I’m responding to comments like this in the article:
So I am betting that the US and China are more compelling forces for change. Stalin was fond of telling a story from his experience in Leipzig in 1907, when, to his astonishment, 200 German workers failed to turn up to a socialist meeting because no ticket controller was on the platform to punch their train tickets, citing this experience as proof of the hopelessness of Germanic obedience. Could anyone imagine Chinese or Americans being so obedient?
This isn’t a serious analysis of German culture. It’s perfectly fine to argue that certain countries are economically or industrially problematic, but when you throw in comments like this, it really doesn’t help your argument.
And I’m not from Europe, but I have lived here for years. The constant clueless comments by my fellow North Americans about the somehow monolithic entity of “Europe” are irritating.
This is not really fair, the story is never explicitly discounted as hyperbole in the article and follows a range of other more mellow criticisms of europe. Also, directly following this quote, is the question: "Could anyone imagine Chinese or Americans being so obedient?".
None of this points to the story being out of place, and since the author specializes in serious analysis of china's relation with america, and the author brings up europe, its fair to assume that they included this story as a relevant criticism of europe.
In that regard, its indeed not of the same quality as the analyses of china or american culture.
I had never heard of this term and I thought about it for a good 30 seconds before looking it up (my best guess was it had something to do with the sea lion's "owrk" "owrk" noise when it asks for a fish at water parks). :]
"I have a hard time squaring the poor prospects of Europe over the next decade with the smugness that Europeans have for themselves. I spent most of the summer in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting. European prices and taxes can be so high while salaries can be so low."
This particular kind of American perspective on Europe always falls into the same trap: Not understanding a world where economic performance is _not_ the be-all-and-end-all, not understanding the connection between the benefits of such a world (things that consider externalities - not individuals - in order to exist) with the costs of such a world (taxes).
I didn't say there was anything wrong with having that value if you want to. The problem is not having the self awareness to realise when that framework of values is clouding your view of other perspectives.
A lack of self-awareness is a trap - the most insidious one because you don't know when you're in it :)
And you'll need a citation on "for the most part the rest of the world". Economic performance as the one true measure of prosperity and progress is very new, even in America itself: Most Americans have no sense of how very different their country is now from say, the country that launched the Apollo missions.
> Most Americans have no sense of how very different their country is now from say, the country that launched the Apollo missions.
You cannot be kidding right? Those that remember the Apollo missions will undoubtedly agree their country is different, first but not least they are most likely using a smartphone assembled and designed with technology unimaginable by NASA planning the Apollo missions; not only that, the smartphone is assembled half way around the world by a country previously in such dire poverty and famine that over 30M died due to Marxist central planning.
That’s not change unique to America though. Why would I be thinking of changes that have affected almost every country, when talking about whether Americans recognize how America has changed?
Whether someone remembers the Apollo missions or not is irrelevant to my point. Quite the opposite: It matters more what people who don’t remember think of it, and how distant their assumptions are from the reality of that time.
It’s also funny how you keep bailing on your previous assertions that we’ve dismantled, and cherry pick different parts of every argument in the hope you might finally get a “win”.
> That’s not change unique to America though. Why would I be thinking of changes that have affected almost every country, when talking about whether Americans recognize how America has changed?
Hahahaha, this is like saying, the world wars didn’t impact Europe, because it also impacted the whole world! Europeans, the war didn’t happen!! Anyways… this entire thread is more evidence that European stereotypes are valid for the most part
The issue is not that it's used as a measure, it's that the thing economic performance is supposed to serve as a proxy for - the general health and stability of a society - is then completely ignored. Homelessness, mental illness and violence are objectively more pronounced in American culture than they are in European culture.
Are you conscious of the fact that you replied to, essentially, someone saying "author mistakes preferences for metrics" with "it's not a mistake, it's a preference"?
Because economic performance does not account for unsustainable consumption of natural resources as a cost. Say I have $1M in the bank with a $10K monthly income. I am spending $100K per month. What is wrong with me measuring my happiness by the amount of money I spend?
Economic performance is a number. You can optimise it. Or you can choose any other number, and optimise it too. Is money the best number? Why not median lifespan? Why not reported happiness? Why not median wealth? US has much more money than EU, but the cost is the streets are covered with homeless. Is US really more prosperous if it can't provide a decent life for the equal percentage of people compared to EU countries?
There's nothing wrong with either perspective, rather its the case that the European perspective is different. That's not to say that Europeans are right, or that criticism flowing from Europe to America is justified, but it should at least be acknowledged that pitching two players in a competition that one of the players has less interest in competing on, is misguided.
> What exactly is wrong with Americans or for the most part the rest of the world valuing economic performance as a measure of prosperity and progress?
Prosperity of the nation? Or average people of the nation?
Imagine economy grows. But created value is distributed in hands of few. How then we think about prosperity? It is a prosperity of those few not a nation's?
> Models were run with maximum available reasoning effort in our API (xhigh for GPT‑5.2 Thinking & Pro, and high for GPT‑5.1 Thinking), except for the professional evals, where GPT‑5.2 Thinking was run with reasoning effort heavy, the maximum available in ChatGPT Pro. Benchmarks were conducted in a research environment, which may provide slightly different output from production ChatGPT in some cases.
Feels like a Llama 4 type release. Benchmarks are not apples to apples. Reasoning effort is across the board higher, thus uses more compute to achieve an higher score on benchmarks.
Also notes that some may not be producible.
Also, vision benchmarks all use Python tool harness, and they exclude scores that are low without the harness.
I am a huge proponent of renewables, but you cannot compare their capacity in GW with other energy sources because their output is variable and not always maximal. To realistically get 100GW in solar you would need at least 500GW of panels.
On the other hand, I think we will not actually need 100GW of new installations because capacity can be acquired by reducing current usage by making it more efficient. The term negawatt comes to mind. A lot of people are still in the stone age when it comes to this even though it was demonstrated quite effectively by reduced gas use in the US after the oil crisis in the 70s. Which basically recovered to the pre crisis levels only recently.
High gas prices caused people to use less and favor efficiency. The same thing will happen with electricity and we'll get more capacity. Let the market work.
Nope. Construction induces ECC-driven emergent modular manifolds in latent space during KVQ maths. Can't use any ole ECC / crux why works. More in another reply.
Doesn't apply as long as the improvements obtained there scale with compute.
Now, are there actual meaningful improvements to obtain, and do they stick around all the way to frontier runs? Unclear, really. So far, it looks like opening a can of hyperparameters.
this is a bad example to claim the bitter lesson applies to, it’s about the fundamentals of optimization techniques not about tying to hand-crafted things for the solution space.
Sure, of course. Wasn't suggesting "are you beating a sota benchmark"? I'm floating the idea of an ablation that matches a realistic scenario for the dataset / task. Personally curious how manifold muon performs compared to AdamW in a throughly explored context. This is the first time I've seen a 3-layer mlp on cifar-10.
I probably should have made the 9-layer ResNet part more, front-and-center / central to my point.
> “That’s right outta ‘Goodfellas,’ that’s right out of a mafioso going into a bar saying, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,’” Cruz said, using the iconic New York accent associated with the Mafia.
It does go to the government and not to Trump's personal wallet (like the memecoins and lavish gift), it's just a tax that's just not being called a tax, and frankly it's a good idea. The current abuse of H1B doesn't work out positively for anyone but the companies making a boatload of money on exploiting people.
Are you querying from an EC2 instance close to the S3 data? Are the CSVs partitioned into separate files? Does the machine have 500GB of memory? It’s not always duckdb fault when there can be a clear I/O bottleneck…
On industrial infrastructure
On technology innovation
On internet regulation
On central planning
Otherwise, your comment becomes an anecdote supporting the common stereotypes (assuming you’re from Europe).
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