I have the memoirs of an acquaintance to read; after living as a homeless amphetamine junkie for 10 years, he managed to raise himself up, got sober, clean, and went back to school.

I followed him as he managed to - through hard work, humility and determination - recover from the lost years of upper senior high he never completed in his teen, to enrolling law studies at one of Sweden's top universities.

He graduated some years ago, and got employed at a lower court, he passed his lawyer bar exam and is now a certified lawyer.

Unfortunately, his book "Uteliggaren som blev advokat" ("The junkie who became a lawyer") is not available in English (yet - I hope it will)

That is incredibly wonderful to hear. Glad they were able to make it through hell.

Erich von Däniken arise from the underworld.

He still lives I think.

Like a box of chocolate... You never know what you're going to get.

Interesting take on it. Even more interesting to feed the article to different llm's and ask for their opinion on it.

I asked ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral and Gemini, and they all agreed it's more of a PR stunt for a possible IPO to position Anrhropic's LLM as "not just an LLM", but that the author is overreacting on his conclusions as to whether the a user would perceive the "soul" of Claude as different from any other LLM.

There's a lot to comment on that post about strange conclusions.

Yes, C has an ISO standard. It took more than 15 years from the conception of the language. Same with C++. Before that, there didn't even exist a normative compiler. And if you want a certified C or C++ compiler, you have to pay a lot, or use the "it is wildly used with a well-known set of bugs".

Either way, there's a huge load of constructs that are Undefined Behavior which you need to know about and avoid. The discussion about the borrow checker being hard to understand and work around, only highlights a belief that is different from what you need to do in C or C++ anyway - but without help from the compiler.

And cost? Heck, Visual Studio Pro cost twice that of Ferrocene. The Enterprise version starts at 10x the price - and those aren't certified.

Then there's the discussion about proving to the compiler that the code is correct - while at the same time dismissing proof using formal verification, that in turn is an entire language and alphabet of symbols that doesn't even exist on a keyboard.

Yes, the Rust syntax could have been easier to read, to that I agree. And Rust is no silver bullet. But in general, the article could benefit from a review.

Read Daniel Pink: "Whole new mind".

Whatever you do, someone else will be able to do it faster and cheaper.

Also, read up on the "Red ocean" vs "Blue ocean" theories about competition.

Yes, you can compete in the cut-throat red ocean, where all other competitors try to survive by offering roughly the same product or service. Look at basically every AliExpress shop.

But it will only get you so far. Will they survive in the long run? To really succeed, you have to offer something unique. Production efficiency is of course on everyones radar. No company ever said "we dont care about how much it cost to produce our product/service".

Google wasn't unique when they started. There were several other search engines out there, Alta Vista being the largest one. Both offered their services for free - so how can you possibly compete on price in the Red Ocean against all other search engine? No matter how efficient the execution was, they had to attract people. Because that was what they were selling. People are the raw material. So, Google offered a different experience than all other engines. That way, they eventually got more and better raw material (people) to sell.

Apple tried what everyone else did back in the early 2000s; Sell mobile phones. But they did not become the world's second largest handset maker by being the most efficient at developing or producing them. In fact, they deliberately sold their phones at a loss for the first years. They decided that they would provide a completely new experience, and that eventually people would be willing to pay a premium which turned out to be twice as much than an android phone with comparable hardware features and costs.

SpaceX, on the other hand, have gotten the world leader in rocket launcher thanks to outstanding execution ; instead of destroying every rocket once the payload has been deployed, they are reusing the rockets, thus keeping the cost per launch much lower. Noone else have yet been near their reusability and cost per launch - because its litterarily rocket science, not because the competitors are less efficient in their execution.

Thomann and Behringer are some of the world's largest companies in the music instrument business. They have perfected execution to such degree that it is hard to find cheaper alternatives that are comparable even on AliExpress!

Ingvar Kamprad started his first company by buying pens in big-pack, selling them piecewize at a large markup. Later the company decided - similar to Behringer - to copy the design of well-known furnitures, but optimize the logistics, eventually also optimizing the manufacturing process. IKEA is now the world's most famous furniture company. But, even they can't sell the cheapest bookshelf anymore.

The irony that an article about Germany is unavailable to EU citizens because the publisher don't want to comply with GDPR. I think I'll pass on that publisher.

451: Unavailable due to legal reasons We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time.

If the US wants to keep its population down and medical costs up by banning safe products, that's up to the US to decide.

At work office; three 1080p screens+laptop. Allows me to keep 6 browser windows+outlook/teams visible,or 4 browsers+vscode+outlook/teams.At my home office; a single 4k and laptop. Same at home.

Neither combos are perfect. Especially whenever I undock for a meeting or move between work and home office, there's always a mismatch between window placements.

I'm using virtual desktops to separate work for different projects, but there's two critical programs that don't allow me to be properly (in accordance to my needs, that is) opened on several desktops at once; Word (where I keep my diary) and VS Code (!).

No way.