A fifth of these last year were paid for by the government scheme that buys people cars - Motability. I wonder how many of these current ones are like that.
It's an async runtime. The whole async-await flow removes a little bit of scheduling control and adds some forced memory management in order to give you some nicer code in an application case, but if you're trying to build a runtime yourself I think you'd much rather retain control in this case. It's just hard to reason about.
You much rather have this runtime you're building manage task scheduling and allocation and all that. It's the most natural design choice to make.
You can get them for half that price on Reddit used. I have a few. You will not get top-tier intelligence out of them. GPT-5.5 and Claude Sonnet/Opus are in an unbelievable tier. Not all problems need that, though. I have a Qwen-based agent write short websites for me to use and it is adequate to the task.
It's hard to tell what the correct public health play is. Take the controversial mask issue. Anthony Fauci on why he didn't say that masks would be effective said:
> Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected
As a public health official, perhaps you want to create an outcome like this by ensuring that you sacrifice some number of unknown people in order to preserve the capacity to fight the disease (and perhaps through doing that, save untold more people, including the people who are originally placed at risk). That will make sense to anyone who has played an RTS, I suppose. But if you're the guy about to be sacrificed, you are less likely to be thrilled about it. Trying to solve a collective action problem is hard, so I won't claim to knowing what I'd do in his position.
However, one way or another, each individual is going to look at that and conclude "sometimes the government will not tell me the truth in order that society may make it and they'll say I'm wrong and not following science to make sure I go along with it" and some individuals will say "okay, we need to take some risk to go along with the thing" and maybe another will say "no, fuck you, tell me the truth" and so on. I think this particular cat is out of the bag.
Once it's made obvious to people that the things you're telling them may not be entirely truthful so that you can create an outcome you want, they won't trust you. I lean on the side of being entirely truthful and appealing to the better angels of people's nature. But I'm an armchair quarterback. Hard to play it back and see what would have happened, or if we were in the counterfactual world with a Spanish Flu like disease that killed the working age more.
You absolutely nailed it. The way COVID-19 was handled by governments around the world has unequivocally eroded trust in public health as an institution. I'm not by any means a conspiracy theorist, but between the lies (like you've quoted), the denials[1], and the contradictory enforcement[2], I don't think the cat's ever going back in the bag. People will die because of it, because actual sound medical advice will be mistrusted due to their past behaviour.
[1] I don't know that we'll ever know the true rate of COVID vaccine injuries but I know more people with medically diagnosed vaccine injuries than I aught to given the official statistics in Canada.
[2] When the Canadian government allowed large outdoor protests (the Prime Minister showing up to a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020 in support of George Floyd) but did not allow outdoor worship gatherings... it started to really look like some of the restrictions and exceptions were politically motivated and not strictly for public health reasons.
Interesting. It makes sense that Taiwan treats semiconductors as a national security issue. After all that's what the Silicon Shield theory is. But I was curious about what happens in other jurisdictions.
It turns out that you can steal from European companies with impunity because European governments really don't pursue this that much. An ex-ASML engineer (in San Jose) set up two companies XTAL in the US and Dongfang Jingyuan Electron in China and then hired people from his team on ASML, one of whom brought all the source code for one component control with him. XTAL lost the case and shut down, but this chap just went to China and ran Dongfang Jingyuan. Living large. The guy who took ASML secrets to Huawei also got away with it. In both cases, European governments haven't really pursued jail time. The US, of course, got involved and has an arrest warrant for the Dongfang Jingyuan guy that we're never going to collect on. "Uncle Sam has made his decision; now let him enforce it" so to speak.
His mistake was taking it to an actually sanctioned country, though. That seems to be prosecutable.
In the US, of course, you will go to jail for it. Besides the national security thing, even Anthony Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months of prison (pardoned by Donald Trump, though), and that was AV tech, not like missiles or anything.
So it seems, based on my Google-level knowledge that:
US: Lots of protected tech, and you'll go to jail.
Taiwan: Semiconductor tech is treated like we do nuclear tech, so you'll go to jail.
Most European jurisdictions: You'll have to pay fines. If you stole to a sanctioned country, straight to prison!
It’s so absurd. As an European, I can’t really understand why our policymakers are so blind to this, companies don’t have the tools to defend themselves from state sponsored attacks, their countries should do whatever they can to protect them if they represent a national interest.
Because from personal experience they don't care. The best of the best policy wise immigrate to the US to take a think tank position in NYC, DC, or Boston earning 3-5x what they could in Europe, and the rest become lobbyists in Bruxelles. After making their nut, they then return to politics with a funding pipeline because campaigns are expensive (even in Europe).
The ones who feel deeply about the cause don't know how to execute but only pontificate (dealt with plenty of EU AI policymakers with European AI founders).
Heck, even consulate employees who are part of the trade promotion teams for most EU states try to network their way out of the role into VC jobs in NYC and SF.
You are generalizing too much. Europe is full of different electoral systems, and each system has its own dynamics that favor different kinds of people.
Take Finland, for example, with open list proportional elections. The primary competitors of every candidate are other candidates from the same party and district. In order to win, you have to develop and maintain your own niche. Many politicians leave to become lobbyists or consultants or join a think tank, but it's almost always a one-way street. It's difficult to return to politics after an extended absence, because someone else has already taken your niche (if it's still viable), and money and experience rarely help win it back.
As for the actual question, many European countries seem to consider trade secrets primarily a contractual matter. Revealing private secrets is not a crime, while abusing your position or breaking into a system without proper authorization can be. Prosecutors generally cannot invoke national security without a clear legal basis. Which probably can't be found in matters that are more about Western competitiveness in general than about the security and interests of a specific country.
Not to be that guy, but there's a significant difference between Finland versus Netherlands, Germany, and even Ireland in importance within the EU and European institutions from a power politics perspective, as well as the type of political culture.
Pre-1995 EU member states tend to have stronger control within EU institutions, and are the states that actually matter along with a couple later EU member states that have openly threatened or actively reversed into illiberal democracies that tried to stymie EU institutions and/or created their own groups to pressure the EU such as the Visegrad Group.
From a US perspective, as long as Russia threatens Finland, Finland has no choice to look to the US, especially if green men suddenly appear on Etelakari, Kilpisaari, or some other rocky island in the Gulf of Finland, especially now that pro-Putin Rumen Radev has won a majority in Bulgaria, Babis and his coalition have returned to power in Czechia, and Fico in Slovakia remains in (tenuous) power.
I'm not sure how the "importance" of various countries is related to the discussion. Or what Russia or the US does.
My point was that there are different perspectives on national security. If everything ASML (or another similar company) knows became public knowledge, it would be bad for its business. It might also be inconvenient to some foreign interests. But would it be an actual national security issue to the host country?
If some forms of corporate espionage are not considered serious crimes, there are other reasons beyond the "best of the best" (whatever that means) migrating to another country. It might be that the people do not consider it a serious crime. And if you are in a country with limited ambitions to influence the rest of the world, that might matter more than the interests of faraway superpowers.
> My point was that there are different perspectives on national security. If everything ASML (or another similar company) knows became public knowledge, it would be bad for its business. It might also be inconvenient to some foreign interests. But would it be an actual national security issue to the host country
Yes for the Netherlands as well as other countries. Netherlands, the US, and Taiwan (because ASML's core IP is dependent on US DoE's Cymer and Taiwan's HMI) are treat the technology used for semiconductor fabrication as dual use export controlled technology critical for national security.
> It might be that the people do not consider it a serious crime
In Taiwan (and especially at TSMC) everyone is taught that the technology surrounding sub-7nm fabrication is export controlled and national security adjacent.
> I'm not sure how the "importance" of various countries is related to the discussion. Or what Russia or the US does
To show that your experience with Finland frankly doesn't matter in the discussion. When someone mentions Bruxelles or the EU, we don't mean Finland or Slovenia or Luxembourg.
Though I would be curious if your defense would be accepted by the Finnish government if you attempted something similar at Patria Oyj.
You highly underestimate the severity with which data and IP exfiltration for dual use technologies is prosecuted and treated in all countries. And if deep down you think that is wrong, if you were an employee of mine I would make you were fired and blackballed.
There is a class of such thing that could be useful. I will likely be teaching my children this literacy myself. Obviously the interstitial pop-ups don't work, and the next generation will not be coming to this technology from the point of view of watching it develop. They will see it as having always existed and while they may be appropriately sceptical, I suspect they will be far more trusting of it. So some degree of understanding the mechanics will probably allow them to learn to treat this technology appropriately.
After all, it's nigh magical stuff. A machine that talks to you in common language and is almost always right. If you weren't already prepared for it, you would trust it implicitly. When Wikipedia first came onto the scene, people behaved this way there too. They would believe it was entirely correct. But at some point there was a concerted effort in pedagogy to say things like "You can't cite a Wikipedia article" and that one simply-remembered rule allowed for children to be forced to treat it as an aggregator.
Naturally, setting up a fund for this is nearly always a bad structure. Earmarked funds have a bad habit of ending up being written to be primarily a vehicle to transfer money to pet constituencies. Teachers unions and so on are always advocating for these because that's what funds the complex ecosystem of teacher educators, the certification and curriculum development programs, and so on. This is just social welfare by a different means. Funds should be flexibly used to meet some outcome. Earmarked funds have a habit of ratcheting up. When there is no need for programs, they continue to exist, and bleed money from the actual work product of education - informed students.
I get why these articles are always written in this style but I really would appreciate some better news media. Students hate a lot of things. Their opinion is mostly moot as to whether a subject is a good thing to learn or not. And all this polemic style of "shoehorn" and so on is completely unnecessary, and just makes me treat this whole thing in the realm of some partisan Twitter post.
But the one thing I did appreciate is a link to the text of the bill.
Haha, it's funny that we've all reached the same conclusion. I, too, believe in the same idea[0][1]. What is fascinating to me is how many things can now be elided from software. I don't use configuration files or things like that. I can simply hardcode everything in because there is only one user. If I want to configure it the other way, I just modify it and rebuild it.
The other thing is that other people's applications are rarely useful. Their libraries are, the feature description READMEs are, but the software itself is full of attempts at generality that make them overly annoying for me to use. Instead I have extremely idiosyncratic software - anyone else would find it insufferable.
The wild thing, though, is that my software is outrageously useful for me. I can see why Anthropic and OpenAI are (or shortly will be) the trillion-dollar behemoths they are. They are enabling a personal productivity increase of epic proportions[2]. The highly specific functionality also means strange things performance wise. I don't need to use Electron or Tauri or whatever. Instead, my thing is Rust with objc2 and it starts instantaneously. On my M1 Max, it's the fastest text viewer I can start. 100s of megabytes of JSON and it's launching is imperceptible for my tool, pretty-printing is instantaneous, breadcrumbs are live.
Because I can make it do only the thing I want it to do. It can't do other things. I cannot edit or auto-complete or anything. And this is great. Useless to others and fantastic to me.
Likewise, my blog is on Mediawiki (which I like so anyone can edit) but the authoring flow is kind of annoying. Uploading images causes a break from writing, and requires a lot of form-filling that interrupts my thought. So I now have this software that does everything I want: link autocompletion, background image uploads, post-hoc publishing, previews and diffs, built-in Wikipedia search to interwiki link. Who would want this but me? It only brings me pleasure.
I make some things GUIs and some things TUIs. The TUIs are easier to work with Claude Code and Codex. We can co-work on many things together because the LLM harness reads TUIs very fast. You can do it with GUIs but that's much slower, and maintaining two separate interfaces into these things isn't worth the trouble.
I clicked through to the source for Amnesty International scrutinizing the claims and that likely 3000 people have died and it reads:
> On 17 January, in a public speech, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, said “thousands of people” were killed. Since then, on 21January, Iran’s Supreme Council of National Security issued a statement that 3,117 people were killed during the uprising. However, on 16 January 2026, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, said in a media interview that at least 5,000 people had been killed, noting that according to information she received from medical sources, the death toll might be as high as 20,000
The only way for someone to read that as “likely 3000 people have died” is if one takes the Iranian numbers as fact. For those whose experience is that authoritarian states crushing protests provide accurate numbers this might be somewhat convincing. To say nothing of the fact that this is a stupendous number of people.
I found it convincing of the opposite: that this is not a neutral summary of the context.
reply