If that was true then slack, linear, … would be out of business.
Yes, anyone can pay the provider, but not everyone can ask the right questions, followup, generally give the question the attention it deserves.
There are heaps of problems with academia, and poor writing is just one of them. It existed pre AI. Whoever produced slop pre-AI now produces more of it. The good ones still stand out.
Maybe they stand out, or maybe the pool of papers just get flooded and nobody new good gets noticed unless they were already preselected by other means.
In Poland everyone uses Blik, recently even Revolut (a popular pan-EU neobank) started supporting it for transactions in Poland. It’s trusted, available for 10+y and generally a successful project.
I don’t think it ever tried expanding outside of Poland though.
When it comes to Wero—I’m not sure. My bank recently replaced “payconiq” with it, and I don’t see any benefits or new features and the app seems amateurish.
I guess the single market is not really “single” in the US sense.
banks have two ways to offer non-iDeal Wero: Either in their own app, or via the Wero app.
I think it's super interesting to see how Wero connects all the separate instant payment schemes. It launched in Germany and France, replacing giropay in Germany. Now it first rebrands iDeal as iDeal|Wero, and plans to replace it with regular Wero. And in Poland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Italy, they don't push the Wero brand or technology, but instead they build interoperability with the local systems.
Like someone else who made the "SEPA in trenchcoat" comment, it's all built on tying phonenumbers (universally available and easily connectible) to bank accounts and relying on SEPA instant for the money.
The only thing to make sure is that QR-codes,etc that are often tied to apps will be supported for routing/connecting between different apps.
Like the Swedish Swish app when asking for money produces a QR-code that says, A+(my-phone-number) , if that's universally recognized by the apps as an ask-request then an Italian app scanning my QR code will be prompted send money and the Italian system will query the Swedish counterparts what account is registered to that phone and then just send the money over SEPA when the request finishes.
Most banks integrate Wero into their online banking app, but some (e.g. mine) use the dedicated app for Wero (It's just called wero on google play and iOS). You still sign up with your bank account though.
The critical feature that Wero needs is adding money to your account balance via SEPA instant or credit card. That way users without participating bank accounts can join.
> I guess the single market is not really “single” in the US sense.
AFAIK due to SEPA we are already much better integrated. And with SEPA URLs (QR or NFC) plus instant transactions we already have all we need deployed EU wide. IMO the European banks are just over engineering everything.
The real benefit is "one to rule them all". It's so much more useful to have one single network that everybody uses even if the service doesn't have all the bells and whistles, than it is to have to use a patchwork of 1000 different networks even if they're stuffed with fancy features.
Does it matter? Both are small nations that do not account for even 1% of global wine consumption and not even one hundredth of one percent of California wine consumption.
Doesn't it seem like ethno-narcissism to think that a boycott by some members of a demographic responsible for less than one hundredth of one percent of sales is the reason why a specific foreign company is having struggles. When there is the very obvious explanation of the whole world drinking less wine. We are going to skip the obvious universal explanation and go to the niche ethnic explanation?
Norway is a small country and most people are not making long distance trips there. Despite being far and far north, they're also close to water and so large parts of the country have a much milder climate than you would expect for their latitude.
Don't get me wrong. The electric cars work just fine in cold weather. As long as your trip isn't too long. I however discovered the hard way last winter about a week after I got my electric car that when the weather is below zero Fahrenheit it gets about half the expected range and I had a trip that was just a little bit over half the expected range - I'm lucky there was a slow charger along that trip, there were no fast chargers anywhere along the route. (An hour charge over lunch got me the 10 extra miles I needed to get home - I didn't eat at my first choice but it worked)
For me it works well for agentic coding tasks and terminal/unix/bash (in cursor and grok build); it's also token efficient and cheaper than gpt 5.6. It's def not as good as Fable for me (I haven't used Astra much, can't comment). So it's not the cheapest, not the most capable, but it has a good mix of it for my backend, go, infra work.
The voice is the weird part. The early Grok 4 models had a very distinct presentation unlike anything else out there. Then suddenly it made a big jump in coding ability and started sounding just like every other model.
> it's also token efficient and cheaper than gpt 5.6.
Deepswe results show that grok 4.6 is more expensive per-task and consistently scores worse than: luna xhigh, glm 5.3, astra low, sol high/xhigh, opus 5 medium.
Grok also used almost 3x as many tokens/turns to complete tasks than all of those models (besides luna), so it takes way more time to complete a task.
There isn't much reason to use Grok at all, it's gotten better but it's still worse than every other player in the field, which shouldn't be a surprise considering until about a year ago they were just buying tokens from other providers and pretending it was their own model.
With gpt-6 luna and sol coming tomorrow it's going to look even worse too, especially if new luna retains the same dirt cheap pricing that 5.6 luna has.
This landing page made sure I lost interest in this attempt.
JFC, who wants animations in their editor?
Also, I set prefers reduced motion on my browser. Pages that are filled with useless animations in spite of my preference tells me the dev is either incompetent as they cannot handle basic accessibility or an asshole because they just don't care.
It's ironic that a community that uses a program originally developed at the MIT AI Lab, extensible in the traditional programming language of AI, would hate AI.
Richard Stallman prefers to call AI "Pretend Intelligence".
Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control.
"So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description.
Hey, MotherDucker here!
We've been working closely with the DuckLabs team since day one, and the collaboration will continue!
You can read more here: https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-amazon/
Wait, you guys actually call yourselves MotherDuckers :rofl:. I was thinking before that would be a hilarious name, kind of like how Google has “Googlers.”
TL;DR AWS will either acquire MD next/soon, or (more likely) keep them around for the optics that they are totally not going to starve the community of anything other than DuckDB as a hosted AWS service.
From the MD "about page":
The idea for MotherDuck came after Jordan Tigani, MotherDuck co-founder and chief duck-herder, saw DuckDB in action and thought, “Wow, this is amazing! someone should really build a serverless version.”
...
Hannes and Mark, who founded DuckLabs to focus on the core technology and build the world’s best analytics database, were looking for partners who would build a commercial cloud offering.
If that was true then slack, linear, … would be out of business.
Yes, anyone can pay the provider, but not everyone can ask the right questions, followup, generally give the question the attention it deserves.
There are heaps of problems with academia, and poor writing is just one of them. It existed pre AI. Whoever produced slop pre-AI now produces more of it. The good ones still stand out.
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