"Who does Spain need defending from?" Nobody, because of the security architecture my tax dollars built. That's not evidence the bases are a favor to us. That's evidence they worked. You're welcome. And if they can't be used when it matters, I won't lose any sleep if they get closed.

The coalition for Afghanistan was voluntary. This isn't even that, it's just flying our planes over Spain's airspace.

Even as a joint contributor I see no reason for the US to pay for bases it's never going to be allowed to use.

But the US not being allowed to use the bases it pays and maintains for Spain makes it questionable why it does so in the first place. Iran is in fact a threat relevant to NATO considering most of it is/was within ballistic missile range. It's also a simple fact that Iran's manufacturing base has been supporting Russia's war machine, which has been a key contributing factor in the Ukrainian stalemate. There is some genuine strategic overlap.

Restricting air space on top of that, makes me, originally a more sympathetic American NATO supporter, question the dynamics here. Why should the US help Spain when it's in need in a future conflict?

I don't want Isreal dragging us into wars for it's personal benefit. But this whole conflict has really got me realizing I don't want Europe dragging us into any wars either. The only transactional benefit to those air bases is that they power American global logistics. If this becomes a pattern then I think NATO will likely become nothing more than a nuclear umbrella, even after Trump leaves office. And only as a hedge against nuclear proliferation.

People take for granted that Biden was technically the most Pro-NATO president we have ever had, and likely ever will.

Still, I feel like they were pretty rude to this guy for no real reason. I don't think I'd want to work with them.

Everyone already knows dissent exists. Polls, social media, elections make that clear. The question is whether street protests add anything to that awareness, and whether the way they're conducted generates curiosity or just irritation. For a lot of people it's the latter, and waving that off doesn't make the problem disappear.

That said, if most people turn into hermits and start living in pods around this period, then I think you would be in the right direction.

As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.

Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles. Despite this, vocabulary and semantics as a whole become more uniform. Spelling errors and typos become increasingly rare.

In parallel, people start using LLMs to summarize content in a style they prefer.

Both sides of this gradually converge. Content gets explicitly written in a way that is optimized for consumption by an LLM, perhaps a return to something like the semantic web. Authors write content in a way that encourages a summarizing LLM to summarize as the author intends for certain explicit areas.

Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before, and perhaps less ambiguous. Language is the primary interface an LLM uses with humans, so even if LLM use becomes baseline for many things, if information is not being communicated effectively then an LLM would be failing at its job. I'm personifying LLMs a bit here but I just mean it in a game theory / incentive structure way.

I've see some argue that a hypothetically buggy router would somehow be less likely to fail if NAT was used but really, that could be equally said about bad port formatting defaults, which have in fact happened. Complexity is what increases the likelihood of bugs at the end of the day.

NAT is just an addressing hack, a weirdly complex way of indirectly routing to local addresses. It only influences what is written on the envelope, not how that envelope is processed at the post office.

This trips up a lot of people, and I think it's because NAT was probably their first real exposure to networking. When that happens, you end up building all your mental models around NAT as the baseline, even though NAT itself is really just a workaround for address space limitations.

What's interesting is that someone with no networking background who thinks of it like a postal system (packets are letters that get forwarded through various routing centers from source to destination) would actually have a more accurate mental model of how IP networking fundamentally works. The NAT-centric view we all learned first can actually make the basics harder to understand, not easier.

My point is simple: the utility infrastructure is the hard part. The silicon sitting on raised floors is disposable and will be obsolete in a few years. But the power substations, fiber connections, and water infrastructure? That takes years to permit and build, and that's where the real value is.

Building that infrastructure (trenches for water lines, electrical substations, laying fiber) is the actual constraint and where the long term value lies. Whether they're running GPUs or something else entirely, industries will pay for access to that utility infrastructure long after today's AI hardware is obselete.

You're lecturing me about evaporative cooling efficiency while completely missing the point.

So they're sitting on real estate with access to massive amounts of water, electricity, and high bandwidth network connections. Seems like that combination of resources could be useful for a lot of other things beyond just data centers.

Like you could probably run desalination plants, large scale hydroponic farms, semiconductor manufacturing, or chemical processing facilities. Anything that needs the trifecta of heavy power, water infrastructure, and fiber connectivity could slot right in.

Groq is more of a hardware focused company.

They're not killing it, they're merging it into Android. Makes sense. Android already does everything ChromeOS does, it just needs better desktop input support. Google said this was to compete with iPads, which only reinforces my point.

> Also Windows is increasing in its share again.

Short-term fluctuations don't change the long-term trend. We're talking about where things are headed over the next decade vs where it once was

> Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.

My company went all-in on Copilot, but I'm not seeing this translate to more Windows usage. Copilot works fine on Macbooks, and that's what most people here use. When management gets excited about it, they talk about Outlook and Teams integration. Nobody cares about Windows-specific features. What does OS integration even buy you? Access to local files that are already in the cloud anyway? I'm using Copilot on my company-issued Ubuntu laptop right now. And honestly, the fact that IT at a massive, conservative corporation even started offering Ubuntu as an option says a lot about where things are headed.

Microsoft will be fine, but I'd bet on Windows declining over the next 10 years, not growing.