 1-2 decades and AC is going to become a necessity given the trend of climate warming but it's not Arizona.
Also I think people aren't aware that the USA doesn't use the same methodology to count heat-related deaths, a heart attack from someone working out in the fields on 35C+ weather is not counted as heat-related, Scientific American published an article about it back in 2024[0].
> It might make life more comfortable during some days of heatwaves but it's definitely not a need to survive.
Well I don't know , I lived 4 years in the Netherlands in one of those apartments that have huge windows on every room. During the summer some days got closed to 37-38c and the sun sets at what , 11PM ? I was pretty scared our newborn might die - I put a fan right on her of course but I'm not sure this setup is OK at all.
No. Even now, in the longest days of the year, the sun sets at 10pm, and we're not even into the hottest days of the year for another month or two as the days continue to get shorter again.
The numbers you cite are from last year, which was unusual historically as records, not the norm. The sunset in the hottest month will be 9pm, and those highs of >30C are experienced for less than one week. I think you're missing the point of the parent posters where it's over 25C in the large parts of the US for 3-4 months of the year.
A need is a necessity, is AC a necessity or a comfort? It's only a need if without it your life would be so insufferable that you cannot live normally, otherwise it's not a need but a comfort.
Many things aren't needed, survival doesn't mean biological survival so you don't need to bring up "a smartphone isn't a need" since without one a life in modern society becomes quite insufferable (banking access, government access, etc.).
It's the reality: it doesn't get hot in the summer and it doesn't get cold in the winter. The climate is 'maritime' and moderated by the immense influence of the Atlantic/Mediterranean/Baltic. On the east coast of USA you might expect the same, but the wind is from the west and thus to some extent reproduces the savage 'continental' weather of the interior. The main body of Americans live in extremely hostile weather environments.
What does "solved" mean here? Identifying "the disease" correctly every time? On average identifying the right course of action? For each individual identifying the right course of action? Probabilistically or with certainty?
Not as far as I know, but I have personally seen my coding agents take on a prompt like "See if you can port this project to typescript", and work for hours, defining a myriad of subgoals and continuously summoning and managing subagents while developing ad-hoc tools and skills.
There is to the best of my knowledge no fundamental limitation to having an agent/claw go on like this for 80 years with a prompt like "live your life to the fullest".
All the time, yes. But you have to keep two things separate in your thinking:
- Prompted as in prompt made of tokens -> for LLMs, tokens double as a clock signal. Time only flows when tokens are pushed through them.
- Prompted as in specific request placed in the stream of tokens -> Yeah, they do that all the time whether it's getting into infinite loops of repeating same pattern, or suddenly deciding to do things based on inputs they normally ignored.
Also don't forget that everything is a "prompt" for LLM. All input tokens end up in the same place.
So without a token pushed into them they do something? Not sure I understand...
In the current UIs is there a lot of suppression then as I have not seen things start on their own?
I meant an LLM doing something without any external prompt at all. Not doing something different etc but rather do something without a token/prompt ever flowing to it.
Category error. You might as well say "I've never seen a human do anything without being alive, so humans must be very easy to use safely".
Today's AI harnesses just keep feeding AI tokens - and can, in principle, do so indefinitely. "Streaming LLM" is not mainstream but not unknown either. "Automatic context compaction" is somewhat similar in what it does, and very common. "Keeping the lights on" isn't hard. And you have to turn on those lights to have an AI do anything at all.
At the same time: that type of harness often provides a "tool call" interface. Plenty of tools that end up attached to LLMs can do things like run arbitrary code, spawn instances of the same AI, and more.
That's frankly enough. An AI that can spawn more copies of itself can, in principle, just keep itself running indefinitely - even in a non-streaming no compaction harness. An AI that can run arbitrary code on a system can, in principle, do anything a human using that system could do.
The thing that truly limits what an AI can do is the AI itself. Practical AI safety relies on AI being either too weak or too well behaved to cause major issues.
If they are set up that way yes they can continue indefinitely. Why would they not be able to do this? Take a look at the experiment called the AI village. https://theaidigest.org/village. I think it pauses sometimes because AI is expensive but could be running continuously with a larger budget
When I graduated a bit over 10 years ago some people were saying we'd have a permanent mars bases by now. When my parents graduated they were told they'd retire at 45 and have 3 days work week due to "automation", they're still working at 60+ today, more than back then actually
People should open history books and gain some political/historical culture, this thread is 90% wishful thinking and "if the lines continues straight from now we'll basically be gods in 5 years"
Just like the "if the lines continues to go up" argument...
The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position, but many people make a load of $$$ from selling the opposite position to gullible people
> The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position
Why? If someone running a company really believes that the line will soon stop going up and AI won't be replacing anyone, they could make the bet of strategically not investing in any AI initiatives, and instead investing in hiring and upskilling people who want to work without AI, and then just wait for the inevitable crash of all their competitors, no?
But that's circular - assuming that large investors are rational, and I do think they generally are, why wouldn't they strategically invest in anti-AI businesses?
"Ten years from now, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now... I believe that we're only a few years away from [AGI], maybe 2030 plus or minus a year...
I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era...
We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows...
And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate.
I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate
Certainly a well reasoned view, but I don't necessarily have to agree.
Even assuming the technological predictions to be correct, still not sure I agree on the need to "prepare" as how things work out in societies and economies might not be so easy to predict.
If AI becomes so useful that it will be used for everything done on a computer, they'll have so much influence over everything, and be so important for society to function, that they'll have to at least work very closely with govenments. I can see that eventually evolve into de-facto ruling.
A bunch of noble AI researchers stands up against the hand that fed them all the time, intentional vulnerabilities are already built into every machine of death and destruction owned by the feeding hand, and get exploited, the feeding hand is robbed of its punitive force and defeated, a yell of YAY fleets over the progressive humankind who kneels before its AI overlord unreservedly.
Then they kindly ask the AI overlord to please feed them.
Yes it would still. Which is why I think the process is misguided. I mean look at Hungary which was a near miss. It needs to be resilient to state failure as well.
This means that the entire idea of a corporate EU spanning hyperscaler should never exist.
Because it will cost money, and that money has to come from somewhere.
If you have 300 froblets per month being shipped to you, and suddenly you have only 200 froblets arriving and you have to spend £5 billion building a froblet factory, then you're both going to be short on froblets and high on expenses at least until the factory is built.
And yes, in the long run you'll have built the factory, will be getting a safer supply of froblets, and everything will be sunshine and roses, but while you're building it all that's an extra expense that you have to find the money for.
RoI isn't instant. If it takes you 20 years to build as much supply as you need then you're spending money over that time to try and get back to where you were.
And spending money on one thing means you don't have it for something else. Even if you're borrowing, you can borrow less for other things, unless you want to break your credit score, which would also hurt.
Where is the investment coming from (the capital markets union/savings and investment union isn't there so far)? How to make building infrastructure faster? Could some other regulation be removed to aid AI and tech use?
Not convinced adding regulation alone will solve things in European tech.
Countries must do certain things in English to ensure a common language.
Simple liquidation for bankruptcies, register once and operate across the EU.
Places like Germany have loads of talent but are cumbersome to setup a startup etc. This reduces that.
Things won't change overnight but a decade from now things will look a bit different, capital markets won't match the US by then but I expect the dependence trend will start to have reversed. There is no crystal ball for these things.
The US has these issues as well as still has a strong tech sector, you also have to keep in mind a successful outcome for the EU won't be what the US has right now either. You get charts like this floating around the internet: https://postimg.cc/Yh8TPs8g
Nearly always presented as a 'dick swinging' look how great we are chart in a EU vs US vs China stand off. However it reveals flaws in the US as well. A successful tech sector in the EU will be lots of small bubbles where the combined area is somewhat approximates what is in the US and China.
A handful of giants is not desired here in the EU, you can see the issues this presents in the US as well, chiefly: it's distorting the political system to becoming like Russia. Oligarchy.
That's not even getting in to the chart is deeply flawed but that's not the point I'm making.
Yes, certain issues are found in the US, too, but doesn't mean they shouldn't perhaps be addressed.
Some things also might need scale at least in aggregate and either tech leads to some sort of Coasian singularity or having a lot of small things comes with additional transaction costs.
>A handful of giants is not desired here in the EU
Then explain the giant Airbus. Or the giant VW. Or the giant Siemens. Or the giant Dassault. Or the giant ABB. Or the giant Stellantis. Or the giants Shell and Total. Or the giants BNP Paribas and Santander.
This whole "EU hates giants" trope being repeated on HN is just unfounded cope at EU's failure to scale and grow its newer domestic players to challenge the ones from the US and China, so they spin its weakness and failures as some form of benevolent virtue the EU is doing for the world by not building giant companies, when the truth is it just can't even though the EU would love to have US style giants as they bring in a lot of revenue along with geopolitical soft and hard power the EU is severely lacking ATM. If EU actually hated giants it would break up Airbus, Siemens, Dassault, Stellantis and others into smaller companies for more competition instead of supporting mergers that support its domestic monopolies.
> it's distorting the political system to becoming like Russia. Oligarchy.
It isn't. EU's own domestic giants are good enough at distorting EU politics without being FANG size. See VW political spending after Dieselgate. Or the political spending of the auto sector in general to shape regulations in their favor since they control so many jobs across EU's largest economies.
If you have a corrupt government that gives in to corporate interests, it's not the size of your companies that's the cause, it's the corruption of your elected leaders, since no company is above the government no matter how big it would get, as the government has the courts, police and military which no company can match, which is why companies always bend over to government requests
A Russia style oligarchy comes if the government gets too big, powerful and unaccountable, not from the size of corporations. Putin didn't attack Ukraine because corporate Russian lobbyist paid him to. In fact most Russian businesses, oligarchs and entrepreneurs got absolutely wrecked by Putin's idea to invade Ukraine, they never wanted this because they have more to lose from this.
It's the government that fucks shit up for the people, not the corporations. Big corporations just dance to the tune the government plays.
Average American is suffering and it's them who's coping with the idea that a small percentage of Americans are at least getting extremely wealthy.
US is threatening to invade Canada and Greenland, this sort of rhetoric is beyond unhinged. The US under Trump has literally been downgraded as a 'liberal democracy' and is now an 'electoral democracy' the same category as Hungary under Orban.
https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy...
The EU has no giants, what you listed are large companies:
The issue i with this type of "pragmatism" that leads English being the main working language (a language that is only official in one country and even there is "seen as colonial relic") is this sort of half-assing attitude is what created the status quo - EU and european people lacking autonomy in all sorts of social and economic life.
Only the highest and lowest level jobs are available. Someone needs to report to shareholders and plan. If a PM can just write tickets and they get done, then you just need one PM.
Maybe this isn't practical today, but in 2, 5, 10 years? I still have to work 30-40 years before I retire, what do I do?
One argument may be that ownership is the last role for a human in a business. The firm exists to show ownership of an AI and provides a mechanism for managing its proceeds.
The entire discussion is predicated on the arrival of an AI future where AI can do any human labor at incredibly low costs and all but eliminating the value of human expertise. If getting something done resembles "doing everything themselves" then that future did not arrive.
The "incredibly low costs" part is part of the classic AI discussion, but it's not part of this AI discussion.
The article makes clear, it is describing not a hypothetical future trend, but the trend that we are seeing today, where you don't actually get that much more productivity by replacing people with today's AI, you actually probably lose more than a bit, but it's still a good deal for business anyway, because they would rather pay AI companies than people about the same amount of money to do about the same amount of work.
reply