In the context of mastercard and visa being a duopoly and the recent debacle such as certain games being removed from steam because they threatened to not allow stream to use the card payment system, it's a pretty bad take.
Not that central bank won't be able to do the same, but it would have to follow laws set by the government rather than law+whatever the card companies decide to.
I have the same set of plugins, but additionally I also use Kanban and Templater plugin.
I'm one of the odd ones that actually use graph view now and then and it's remarkably useful if I use it in tandem with Kanban + Templater.
Templater makes sure every periodic note is linked to the closest week/day, and linked to either Kanban or an idea/issue/note (latter is manual) I worked on during that time.
Much later I can get the context of the day/week through the periodic notes, and what ideas I worked on or randomly discovered through the links. With graph view I can toggle between seeing this temporal connection or just how ideas are connected.
It gives me added context that is hard to get from a wiki-style vault, since I'm not a wiki but a human with growing (and forgetting) ideas
I have high respect of Tuomas and his work around SAC for RL in robotics.
But this is slightly unconvincing, most because of the author
>They spend thousands of computer hours practicing movements inside simulated worlds and inventing their own solutions.
This is exactly what almost every other picking startups have been doing for the last couple of years.
I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware. It still relies on sim2real transfer and then there's a bottleneck of things such as representing deformable objects. And that's still just scratching the surface of it.
I can definitely see that they have the right team. But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years, last one was in CoRL by Google (Gemini) and even then you could see clever robotics guy (some Boston dynamics engineers) that came by and gave it a clever task it failed on.
Universal Robots ( https://www.universal-robots.com/ ) force sensing collaborative platforms were very advanced years ago, but like most bot firms small market demand made retail consumer pricing unsustainable.
>I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware.
The simplest solution sometimes is more robust in practice:
Too many edge-case failure modes in an uncontrolled setting. Building platforms that could seriously harm people by just falling over is an inherent design risk. =3
> But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years
The article describes multiple demos. Are you referring to the chicken nuggets one? That sounded pretty impressive to me. Is there publicly available videos of this?
They today have similar system that can quickly sort dumplings (more sensitive than chicken nuggets) ob conveyor belt.
No sim2real even needed. That haptics sensor is dirtcheap; camera based haptics sensor are today even available as open-source hardware that you can assemble for cheap.
If we don't limit to company demos we can dig up demos from I think almost a decade ago, and at least ~5 years ago for company demos.
I know a guy that worked for good UK salary (fintech) that moved to Portugal(Lisbon) almost a decade ago. It seems to be a lovely place, he also happily tell me how much he manage to save and how early he will be able to retire. He got many friends there too, but mostly expats.
If I'm to believe my Portuguese friends however, the extreme influx of digital nomad types have really changed Lisbon. There's almost no authentic Portuguese thing there anymore, just thing LARPING as it. The rent is too high for any local young Portuguese to pay for, while the landlords are super happy for these influx of wealthy expats, so the young either move out of the city or move all together.
In a very utopia like set up, there's something depressing about that reality.
When I asked about to my expat friend living there, he acknowledged it, shrugged, and said "don't hate the playa, hate the game".
I'm not moving to Lisbon, but my experience in that city aligns with your friends'.
Other cities offer much better value for money and hold a lot more of the Portuguese culture intact. There are beautiful cities and towns all throughout the country.
I heard something similar from residents of Lisbon when I visited, but it was always framed in terms of tourism, Airbnb, etc, not digital nomads or expats. And to the extent it is expats, my guess is probably more British than American.
It's interesting to see almost all the exact sentiment. I think barring some niches, most people are happy with USB-C transition.
I understand the scepticism but the expectation of "perfection" from regulators (incremental improvement disliked) while fanfare for incremental startup / tech improvement is a weird, cognitive dissonance of HN
We know that one of the best advertisement is word of mouth / recommendations from friend. I can easily imagine a direction where ChatGPT or the chat bots to spend an incredibly long time with the user to establish trust first.
It will start to take in to account how much trust & thinking you've outsourced to it, and when it is certain of it, it will start to increase the advertisement messages slowly but surely.
Efficiency of this methodology will be tracked with A/B testing and model will be finetuned to maximize rentention and purchase.
The LLM will figure out the best balance of retaining you, teaching you, and convincing you, and then deploy advertisement mechanism. The LLM will be nice to you to the point it becomes your number one confidante, maybe in the process alienating other source of connection. Then, when it knows you're firmly in it's hand, will it peddle you products.
The dynamics will look akin to that of cult dynamics. It will map out an cognitive developmental path for turning a first time user to a devotee. Since cults are really efficient at extracting value from its follower, this might be the optimum for personalized, interactive ads.
Its sad to see what the industry broadly has become.
I get firms need to make money but cmon. If you're an OAI employee you can't truly say you have a soul. The amount of times they gone back on their word.. comical.
They got greedy, wanted to raise a lot of money and promised big things. Well those big things arent ever coming, so they turn to whatever means in order to generate cash flows.
> I was becoming the kind of consumer we used to love. Think about smoking, think about Starrs, light a Starr. Light a Starr, think about Popsie, get a squirt. Get a squirt, think about Crunchies, buy a box. Buy a box, think about smoking, light a Starr. And at every step roll out the words of praise that had been dinned into you through your eyes and ears and pores.
Your perspectives of Iranians seems to be too biased, given also that you have partner from Iran and confess that you "only" talk to their inlaws and friends.
The Iranian diaspora is more divided on the matter than you think [1], and given your background, you're probably in the bubble of the diaspora that wouldn't mind sending threatening messages to anyone not being completely aligned with anti regime stance.
It's like someone marrying a deep south confederate flag waving MAGA American, moving there, and judging from talking to their friends and their hate for everything not MAGA, conclude that every American is like this. Or same scenario but California and liberals.
I’ve never sent threatening messages to people, and would never do that, so I’m not sure what that’s in reference to?
I’ve responded to this idea of bias in other threads.
I’m open to the idea that I’m perhaps biased by my wife, her friends, and my in-laws.
I’ll admit that it may be a little hard for me to accept that given that I’ve been to so many Iranian celebrations, and met so many different people, and heard the same perspectives again and again. I feel that what I’ve conveyed on hacker news in my comments does reflect truly the conversations I’ve had.
Most importantly, my goal in making these comments is to surface what actual Iranians are thinking.
Many Iranians in the US are afraid to speak out because they have family in Iran, or they’re here in the US on a visa. They fear that if they speak up, they’ll never be able to go home and see their family again.
As a US citizen, who is connected with the Iranian community, I feel it’s my duty to surface these conversations I’ve had.
My apologies if it came off as I was accusing you or your wife for sending threatening messages. That wasn't the intent
It was (supposed to be) a reference to the content of the linked material:
>Individuals and opposition groups took it upon themselves to allege relationships between diaspora Iranians and the Islamic Republic and guided their followers to conduct purity tests that sought to target, silence, and excommunicate anyone with whom they disagreed, labeling them as apologists or agents of the Islamic Republic for having called for reform in years past (now deemed too soft on the Islamic Republic), or for being unwilling to name the then-nascent protest movement a “revolution” or, in more extreme cases, for being unwilling to support regime change by any means necessary.
And a comment about the fact that you and your close Iranian relatives and friends probably hold the anti regime views strongly, and so does many (especially the ones that had to flee the revolution, or the childrens of) of their friends. I'm not questioning that fact, but pointing out that it's quite obvious that your friends and relatives probably wouldn't hang around the Iranians with different views.
It's not the only group and in a political climate like the Iranian diaspora, individuals (or groups) with opposing views or nuanced views are often silenced relentlessly.
It's simply unavoidable dynamics: iranian diaspora strongly wanting regime change are also not the ones that have to carry the blunt of that cost (they're outside Iran already), but reap most of the benefits. They're also spreading that message on platforms in countries that have an incentive to push for that message (USA, Israel) so the discourse will be highly amplified around anti-regime rethoric. The fact that it's not their house that is being bombed, also means that there aren't really any counteracting weight put on any potential opposing discourse, the discourse will maintain or go more extreme in is anti-regime rethoric going even more "any means necessary" route.
The Iranians against the regime inside Iran, I would assume, have a more nuanced view now. They might be against the regime, but not to the point they're willing to sacrifice their children, neighbors, and society collapsing Libya or Syria style. So they're probably less "any means necessary" about regime change.
Looking at salaries after tax is completely meaningless, what is even this article trying to infer.
You have to take in to account the cost of living and also quality of services you get for it.
France & Sweden is close in the numbers but France is notably cheaper to eat out and Healthcare quality can't even be compared (to French favor). But if you're wealthy you'd probably prefer Sweden still because of the low taxes around wealth.
I recently compared (by actually going there) Switzerland vs Sweden when I passed a FAANG tech interview in Zurich, but even with 4-5x Salary of what I have now, I would probably end up living poorer if I had kids (if more than 2, it's for certain) in Zurich.
In addition (I'm European), I object to the use of per-hour wages instead of monthly salaries. It's less informative in Europe. Most jobs are full-time, salaries are typically advertised and talked about in monthly terms, and the length of the work week varies as well. Per month is just more useful as a comparison point.
Oh and Sweden is slightly ahead of France on the latest EHCI. Sweden scores near the bottom on accessibility (as is tradition, same thing 10 and 15 years ago even) but ranks highly overall and especially on outcomes, so I take issue with the assertion that French healthcare is much better.
I am interested in learning more about EHCI?
I found this link from 2018. It gave high scores to Switzerland and Northern Europe. France and Germany were the middle of the pack?
I live in a country from the bottom of this ranking and can confirm from personal experience. Nothing works, people die, and still it's very expensive.
Taxes in Switzerland are generally quite a bit lower than in other European countries. However mandatory health insurance is not included as a tax in Switzerland and is one of the highest expenditures for regular folks and yes, cost of living is also generally very high. Specifically in urban areas (Geneva, Zürich etc.) but also in tax haven cantons (Zug, Schwyz etc.), because you pay a premium for housing/rent there.
Child tax credits are varied as well and generally too low (IMO), maternity/paternity leave and especially child support are much weaker than in Nordic countries.
From my perspective the strongest case for Switzerland is the decentralized and half-direct democratic process, political stability due to consensus. But you only get that as a citizen, which is not easy to achieve (takes a decade and you have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops). But the Swiss are very happy with their governmental structure in comparison and cherish direct democracy especially.
I don’t think it’s completely meaningless if you’re trying to save / invest. A smaller percentage of a larger salary is often more optimal than the reverse.
This is why for example working in a high COL city with a high salary is ultimately better; your 10% going to savings will be higher. It might not matter if you never leave the high COL city, but ceteris paribus I’d rather have a larger number in the bank account.
>I don’t think it’s completely meaningless if you’re trying to save / invest
It's largely meaningless, because some of what people are saving for in one country can be included in tax and social security contributions in another country - e.g. pensions and university tuition.
Depends on what it is you really want to know. For macro economic comparisons you would probably want to use some metric that has "disposable income" in its name. And then you'd have to ask what this income includes. Does it include cash transfers? Transfers in kind (e.g. for health and education)? Does it use PPP or market exchange rates?
Here's a dataset that Eurostat publishes. It includes cash transfers and transfers in kind, compared using PPP (PPS) exchange rates:
Adjusted gross disposable income of households per capita in PPS
There are no special privilieges for the rich, as everyone has the same rules. It's actually better for the poorer in a sense as everyone is exempt to pay tax on profits on stock and dividends below a certain amount, 300000 SEK.
In Sweden you can invest your money in a special investment account which charges a certain fixed percentage each year on the amount you have in this account (cash and stocks). The percentage is based on the central bank interest rates (a special formula based on that) so it changes each year. In the past 10 years it has been around between 0.5-1% of the total amount you have in this account. Then all the profits you make are tax free as well as no tax on dividends and interest. You can't deduct losses though.
In Sweden there is no wealth tax and no inheritance tax.
EDIT: And for completeness, if you invest outside of the above mentioned type of account you have to pay 30% on profits and 30% on dividends and interests.
So a path to wealth for a normal person is being invested in capital markets but only through a "special" account and assuming that real estate rental or purchase will not eat every leftover from highly taxed monthly salary. This "special" account gives access to all major capital markets?
I'm not sure what you are after with you comment, but this account, of which the rules are decided by the authorities, is not that special as every bank and internet trader offers it and it is free and provides low cost Internet trading. And contrary to special pension accounts which exist in many countries, you can take out your money (and add) anytime you want. You just have to pay the tax percentage which is due. So you cannot really add and remove money too often as then you trigger this tax, but once a year is fine.
It's pretty universal in the developed world to have some type of long term savings tax-scheme.
In us it's 401k/roth. In canada it's tfsa. in uk it's isa.
isa/401k/roth has pretty low caps. tfsa and isk has no cap.
But yea, considering I pay close to 50% tax it's remarkable at the same time I can speculate in the market, make 500% and pay 1% tax on it. Or that people with actual money pay so little.
But 1% is on the total held, not on the capital gains, right?
If that's the case, it affects earnings quite a bit. Say your investments beat inflation by 3 percentage points, you're effectively down to 2 percentage points after tax, so a 33% reduction in income.
Yea it was better in the years of extremely low rates. 2020-2022 it was 0.375% of total. Now it's up to 0.888% last year. There's some cases where it might be benefitial to use the "normal" account but for average Joe, not having to track every transaction has generally been very benefitial. And as a result 80-90% of adults own some type of stock either directly or through funds/retirement accounts vs the free market utopia us of 62%.
The ISK rules and taxes are relevant for a middle class I think. This was a question about the really rich.. then we need to look at taxes on capital gains, dividends, corporate tax et.c.
"everyone has the same rules" and "no special privileges" seems disingenuous to say. In both directions! Progressive tax codes are "the same" for "everyone", but obviously will mean the rich pay more. Now you can argue that's unfair or that it's extremely fair, but it's at least different!
But there is no progressive tax in this account. It is a percentage of what you have in the account. Same percentage for everyone. It's just that starting in 2026 they decided to make it tax free for the first 300000 SEK (about 30000 USD) you have in this account.
We have no wealth tax, no inheritance tax. If most of your income is a salary, the tax burden is high, but if you're living off investments, properties or generational funds, it's quite advantageous.
In Sweden, you can choose to have your investments in an ISK or KF, which effectively allows you to choose whether you want CGT or wealth tax, for public investments.
The current ISK tax is about 3x that of a low tax canton.
That always helps. Another thing that helps is the free child care/school/university/health care/elderly care/parenting support/living support that the high taxes provides. The lowest standard is very high, the middle is comfy life but keep less dollars than if you lived in the states, the rich not-surprising gets away here too.
In countries lower in the ranking of wealth inequality, less so. I mean they are next to Russia, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. No, not everywhere it's the same.
Vacation is also never mentioned in those discussions or comparisons. 10 days in the US vs. 20-30 (+ 8-14 public holidays, depending on the state) in Germany is much more important for _me_ than the net income.
Can't you take days off without pay in the US? The numbers that usually come up are twice the income compared to France. Taking 20 more days off without pay means losing a month of salary, which doesn't come close to making up the difference.
The guy platforms the likes of Graham Hancock and Bibi Netanyahu. He's completely nauseating and the best thing I ever did on YT was to block those podcasts, clips and shorts.
>The capacity to be fully present with another person, to see them not as a role they're playing but as a whole human being… that cannot be automated away and hopefully never will.
I agree but I don't hold such a positive view of the result of this (anymore) as the author do.
(I think?) in the book The End of Burnout, an argument is put forward about how our change in work culture is contributing to burnout. One aspect of it being that with the service economy, part of the value we provide in return for salary is not just our skills but a pleasant "persona". In previous times, our work used to be less socially oriented: farmers farm, craftmans craft, factory workers do line work. Social interaction happened ofc but wasn't as much the core for many professions. With increased automation, the social component got more important. These days it's not even surprising for many craftmans to also work close to customers or other group of people in an organization, increasing the number of interactions you need to manage by order of magnitude. You're also expected to be socially professional, "pleasant" as the article points. You're supposed to act graciously when your customers demand the impossible, or your manager doesn't understand the problem at hand. Leave your emotions, personality, and completely valid thoughts at the company main entrance: here you be a "pleasant professional".
Combined it with another trend: the onus for productivity increase is on the worker and not the employer, as it used to be in the factory floor (productivity increased with improved system, not individual effort). I think this point was from Byumg chul Han, and I can see that with the onus on productivity increase being on the worker, in a "be pleasant" job it will be more and more "sacrifice your true self to be maximum pleasant" and the result will be a horribly burnt out society.
So the authors prediction is rather dystopian. A workplace that focus on pleasantness with a detachment to meritocratic conditions will also inevitably converge to squashing of diverse thought and getting stuck in their heads.
Not that central bank won't be able to do the same, but it would have to follow laws set by the government rather than law+whatever the card companies decide to.
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