Looking at the differences between the M5 Macbook Pro vs E14 Gen 7 I still don't quite feel that the scoring is fair. It is true that the battery is more difficult to replace and the memory/storage are soldered in the Mac. However, the soldered ports for the Thinkpad are a pretty big downside. I bet that if you surveyed regular users, they would be more likely to prefer replaceable ports to upgradeable memory/storage. The battery replacement also does not seem terribly difficult on the Mac; most of the repair guide is about Apple's neurotic use of torque drivers and adhesive activators. If you are happy with the build quality and durability of modern Thinkpads, these steps are entirely unnecessary.

I suspect a substantial factor in the scoring is Apple's fasteners - the drivers for which, of course, are now in every electronics repair kit in the world, not to mention typically included for free with replacement parts on Amazon. Is this really worth a substantial hit to Apple's scores?

I think that determining a leader is usually far more clear cut. The EU and its bureaucratic-media apparatus love to find abstractions and subjective ways to discuss and measure things, but in reality you can measure production in objective terms. The EU is about 3-5% of global shipbuilding tonnage vs. China's 50-70%. Similarly, China produces 54% of the world's steel and 59% of the world's aluminum; the EU produces 7 and 4% respectively. China has 72% of the wind capacity installed and 4 of the 5 top turbine manufacturers. They similarly dominate numbers for trains (track laid, total HSR track, rolling stock built) and electric motors (market share of drone motors, motor components, EV traction motors, for industrial electric motors the EU and US are at about a quarter of the world market vs. China at 35-40%.)

There are a few areas where things are more subjective. Medical equipment, pharma and high-voltage, I could see a case for current EU ties and I appreciate your perspective.

Aircraft is certainly for the US, though. The EU really only has Airbus and Leonardo. Nobody would disagree that the US wins by far for: fighters, stealth, UAVs, transport, business jets, experimental, VTOL, long range bombers, and yes, helicopters. You cannot compare the US (over 2,000 Black Hawks in the Army alone) to the EU (100 Black Hawks) - the EU has a lot of lightly armed utility helicopters, the US has a massive array of everything from stealth, attack, logistical etc. Yes, sure, Leonardo can design a cool light utility copter, but that is infinitely easier and far less significant than an attack or stealth helicopter. The EU's attempts at serious helicopters (NH90, Airbus Tiger) are mostly a joke. Unless you want to count the AW129? War breaks out, how many of those can Italy send? ...4?

The picture with submarines is similar. The US has an expeditionary nuclear submarine force that can operate around the globe. The EU can do minor regional things, poorly. The Gotlands are cool, but they are small and the Swedes made three (3) of them - thirty years ago.

>Oil is a commodity. You don't really gain anything technologically from producing it yourself

The benefits in peacetime may be limited to dollars, sure; in wartime it is life or death. I am no huge fan of oil but in 2026 it still makes up most of our energy and most of the things around us. I also don't see anyone seriously accusing the US economy of Dutch disease.

>As a Dane, I'm unwilling to call anything related to AnsaldoBreda "world-class"

Hah, +1 for the chuckle :) I am Dutch... ask us what we think of AnsaldoBreda!

Second, a lot of the EU stuff is already dead and only continues to exist through inertia. The median German cars and machine tools are worse than the median Chinese and they cost far more.

Third, those numbers often reflect the nebulous concept of "value added." Let's take the case of a refrigerator. Chinese company manufactures every technical part of the refrigerator and ships it to their EU business partner for €100. EU partner assembles it, fills it with foam, and sells it for €600. Most of the "value added" was in the EU! Win for the EU! Go EU manufacturing! The concept of "value added" is the basis for the entire EU VAT system and much of its economic indicators and incentives, while in the US it is almost never mentioned. This is also the source of the most hilarious comparisons (Greek manufacturing superior to the US per capita? χαχαχα)

If you want to cut through the bullshit, you have to look at actual things made. Among the US/CN/EU, who leads: Solar panels (CN), cutting edge chips (US), chipmaking equipment (EU), jet engines (US), aircraft (US), space launch vehicles (US), fighter jets (US), batteries (CN), nuclear reactors (CN), submarines (US), advanced missiles (US), cars (CN), CNC machines (CN), machine tools (CN), precision bearings and linear motion systems (CN), cutting edge medical equipment (US), gas turbines (US/EU), high voltage grid equipment (CN), telecom equipment (CN), construction equipment (US), ships (CN), advanced optics (EU), electric motors (CN), steel (CN), aluminum (CN), oil (US), cutting edge pharma (US), industrial robots (CN), wind turbines (CN), trains (CN), agricultural machinery (US/EU), drones (CN), smartphones (CN.) From that list, China leads eighteen, the US leads eleven, the EU leads two, and the EU and US are tied for two. And China is closing in fast on chipmaking. When China takes that crown, what will the EU have left?

Taiwan's energy policy is, as far as I know, the most pants-on-head stupid of any country in the world. As anyone knows, they are a small island at constant risk of a sea blockade and yet rely on sea imports for 98% of their energy. Not only that, but they _had_ more domestic production (nuclear) that they have been phasing out. Writing giant checks to import yet more oil by sea instead of boosting domestic production is a terrible idea for so many reasons.

That made me start looking into their scores. The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a pile of easily breakable plastic clips, a flimsy plastic case, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly. To me that sounds _worse_ than the M5 MacBook Pro, which scores 4/10 (soldered storage unlike the E14, easily replaceable ports, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly.) I would personally rather have replaceable ports than non-soldered storage, but putting my personal preferences aside, I think it’s hard to argue that difference between the two is worth going from a 4/10 to a 9/10.

Personally, I have driven around the Netherlands a fair bit and this sort of thing does seem to be roughly true for the median case. It can definitely be annoying when the streets are empty, though. For those journeys you’re obviously losing a fair bit of time.

I started forcing myself to start and end the day without the internet, and the very first and last parts without computers/phones entirely. I can't emphasize the benefits enough - to sleep, mood, productivity etc.

>CASE 4B Case Overview Mrs. B was a female in her 80s who had a challenging medical trajectory following coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. She experienced several post-operative sequelae, including wound dehiscence, osteomyelitis, and respiratory failure. She required specialized care in hospital, including additional surgical procedures. Due to physical and functional decline, Mrs. B elected for a palliative approach to care. She was discharged home with palliative supports (i.e., palliative care team and home care support services, including adaptive aids and personal support services). Mrs. B reportedly expressed her desire for MAiD to her family. In response, and on the same day, her spouse contacted a referral service on her behalf. The following day, a MAiD practitioner assessed her for MAiD eligibility. She reportedly told the MAiD assessor that she wanted to withdraw her request, citing personal and religious values and beliefs. She communicated that pursuing in-patient palliative care/hospice care and palliative sedation was more in-keeping with her end-of-life goals. The next morning, Mrs. B presented to the emergency department (ED) of her local hospital. Her spouse was noted to be experiencing caregiver burnout. Mrs. B was assessed to be in stable condition, and thereby discharged home with continued palliative care. Her palliative care physician completed a referral for in-patient palliative care / hospice care due to her social circumstances (i.e., caregiver burnout). Her request was denied for not meeting hospice criteria for end-of-life, and a long-term care application was offered.

On the same day, Mrs. B’s spouse contacted the provincial MAiD coordination service requesting an urgent assessment. A different MAiD assessor from the previous day completed a primary assessment and determined Mrs. B to be eligible for MAiD. The former MAiD practitioner was contacted. This MAiD practitioner expressed concerns regarding the necessity for ‘urgency’ and shared belief for the need for more comprehensive evaluation, the seemingly drastic change in perspective of end-of-life goals, and the possibility of coercion or undue influence (i.e., due to caregiver burnout). The initial MAiD practitioner requested an opportunity to visit with Mrs. B the following day to re-assess; however, this opportunity was declined by the MAiD provider due to their clinical opinion that the clinical circumstances necessitated an urgent provision. An additional MAiD practitioner was arranged by the MAiD coordination service to complete a virtual assessment. Mrs. B was found eligible for MAiD by this third assessor. The provision of MAiD was completed later that evening.

That's an interesting perspective, thank you.

As far as country breakdowns, a decent start is (as usual) Our World in Data. And indeed, as you expected, the increase in energy use is mainly from Asia. I think things are a bit more complex, though; most of China's energy use is in manufacturing. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

To your question, why do we need energy too cheap to meter? Well... because there are a lot of sci-fi scenarios that would need it. Any of (high speed travel / flying cars / space travel) at a large scale would use an unimaginable amount of energy. Plenty of ideas to protect the environment - true recycling, cleaning the oceans, truly cleaning wastewater from all the pollutants we put in it, et cetera all require far cheaper electricity. And the thing is that in most future-planning scenarios, if you need cheaper X, just wait. Most things get much cheaper over time! Not energy! If we want cheaper energy, we need to do something serious towards it, such as fusion - at least, I'm not aware of any realistic proposals to generate energy too-cheap-to-meter aside from fusion.

Yes, and it seems like it's really a 7.5x risk increase. Still pretty spectacular, though!

I really wonder what could cause that. Randomly throwing out possible causes: 1) blood redirected away from gut, 2) overuse of NSAIDS, 3) ultraprocessed foods (gels etc), 4) strange microbiome issues (gels + stress in gut from extreme exertion = altered gut flora?)

The study that found the result is DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2025.43.16_suppl.3619

With solar I doubt we will see costs well under, say, a half cent per kWh. Even when the land and panels are ~free, the surface area of that much aluminum/glass/wiring/infrastructure has a cost. And a half cent is cheap, but not too cheap to meter. You could get a barrel of oil in the late 1800s for ~$20 of today's money, roughly 1 cent/kWh of thermal energy or 3 cents if you run it in today's plants to make electricity. The idea that a _time machine to the 1800s_ would be a cost-effective way to obtain energy is patently absurd and I suspect the man with a handlebar mustache who would sell you the energy would think it similarly absurd; it certainly isn't true for any other serious industrial input. But energy is unique.

At 0.5 cents you're not going to scale global energy use by orders of magnitude. And if you want any of the various promised sci-fi scenarios (flying cars, large scale high speed travel, scaled up space travel, true recycling) you need orders of magnitude more energy.

Don't get me wrong, solar is a great solution for today. But I don't think it's the solution for the future that many people dream of.

The pro case for getting rid of frameworks: they're bulky, complex, there are security holes, updates to keep up with, things keep changing. LLMs can write you something perfectly customized to what you're doing. You get some free security by obscurity.

The con case: LLMs are excellent at getting you up to speed with a framework and understanding issues. As avidiax says in this thread, "The author seems to mistake having to update Node.js for a security patch to be a curse rather than a blessing. You get the privilege of patching Node.js." Security by obscurity is generally a bad design. To me, the general architecture and maintainability is a huge issue when you have LLMs write everything from scratch. Not that a Node or React app is a paragon of maintainability or architecture, but it's certainly better than something made from scratch by an LLM. The code quality of a framework is also far higher.

I personally feel like the best path today is to use something lightweight, like Svelte. You get the best of both worlds. Light structure but nothing overbearing.

Speed completely changes the game in a few ways. The first is identifying interests. Imagine every possible interest in a tree structure. Let's say you're into kumiko. There are so many levels of the tree to traverse to find kumiko; perhaps Skilled crafts -> Woodworking -> Japanese -> Construction without use of fasteners -> Panels and decorative elements -> Kumiko. The more iterations you can get through, the better you can match people's interests. If someone has 10 interests and each one requires many questions to determine, it can take forever to find exact interests with a system that only narrows down your interests every X videos vs. after each video.

The second is matching current moods. Let's say you just broke up with your girlfriend, or your pet fish died, or you're on vacation in Spain. A rapidly-updating system can capture those trends and get right to the heart of them in time for them to matter. A slow system might only get through a few iterations and capture a vague interest in Spain; a fast-updating one can get through countless iterations of guessing. Spain? What city? Tourist or moving there? What type of tourist? Foodie? What type of food? How fancy? Bam, you're watching the perfect video about an upscale seafood restaurant in Barcelona.

The third is type and flavor of content. Even inside of a small niche you will find many flavors of content. Super-short or long form, fast paced or slow, funny or serious, intellectual, irreverent, political leanings, background music, et cetera. Maybe you like slow long-form woodworking content but like fast-paced travel guides. Maybe you hate background music except when it's in skateboarding videos. To determine this requires an incredible amount of "questioning" of the user.

Now, of course, an algorithm that updates once daily can also make inferences about your interests and preferences. It can certainly learn, with enough time, what you are into and how you like to consume it. But the key thing is that these inferences only enable _predetermined_ changes. Imagine you are a human showing someone TikToks. Imagine that you can ask them any questions about their preferences right as they watch a video. You may not ask a question after every video, but you will ask countless questions over the hours of scrolling that day, and you will get good data. Now imagine a new restriction: you must decide your questions once a day in advance. You will manage far fewer questions; and to follow up on them you must wait yet another day.

Now, why do I partly agree? Well, I don't think speed is everything; I think TikTok has another sort of je ne sais quoi to it. I think it has a unique culture and community. It has a better UI and better features than Instagram. It has a young and cool reputation, far from the Millennial taint of Instagram or Facebook. And I suspect that they are good at identifying _who_ you are and acting on that information. But in my eyes, the speed could very well be the most important part of the puzzle.