So why do people not like datacenters? Go figure.

Occasional fires, sure. But very clearly nothing approaching the current scale and frequency.

The last really big one in that region was in 2022; and there are currently not one but 2 parallel fires in the same forest.

Two of the large recent fires in the Landes region, including the most recent, have started from poorly maintained, spontaneously igniting cars. Those also have not suddenly started appearing out of nowhere.

The common thread is very dry forests, it just takes a spark for disaster.

A bit of a distinction without a difference. The climate is not changing back, it's the new normal. In that climate, this particular kind of agriculture (huge pine monocultures) has become a problem.

It breaks my heart to say this, I've spent nearly all my childhood summers in my family's summer house down there. This year, I left just a few days before the evacuation order would have come.

It's going to be burning every year now and if we want to be safe there, the forest can't stay the same.

For example, when studying maths or physics, it is very common to feel like you've understood everything, until you get to the exercises, and need to apply that understanding, and it's only then that you consolidate the knowledge and begin to truly understand in depth.

I like AI enhanced coding, but I do sometimes worry that we're not getting enough of that depth anymore.

I'm not enough of a designer to be able to point exactly at what makes it so, but Claude does seem to have a somewhat limited repertoire of styles.

Maybe if you could point more precisely at the required changes, you could discourage it?

> just writes off any improvement

Is not what that section contains?

There's a more nuanced point about capabilities improving in some ways but not others (ability to one-shot apps vs. maintenance of existing code over time).

At that point, it barely makes sense to call that a minority, it's just normalcy. If you find yourself in a pocket of unusual backwardness where it feels otherwise, you should probably leave.

I pass as German based on looks, but my name is weird and my wife doesn't look or sound German at all. I don't think her or I have ever noticed any adverse consequences from that.

If your German is good, you can just act and feel like you belong here and no one will challenge that.

The people saying they're having trouble getting by with just English though are weird to me. What did they expect? Different countries are different, that's sort of the point.

I do actually agree that Germany isn't the best country when you're looking for economic opportunity, but that isn't really what people are optimizing for here. You might disagree with this, but it's mostly not directed against immigrants.

Regarding your political points: Ironically, they sound very German to me. Yours is a standard left of center critique in German politics. The countries that have a long history of being targets for immigration largely don't work that way, probably because extensive social safety nets are bad for the acceptance of recent immigrants by locals.

I think it's important to note that the cost of bringing a drug to market has increased a lot (about threefold) since 1990, so if the case studies are that old they might not generalize.

But here's a mechanism to mobilize private capital for those diseases that are. Again, the investment needed boogles the mind, around 10B currently, for a single drug.

You're asking someone to pay that money and allowing others to reap the rewards. Why wouldn't everyone want to be the one who didn't pay the money?

Not sure how that address the point. Again, the investment to get a drug to market is gigantic and you're saying that someone should pay for that and someone else should get the reward. It really doesn't work that way. Everyone would want to be the one who didn't pay.

I need a bit more depth and detail to believe that this doesn't destroy the pharma industry.

What would the empirical evidence even look like? It's not like the modern pharma industry existed before patents.

It might be difficult to make models that have useful, high intelligence, but also are very biased. It could create a sort of grounding in logic and reality.

Grok might actually be early evidence of this. Despite the bad press it gets, it's really not so bad.

One can always hope ...

It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.

Everyone should do it more, it really helps put the uncompromising convictions of people around you into perspective and see them as what they often are: a lack of understanding for the breadth of human experience.