> "Nothing was saved except clothing and bedding. When Mrs. Wood saw that the house could not be saved, she put some sheets on the floor, threw all the clothes from bureau drawers and closets on the sheets, tied them up, and threw the out the window."
> "Well, wasn't that smart?" said Jessie. "That costs the most of anything, doesn't it, Aunt Jane? The family clothes and bedding?"
Does it matter? Is 8GB enough for marketing AI acceleration on a professional laptop? If not, then the reasons don't make a difference if it can't achieve the marketed use.
My take-home message is Microsoft's hypocrisy, like "When Microsoft unveiled the Copilot+ PC standard, they drew a hard line in the sand when they said that 16GB of RAM is the absolute minimum requirement to earn the Copilot+ PC badge." but "now that Surface Laptop 13 for business is about to get an 8GB RAM variant and it’s still marketed as a Copilot+ PC, it just goes to prove that Microsoft isn’t consistent with RAM recommendations".
Plus, "It is shamefully hypocritical to mock Apple for shipping an 8GB laptop, only to turn around and announce an 8GB Surface Laptop for $1,299.99, which is, hilariously, more than double the price of the $599 MacBook Neo."
FWIW, the author says "It’s not the first time Microsoft has experimented with crippling low RAM" and believes it's "a return to the standard business playbook Microsoft used with the Surface Laptop 5 and 6", so not necessarily tied specifically to the RAM shortage.
Given the time needed to gather data, write it up, and go through the peer review process, this is about what I would expect for up-to-date empirical findings combined with some background base understanding.
Can you suggest some better and more recent empirical findings?
“Outdated” was perhaps an inaccurate term to use here. The issue isn’t what dates these studies were published on, it’s what models they were evaluating on. This field is moving faster than a speeding bullet. To start with the most recent studies cited:
- Stray2026 covers a “two-year period” of commits. The paper was submitted in September 2025 and revised in January 2026. “Vibe coding” at that time (so from 2023-2025) was still mostly pasting code from chat windows into your IDE or accepting autocomplete suggestions.
- He2026 is similar in the timeframe, submitted November 2026 and revised in January 2026, focused entirely on Cursor, which, at that time, was very different in its focus (code completion/inline chat prompts vs agentic back-and-forth with extensive tool use and autonomy). Again, very different from what reality looks like currently.
- Becker2025 explicitly evaluated Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet, an entire generation removed from the current state-of-the-art.
- Xu2025 and Bakal2025 say they evaluted “GitHub Copilot”, which isn’t an AI model but an AI router. I couldn’t find any data on whether they actually evaluated what models the developers’ requests ended up going to.
The point is that there is no recent empirical data because by the time a rigorous study is ready to publish, the industry and its capabilities have already moved on dramatically. The truth is that, as of right now, anyone claiming to have empirical proof of either slowdowns or efficiency gains is wrong. There is no way to tell.
This isn't about "empirical proof of either slowdowns or efficiency gains" but ways in which the process of evaluating its capabilities can be flawed. The first paragraph is:
"Suppose your manager asks you next week to demonstrate that the AI coding tools your company signed up for are worth the subscription cost. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way; the sections below explain why."
If it requires (or will require) Google/Apple authentication then it's of course not sovereign payment. It looks like Wero works on GrapheneOS, at least for now. Will that always be possible?
Will it always be smartphone only, or will there be other options?
I've read about the problems kids (eg, 10 year olds) are having in the countries which have gone mostly cash-free when they don't have a smartphone or debit card to use for otherwise normal and age-appropriate transactions.
I can't help but think that by switching even more of the economy to smartphone-based solutions then kids will have even more restricted purchasing autonomy.
To say nothing of people like me who don't have and don't want to have a smart phone.
Norway passed a law quite recently forbidding permanent card only shops, cafes, etc. As far as I can tell this was done for two reasons, firstly card only is discriminatory and secondly to improve the countries resilience in the face of cyber attacks.
You can only be electronic payments only if you are a temporary sales location such as a flea market, ice cream van, etc.
The point of budgeting via "cash stuffing" instead of the invisible shuffling of money through a bank card, is something that in retrospect is something similar to what I did when I was younger - the cash in my wallet is getting low, so I should hold back on expenditures.
It lists some issues, like "The number of automated teller machines (called a minibank in Norwegian) has also declined, and most of them recently started charging a fee of NOK 10 (USD 1) to withdraw cash. If more people start using cash again, that may change."
Can you perhaps tell me how things have changed in the last couple of years?
Minibanks charge a fee if they are not your bank, they have been doing that for a very long time. But you can get cash at many supermarkets.
The proportion of payments that are electronic has been very high for many years, cheques were effectively abolished thirty years ago and we have very rapid (seconds) and easy to use ways of transferring money between private individuals knowing only their mobile phone number (Vipps).
Nothing much has changed in the last couple of years except for the new law requiring the acceptance of cash and the issuing of a leaflet on resilience by the DSB to every household in the country which along with saying you should keep several days worth of water and food also says keep enough cash for several days use.
And this year has been declared a year of Total Defence.
"A biome (/ˈbaɪ.oʊm/ BY-ohm) is a distinct geographical region with specific climate, vegetation, animal life, and an ecosystem. It consists of a biological community that has formed in response to its physical environment and regional climate." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome
Because "completely" isn't read to include everything down to tardigrades and E.coli.
To start, here are examples of (seemingly knowledgeable) people using that phrase:
"The Atlantic lowland forest of Brazil comprises a completely separate biome from the Amazonian forests to the north and west, and is home to a rich array of endemic fauna and flora. Among over 200 endemic birds are at least ten endemic genera, including such spectacular species as the Seven-coloured Tanager (Tangara fastuosa)" - https://archive.org/details/atlasofbirdsdive0000unwi/mode/2u...
"Now called the pine-hemlock hardwood forest, or northern hardwoods, it had survived the axe, fire, and insects, and lay as an ecotone between deciduous forest to the south and coniferous forest to the north. Shelford considered it to be a third association of the transcontinental coniferous forest biome, while Clements viewed it as a completely separate biome." - https://archive.org/details/pioneerecologist00crok/mode/2up?...
It start "Plant ecologists have regarded an essentially complete difference in climax dominants as the basis for the recognition of the major plant communities called plant formations." then mentions how that "usually includes some wide-ranging species among the dominants" ending "It is the purpose of this paper to show that it is not always feasible to make sole use of the criteria of plant dominants and maintain the integrity of some of the impor-". (For a summary of the paper, go back to https://archive.org/details/pioneerecologist00crok/mode/2up?... .)
So "completely separate" should be read to mean something more like "essentially complete difference", and not "absolute difference".
The summary is "Al Gore predicted in 1992 that in the next few decades, Florida would lose 60 percent of its population due to climate change."
The text shows an image from the WSJ with two quotes put together: "in the next few decades," "up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated."
What's missing is the text in between, or even a ellipsis.
"About 10 million residents of Bangladesh will lose their homes and means of sustenance because of the rising sea level, due to global warming, in the next few decades. Where will they go? Whom will they displace? What political conflicts will result? That is only one example. According to some predictions, not long after Bangladesh feels the impact, up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated. Where will they go?"
"Few" is one of those words that doesn't have a precise meaning, but 3-5 is quite reasonable. (It can also be larger[1].) 1993 + "3-5 decades" is 2023-2043, or possibly 2023-2052 if you include the full decade.
That's the time for Bangladesh. Florida's predicted relocation time is "not long after" that.
Thus, the summary quote is wrong as Gore did not say that "in the next few decades, Florida would lose 60 percent of its population due to climate change." It would be "not long after a few decades", which would make it be "several decades" - another imprecise term.
In any case, 2026 is only the barest beginning of the possible range, so the response shouldn't be "it hasn't come true so we can discard the idea" but to look at the predictions of sea level rise, changes in building policy, etc. to update the evaluation.
Nor should it be to remove relevant context from the disputed claim.
[1] "Few" is also used in a comparative sense, so Job 14:1 has “How frail is man, how few his days, how full of trouble!” uses "few" for something measured in the tens-of-thousands of days.
> The simplest explanation of why Alice will never get to 20 is this: the multiplication table traditionally stops with the twelves, so if you continue this nonsense progression—4 times 5 is 12, 4 times 6 is 13, 4 times 7 is 14, and so on—you end with 4 times 12 (the highest she can go) is 19—just one short of 20.
Gardner then writes "A. L. Taylor, in his book The White Knight, advances an interesting but more complicated theory" which is the changing base theory.
He ends with "For another interpretation of Alice's arithmetic, see "Multiplication in Changing Bases: A Note on Lewis Carroll," by Francine Abeles, in Historia Mathematica, Vol. 3 (1976), pages 183-84."
> "Grin like a Cheshire cat" was a common phrase in Carroll's day. Its origin is not known. The two leading theories are: (1) A sign painter in Cheshire (the county, by the way, where Carroll was born) painted grinning lions on the signboards of inns in the area (see Notes and Queries, No. 130, April 24, 1852, page 402); (2) Cheshire cheeses were at one time molded in the shape of a grinning cat (see Notes and Queries, No. 55, Nov. 16, 1850, page 412). "This has a peculiar Carrollian appeal," writes Dr. Phyllis Greenaere in her psychoanalytic study of Carroll, "as it provokes the fantasy that the cheesy cat may eat the rat that would eat the cheese." The Cheshire Cat is not in the original manuscript, Alice's Adventures Under Ground.
It continues with a full page on the topic, none of which are anything to do with math jokes.
We do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitite#Similar_materials says "Occasionally, the name trinitite is broadly applied to all glassy residues of nuclear bomb testing, not just the Trinity test" and lists hiroshimaite and kharitonchiki as similar glassy residues from Hiroshima and the Semipalatinsk Test Site, respectively.
Adding to this, I seem to recall that the specific geological/chemical conditions on the site is consequential for the sorts of glass produced. So presumably, Hiroshmiaite and Trinitite would actually be physically distinct as a material.
As I recall, research on meteorite impacts use the similarly formed Impactite to deduce various things about ancient impact sites. As an aside, I think they also do really elaborate calculations of force and angle of impact based on surveying the spread pattern and distribution of these little glass chunks.
Probably no Hiroshiaite as the explosion there was at higher altitude of 580 meters. Trinity explosion was close to the desert surface (30 meters). The radius of trinite formation was about 300 meters around the tower so none would have formed at Hiroshima.
I think it's pretty surprising for you to make that "Probably no Hiroshiaite" claim given that the linked-to Wikipedia article says it exists: "Following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, it was discovered in 2016 that between 0.6% and 2.5% of sand on local beaches was fused glass spheres formed during the bombing." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitite#Similar_materials
"A complex association of millimeter-sized, aerodynamically-shaped debris, including glass spherules, glass filaments, and composite-fused melt particles was recovered from beach sands on the shores of the Motoujina Peninsula in Hiroshima Bay, Japan. .... This study interprets the large volumes of fallout debris generated under extreme temperature conditions as products of the Hiroshima August 6th, 1945 atomic bomb aerial detonation. The chemical composition of the melt debris provides clues to their origin, particularly with regard to city building materials. This study is the first published record and description of fallout resulting from the destruction of an urban environment by atomic bombing."
"Our analyses support the hypothesis that the Hiroshima glasses are gas phase condensates formed in the nuclear fireball ... The Hiroshima bomb exploded 580 m above the city so that no crater was formed at the surface. The plasma (called fireball) formed at this altitude, had a maximal radius of 230 m (Imanaka,2011; Malik, 1985). ... The maximum temperature on the ground during the explosion was estimated to be 6287°C (thermal wave) (Radvanec, 2009) while the maximum pressure reached 35 tons per m² (3171 bar) at the arrival of the blast wave at the hypocenter, 1.3s after the explosion (Radvanec, 2009). Under such conditions, the city materials were injected as vapor or melted debris in the air 0.5 to 2 seconds after the explosion and vaporized by the high temperatures prevailing in the plasma (4000-2500 K) at that time (Adams et al., 1960, Supplementary S6)."
I think what your analysis didn't consider was the observation that "The fact that no crater was produced by the explosion (Glasstone & Dolan, 1977) reinforce the idea that the primary source of Hiroshima glasses is the city materials and not the soils or the basement rocks below the city."
How often in the US does a "bunch of friends drive over to barbecue and watch TV on your giant screen"?
My experience is that it's rare. Even the math doesn't work out that well -- if "a bunch" is 6 friends, then are those visits rotating around to each person's house? Or are 5/6ths of those friends failing to achieve that dream?
My experience is also that barbecue events are for socializing outdoors, while watching TV is indoors, but that may be just me.
> Here’s a map of the net migration difference between some European countries and the U.S., as a percent of each country’s population, for 2024
Ohh, interesting choice of date. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2026/... says there's been a big drop in Net International Migration (NIM) between 2024 ("Peaked at 2.7 million in 2024") and the expected NIM in 2026. "Currently, the estimates of NIM are trending toward negative net migration. If those trends continue, it would be the first time the United States has seen net negative migration in more than 50 years.
> There aren’t any European countries where significantly more people move from America to Europe than the reverse
Quoting from https://www.irishpost.com/news/net-migration-to-ireland-drop... (August 27, 2025) "According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO), 9,600 people relocated from the United States, up from 4,900 the previous year, a rise of more than 95%." while "More than 6000 people moved from Ireland to the US in the last year, which is a rise of 22%."
> "Nothing was saved except clothing and bedding. When Mrs. Wood saw that the house could not be saved, she put some sheets on the floor, threw all the clothes from bureau drawers and closets on the sheets, tied them up, and threw the out the window."
> "Well, wasn't that smart?" said Jessie. "That costs the most of anything, doesn't it, Aunt Jane? The family clothes and bedding?"
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