but this is not really caused by "some leftist politics" or similar but has other historic and complicated reasons. E.g. in Germany across all political spectrum there is a lot of people which think just being in a room with can make you sick (independent on how much it cools the room). In general there are many smaller reason they have against AC which in combination with it simply not really having been necessary (for homes etc.) until recently lead to a wider cross party "non-liking" of ACs.
This anyway isn't specific to one political direction, I mean yes some regulations affect the cooling liquid used, nothing of which is a major road block.
Also the huge majority of new supper market, shopping centers, cars etc. in both countries you named have AC
But also other other mentioned heat death in that statistic are mostly a combination with other health issues. Hence why there is some relation between countries having a lot of old people and countries having a lot of heat related death. But also hence why many people will not treat this death as heat death even if they happen to their family.
A big problem for changing the current state in Germany are also like so "old politicians being mentally stuck in the past". The kind of "we didn't need it so you don't either" mindset. (Which if we have to speak about political direction is more common on the right side of the political spectrum, maybe simple due to that side being also older in average).
Pretty much this, it simply genuinely hasn't been a part of the culture until recently. The energy use angle didn't help, nor did the cost of the units. In case GP forgot, the eastern half of Europe only got rid of Soviet occupation in the 90s, and has been playing quite the catchup. We bought fans and that was kinda it. Can't really comment on western Europe, but I'm sure he can. :)
GP's big leftist overregulation fantasy is adorable though, and definitely no stereotypes were hurt in the writing of his comment, but the reality is that mini split heat pump aircon installations in particular are booming here, usually paired with solar. So unless he's referring to something from the past millenium, which would be pretty weird to do without explicitly noting it, that's a swing and a miss.
The spooky statistics "difference" comes down to a difference in measurement methodology afaik. This exact talking point he's raising has been very popular in certain circles as of late, actually.
But I'm sure his position is entirely his own and actually way more informed than mine, he simply omitted his sources and rationale for brevity :)
In Scandinavia, lack of air condition in homes vs. presence in cars has nothing to do with carbon programs.
What options become standard in cars, and what options are cheap to implement in cars (adding a bit more piping during assembly), follow an entirely different market dynamic than the retrofitting homes (most houses are either pre-WW2 or from a boom in the 50's to 70's) with air conditioning to handle what used to be very short bursts of heat.
Not only did weather not demand it, old brick houses have significant thermal mass and during sudden heat waves you'll often find the inside to already be noticably cooler.
It's being considered now both because weather got weird and our construction went so far in energy efficiency that while new construction barely require any energy to heat in the depths of winter, they become literal ovens in peak of summer.
I can't stand the word "incumbent" anymore. I have only ever seen it in election contexts.
Now that Claude is using it as a fancy shortcut to "current", it's everywhere. I even hear people who would never think to use this word say it in face to face conversations.
It's used all the time in mathematical optimization, referring to the best feasible solution found so far and therefore the "answer" until/unless something better appears. If you work with people in that space, it leaks out to mean anything "current" you're trying to improve upon.
> Because Opus 5.5 is comparable to Claude Mythos 5.1 in biology and cybersecurity, we’re deploying it with safeguards similar to those on Claude Fable 5.1
According to their ToS, conversations flagged by the guardrails when using Fable are stored longer for moderation. That included Fable's guardrail for AI research. Moderation can mean a human looking at your conversation.
Does that mean that I can no longer trust Opus with not snitching my AI research to Anthropic either?
Quite appalling to open a "journalistic" report by ridiculising the people you report on:
> Not since Socrates complained that the written word might make people lazy about remembering things has there been such an outpouring of angst against a new technology in the world of academia.
It's also sort of a misleading gloss of what is going on in that dialogue, which, it is important to note _is in a book_ -- one of many that Plato wrote. Plato has Socrates recount a story (supposedly) from ancient Egypt in which an Egyptian god claims that books will make people forgetful. He never makes that claim himself, as a character, and certainly Plato didn't believe it, because he wrote lots of books before and after that dialogue. The general thrust of that section of the dialogue is that writing can be a useful tool for remembering, but _not_ sufficient for learning, which requires person to person interaction and dialogue.
This is really impressive. Can you say a bit about the underlying process? I'm guessing this is post-training qantization? Isn't PTQ also resource-intensive? (Ie might not work on any machine)
Not sure that's correct. You're replacing a simple visual recognition problem with something similar to the halting problem (but maybe less fatalistic, depending on the formalism you're working against ie DOM vs js).
We don't follow "rules" in war anymore, according to "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth. We show no quarter and take no prisoners, we pursue "maximum lethality, not tepid legality."
That's American policy now. The gloves are off, no holds barred, everything and everyone is on the table. So I guess we reap what we sow.
Simply not true for certain countries, notably France and Germany. This is well documented.
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