Phenomena that are largely uniform are explained by population. Why does American have more women than France? Well, the generation rate is more or less the same, so the bigger country has more.

Iceland with 400K people managed to knock out England, population ~60M, from the 2016 European championships. China played in one world cup and has struggled to qualify for decades with 1.4B people.

Being good at soccer is not uniform, because the generation mechanism is not the same. Countries get good at soccer when they have good systems for developing talent, ie making the talent, not waiting for it.

In the US, you have some special factors:

- Pay to play. They turned kids soccer into a consumption good, which you have to pay for. In Europe, if you are any good, you play.

- Competing sports. If you're athletic, there are similar games you can play, with a much more developed youth system, particularly where you can get yourself a degree for free. The systems to develop you into an NFL or NBA player are there already, everything from recruitment to NIL deals. To do soccer, you need to find a way to get in front of a European recruiter.

- College soccer is not a pipeline into the big clubs in Europe. In Europe, the kids have already been selected at age 10, and the good ones generally don't go to university.

On the women's side, this is different. US Women get an advantage from the college system, since professional women's leagues are a relatively new phenomenon. They are guaranteed some funds to play in college under title IX, so effectively they've got a massive league subsidised by the universities. As the rest of the world has gotten serious about women's football, the US has been less dominant.

I liked using the early models to do autocompletion. It could do a leetcode style thing, pretty nice, but only useful for small things.

Then I sought out Cursor because that seemed to be able to do multi-document edits. Not bad, but models at the time (2024) still got stuck pretty often. So, cross-document autocomplete. Useful, but definitely within the realm of "nice shortcuts to have".

Then a friend (who works in AI) told me to try Claude last year. I was on holiday at the time, but I spun up my work repo and looked at the backlog.

It chewed through the entire 6-9 months of estimated work in a two-week period while I was watching that Lord of the Rings series with a friend (we watched an episode or two in the evenings). I just chatted with him about the series while checking the progress every few minutes. It was a huge amount of refactoring, and it didn't get everything right the first time, but it made enough progress that it could be directed the right way.

Since then I have hardly coded any manual lines. I just tell Claude what to do, with very little harness (skills, MCPs, instruction files), and I get what I want.

A calculator - let's expand this to maps, thesauruses, dictionaries, and other lookup tools - was used for a pretty narrow set of problems, and you had to transcribe the result to whatever context you needed.

An AI can be all the calculators together, and transport the output of one to the input of the next. You're meant to have the overview, but it's just so enticing to let it simply do that as well.

It's been written about extensively and is in every undergraduate economics course.

How have dots not been connected?

In Europe you just study what it says as well. You happy to do a bachelor's in physics, your classes are all physics. You don't read shakespeare and learn french.

You can also do this in high school, so you can from age 16 be studying just physics and math.

Luckily for him it worked out very very nicely.

Everybody knows a bunch of people by name, and nothing else, from various contexts. You go to matriculation, there's a bunch of people introducing themselves, too many to get to know. You work a job, there's 50 people whose name you know. You go to a party, your friends introduce you to 10 new people, and you don't have time to talk to them all.

The ones you don't talk to much, they are your friend seeds.

You move to a new town, and you know nobody, other than that one guy you never spoke to after the first week of university. Contact that guy.

For instance I'm the old world, if you wanted to change an interface, you might have to edit 5 or 6 files to add your new function in the implementations. This is pretty routine and you won't need to concentrate that much if you're used to it, so you can spend that low-effort time thinking about the bigger picture.

Personally I rate them really really highly. They are always fascinating to talk to. But they also compete with newer cohorts who mature.

> Will new developers know/understand what they don't know, or will the new state of things simply become normalized?

Yes because a 32 year old guy with 10 years of experience who got given AI recently is going to be around for an awful long time reminding everyone that he has something the younger ones don't have.

Everyone who starts to code after AI has a problem: it's hard to believe you went through the pain and frustration that people often think is required to become a senior engineer. Even if you did, you are in a lemon market with quite a few people who took the shortcut in college. Much better to hire a guy who learned before they could cheat, and then give him the tools to replace the juniors.

For example, for markets that are between 60 and 70, is it the case that around 65% of them resolve to yes?

I guess you want to take a certain time before out finishes, so focus on sports.

But really, it's a values failure.

Wanting to make decisions that are good for America, and good for its friends, is a value. Putting people you are supposed to represent ahead of yourself used to be the kind of thing people would say mattered. It used to be a thing that leaders tried to demonstrate that they had carefully considered their decisions.

Once you have an administration that puts itself ahead of everything else, this whole thing makes sense.

This administration is full of insecure people who want to show how strong they are. You can see it in how they talk, and the constant stream of memes coming from the WH. It's incredibly juvenile, stuff like having Trump portrayed with a sixpack, beating up his enemies.

Strongman regimes have a tendency to try to steal the blind, to use a poker concept: bully the opposition into giving you a concession, by making super aggressive moves. Like picking pennies off a train track, most of the time you will win and the opponent will back down, EVEN if on paper the opponent tends to have the better cards, because a rational opponent will appreciate putting a lid on risk. This last bit is really important, because it means the bully learns that he can win despite rejecting advice.

So you can go around sucker punching people until it stops working, and there's a decent chance Iran is where it stops working. If it's not Iran, it will be the next thing, because they can't stop.

And to get back to values, too many Americans are unwilling to take responsibility for their country's actions. If you look at what causes discontent with the current Iran situation, it is things like gas prices. In other words, self-interest, still.

It's very obvious to gamers when someone hasn't played, it actually doesn't matter whether you have high level gear.

There's things you can't buy with money, and respect is one of them. He fundamentally doesn't understand how status works. He could, for free, just put out a video where he says "look at me, I'm a busy CEO, but I play this game even though I'm bad at it".

People would think positively about that.

Can someone explain the actual benefit of sitting in a developed country and charging via Estonia?

The big country that is an exception is the US. Their citizens have to pay tax regardless of them being elsewhere, and the difference is dealt with via various taxation treaties. I imagine the justification is something like "we help our citizens everywhere, so they owe us tax".

> I'd be interested to hear how others see it. Like I said, I haven't really thought about this too much before, and may be missing something more fundamental and obvious.

The big thing that's missing is corporations. They are imaginary entities, with a bunch of rules about what they are allowed to do, how they pay tax, etc. Once you create a corporation (or several), you can move profits around according to various accounting rules, which are often disconnected from how ordinary people interact with an entity. Are you buying coffee from Starbucks on Oxford Street, or Starbucks UK, or Starbucks Luxembourg? Most people don't think about that when they buy a coffee, but the accountants do.

You can also change what kind of tax you are paying. If you have a company, you can pay yourself a salary or a dividend. It's still money either way, but depending on jurisdiction taxed differently.

"Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"

There's going to be a net loss, but it's probably better to regulate it than have another war on drugs.