The EU's bank count per capita is tiny compared to the US. Their offers are never competitive if you compare to the US banks (e.g. interest rates, apps that actually work, customer service, etc). They lack competition due to over-regulation, which, if you understand the history of corruption within banking in europe, should not imply good regulation.
Regulating big tech is good. Kill gatekeeping platforms and engagement-driven newsfeeds that are tearing us apart. I wish they could do that. Big tech competition with banking, on the other hand, would be welcome.
It's too bad, too, because overall the EU in most places has a history of better representing their citizens. I wish that mechanism was more functional.
My experience is living in 3 EU countries as an American - the banks are similarly terrible and entrenched in each.
The EU has recently reduced fees for one of the biggest instant payment systems of the world (SCT inst reaches the Eurozone's 350M residents). Compare the quality of that to a wire or to a ACH transfer.
EU is also ahead with security. PSD2's requirements go further than US requirements, and they are also ahead in the magnetic swipe card phaseout.
Wise and Revolut, two companies which brought a lot of innovation to international money transfer, were founded in the EU as well (since 2020 not EU companies any more).
Of course, all of this doesn't mean that the average EU bank doesn't suck. But I heard worse of the US.
Swipe? I don't recall a time when I needed to swipe in US in the last few years. Pretty much tap, tap, tap, tap. Actually you cannot swipe a card in US that has a chip, and probably 99% of cards have chips.
>Compare the quality of that to a wire or to a ACH transfer.
Zelle? Just a qr code or a phone number? And it's free?
>Wise and Revolut
No clue. What's so special that I don't have with Chase?
>EU is also ahead with security
Um isn't that useless? As more scams are via social engineering.
> Swipe? I don't recall a time when I needed to swipe in US in the last few years.
I do, earlier this year visiting the USA. The readers on pumps at two different gas stations.
But the EU started phasing out reading magnetic strips twenty years ago, well before the USA had even started issuing EMV chip cards.
> Zelle?
Zelle is only for person-to-person transfers, Europe has had good person-to-business, business-to-person and business-to-business transfers for decades.
> ...
The point wasn't that the USA didn't have these things, but that Europe had them earlier (sometimes much earlier), so the banking system led to this innovation.
Well you found one, and I can tell you about time when in EU that a place took a hard print of my card in the last 5 years! Didn't even know that card imprinters still exists.
Zelle is not just person to person, it's just a transfer. You can pay businesses, people and even transfer to yourself. Zero fees.
Europe is a big continent and I can easily find a place that is way more backwards ;)
Also 2 letters from EMV stands for 2 American companies :).
Monzo was also founded in the EU, in the UK specifically when they were still in the EU.
> The EU has recently reduced fees for one of the biggest instant payment systems of the world (SCT inst reaches the Eurozone's 350M residents).
But that was done by regulation, wasn't it? Would have been nicer to see that come as a result of competition.
> Of course, all of this doesn't mean that the average EU bank doesn't suck. But I heard worse of the US.
I don't know about the average. But I can tell you that quality varies a lot. I was generally OK with German banks (having grown up there), but UK banks before Monzo (and Revolut, Wise etc) used to be the scum of the earth. Just like their supermarkets used to feel openly hostile to me as a customer before Aldi and Lidl showed up and shook up the market.
Yes, Tesco and friends regularly get told off by the regulator before, but nothing changed until competition forced their hands, and gave customers something they preferred.
> But that was done by regulation, wasn't it? Would have been nicer to see that come as a result of competition.
Bill Gurly has been crying for years now about how US banks have been bocking/not-participating in equivalent services in US(Fed Now) and for good business reasons for them.
A well functioning market does need regulations. Not everything can be magically fixed by "competition"
> A well functioning market does need regulations. Not everything can be magically fixed by "competition"
Ideally, you can set up your regulations so that competition has more bite.
Much of the time, you can remove special purpose regulations for a specific sector, and can get by with just the generics: enforcing contracts, punishing fraud, etc.
Haha, historically Americans over-regulated their banking system, and got rewarded with frequent banking crises in return. (And America was the only major economy with that problem.)
Eg until a few decades ago many American states banned banks from having more than one branch.
See also the big struggles Walmart had in trying to become a bank; and conversely see how US banks are (or at least were) banned from serving their customers coffee..
Yeah seriously doubting you really lived in the EU instead of just shitposting as another American patriot who has to declare that everything is better in the US. Because I’m Dutch and banks here are fine. I never even have to think about my bank because it just works.
Also no insane fees for going into the red, or having to pay to get my own money and all that fun stuff that American banks seem to love.
I'm surprised by the contraversy of my comment. Maybe I should have been clearer.
The banking /system/ in europe is superiour. It's crazy that the US isn't part of the IBAN system. ACHs suck, etc.
Revolut and Transferwise help a lot with country level bank shortcomings. But they're not really the same as those banks. And they're exactly two mega companies. In Portugal, there is MBWay, and in Denmark there was Visa Electron (might have changed). These payment systems are used everywhere here due to their low fee at the exclusion of other payment systems. I appreciate the low fees to the vendor but it means that Revolut and transferwise are not an every day banking solution here.
When I lived in Denmark, I could not get a visa electron card despite being a resident because I didn't have credit in the EU. This made me use cash for everything as local businesses did not take normal bank cards / credit cards.
In Portugal, banks charge to keep your money in them without offering interest. As an American, managing interest payments from a non-domestic bank is a tax nightmare so I wouldn't want it anyway. But it's notable that they don't have to compete here at all. It was the same, as I remember, in the other EU countries I was in. In contrast, US banks can be found offering competitive interest rates though brokerages are a better option, still.
My point was not some kind of America versus EU nonsense that this seems to have attracted. It's that banks had an outsized influence on politics in the EU.
If you look at the distribution of market cap of industries in the EU versus the US, you'll note that the financial industry in Europe is much larger as a percentage. Step back and think about what that represents.
The US economy has 14% of public economy in financials vs 25% in the EU:
A decline in business counts is not good. It's not good that the same trend for other business types is happening in the US, either. Western governments are now favoring large businesses that hold political capital at the expense of the smaller businesses. This isn't good no matter the industry.
We should all want our businesses and governments to improve. To do that, we must first understand deeply the problems.
I recently went down a rabbit hole on how researchers make mice depressed so they can test antidepressants on them. The short answer is they disrupt the mouse's environment in ways that are unpredictable and uncontrollable. It's a standard protocol. We know that this causes depression.
The culture of products not under the control of the customer does the same thing. A culture that sees this as normal is a depressed culture.
To test whether the mice are depressed, researchers give them something rewarding that requires a little effort to get (e.g., sugary water vs. plain water).
The depressed mice give up. They are apathetic.
I imagine the mice believe that there is no way to change things. That might be true for the mice but it's not true for us.
I think they'd find that to be an engaging task, and they'd get a great deal of satisfaction once they had sorted it out themselves.
If the mice had to deal with an intermittently disappearing cursor, and erratic hover behaviour on a 2 year old M2 Mac with the latest version of Sequoia .. that would probably illicit a very different response.
This is that depression the comment author is talking about. Apple fans will make it a point to lash out at Linux for not being a trillion dollar company supported product. Only depressed people lash out at the parts of the world where communities are trying their best.
Yeah. I had a laptop which is only 4 years old causing issues, took it to an Apple Store and they couldn't give a toss.
Everything was pushing me in the direction of buying a new laptop (with a small discount relative to the new price) and transferring everything across.
Agreed. If I weren't a computer nerd I probably wouldn't feel this way, but on Linux I feel more empowered. Even if there are more things to tweak/fix (which is not necessarily true these days), there IS probably a way to do it.
On MacOS, I more often have to give up and live with the annoyances.
Hardware is the the big exception. None of my PCs have had nearly as good build quality or battery life (on Linux, at least) as a Macbook. Maybe I should try a Framework.
> If I weren't a computer nerd I probably wouldn't feel this way, but on Linux I feel more empowered
There are also more footguns and rabbit holes. Overall, I am about as happy with Linux than with macOS (I use both daily), but I would not say that one is really more empowering than the other.
I like tinkering with KDE but it’s full of inconsistencies and instability in a way than even the worst Finder I’ve used was not (e.g. the whole desktop freezing when adding a widget to the desktop with a brand new install). Never mind the Russian roulette that is updating nVidia’s drivers.
On the other hand on macOS it’s easier to get to things that are actually productive.
> The short answer is they disrupt the mouse's environment in ways that are unpredictable and uncontrollable.
For example like will my wifi work today. Will my laptop still have any battery when I open it. Is today the day I surprise boot to tty and have to figure out what changed before I can start working.
I'll stick with the year-to-year unpredictability of apple over the day-to-day unpredictability of linux.
I dunno about that. Bleeding edge distros like Arch are infamous for breaking in random ways for those updating without paying attention and even distros that are considered more stable like Fedora and Ubuntu can from time to time break drivers or random smaller things. Definitely a YMMV sort of thing.
What are we going to do, then? Stop updating the OS and accumulate security issues? Stop doing anything that might possible touch an obscure config file somewhere in the bowels of the OS? It’s just unrealistic. "Do not update" cannot be a solution, it’s worse than the problem it is supposed to solve.
I’m responding to someone pretending their system randomly breaks in the morning as per magic. This simply doesn’t happen, period.
A Linux system stays the same unless you change it.
I also personally disagree that updates break system by the way. I have used Arch for more than a decade and has yet to experience one of this alleged frequent disturbance.
You said magic twice attacking me but I said it zero times. It's just not even a "good" bad read of what I did say.
What I'm talking about is changes because of updates, yes. Auto updates, or ones I did, or an update to specific software that caused a library update to break something else. All that counts as "me changing it" sure. Like I said I guess I need a system a little less prone to breaking because of my actions. I'm a programmer not a linux admin.
In practice, even with a rolling release distro I have not had things break on an update in a very long time (not at all on my current install, which is two years old), and with stable distros its literally been 20 years since something did not boot.
Any OS seems to have some bugs on updates.
I have heard battery life is better so not arguing about that, but its rarely that I will not wake my laptop for more than a day or two so its not a problem I experience either.
Having claude run the browser and then take a screenshot to debug gives similar results. It's why doing so is useless even though it would be so very nice if it worked.
Somewhere in the pipeline, they get lazy or ahead of themselves and just interpret what they want to in the picture they see. They want to interpet something working and complete.
I can imagine it's related the same issue with LLMs pretending tests work when they don't. They're RL trained for a goal state and sometimes pretending they reached the goal works.
It wasn't the wifi - just genAI doing what it does.
For tiny stuff, they are incredible auto-complete tools. But they are basically cover bands. They can do things that have been done to death already. They're good for what they're good for. I wouldn't have bet the farm on them.
We see that the fastest C# version is 6 times slower than the rust/c++ implementation.
But that's super deceiving because those versions use arena allocators. Doing the same (wrote this morning, actually) yielded a ~20% difference vs the fastest rust implementation.
This was with dotnet 9.
I think the model of using GC by default and managing the memory when it's important is the sanest approach. Requiring everything to be manually managed seems like a waste of time. C# is perfect for managing memory when you need it only.
I like rust syntactically. I think C# is too object-oriented. But with a very solid standard lib, practical design, good tools, and speed when you need it, C# remains super underrated.
> The fact that Rico Mariani was able to do a literal translation of the original C++ version into C# and blow the socks off it is a testament to the power and performance of managed code. It took me several days of painful optimization to catch up, including one optimization that introduced a bug, and then Rico simply had to do a little tweaking with one hand tied behind his back to regain the lead. Sure, I eventually won but look at the cost of that victory
I was actually surprised much of the material still exists - though the links don't work. Microsoft performs so much needless self-vandalism and I know some things I care about are gone.
Which just reminded that yeah, all the links I'd made to Raymond Chen's "The poor man's way of identifying memory leaks" no longer work. The Rust implementation is less than four years old, but its link (which worked) now does not. -sigh-
Tempting to go reconstruct that performance improvement "fight" in Rust too. Maybe another day.
It more or less tells you to unlearn all functional and OOP patterns for code that needs to be fast. Just use regular loops, structs and mutable variables.
Great angle to look at the releases of new software. I, too, thought we'd see a huge increase by now.
An alternative theory is that writing code was never the bottleneck of releasing software. The exploration of what it is you're building and getting it on a platform takes time and effort.
On the other hand, yeah, it's really easy to 'hold it wrong' with AI tools. Sometimes I have a great day and think I've figured it out. And then the next day, I realize that I'm still holding it wrong in some other way.
It is philosophically interesting that it is so hard to understand what makes building software products hard. And how to make it more productive. I can build software for 20 years and still feel like I don't really know.
When working on anything, I am asked: what is the smallest "hard" problem that this is solving ? ie, in software, value is added by solving "hard" problems - not by solving easy problems. Another way to put it is: hard problems are those that are not "templated" ie, solved elsewhere and only need to be copied.
LLMs are allowing the easy problems to be solved faster. But the real bottleneck is in solving the hard problems - and hard problems could be "hard" due to technical reasons, or business reasons or customer-adoption reasons. Hard problems are where value lies particularly when everyone has access to this tool, and everyone can equally well create or copy something using it.
In my experience, LLMs have not yet made a dent in solving the hard problems because, they dont really have a theory of how something really works. On the other hand, they have really helped boost productivity for tasks that are templated .
One of the rebuttals at the end of the post addresses this.
> That’s only true when you’re in a large corporation. When you’re by yourself, when you’re the stakeholder as well as the developer, you’re not in meetings. You're telling me that people aren’t shipping anything solo anymore? That people aren’t shipping new GitHub projects that scratch a personal itch? How does software creation not involve code?
So if you’re saying “LLMs do speed up coding, but that was never the bottleneck,” then the author is saying, “it’s sometimes the bottleneck. E.g., personal projects”
Also when vou create a product you can’t speed up the iterative process of seeing how users want it, fixing edge cases that you only realized later etc. these are the things that make a product good and why there’s that article about software taking 10 years to mature: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...
This is the answer. Programming was never the bottleneck in delivering software, whether free-range, organic, grass-fed human-generated code or AI-assisted.
AI is just a convenient excuse to lay off many rounds of over-hiring while also keeping the door open for potential investors to throw more money into the incinerator since the company is now “AI-first”.
Just like writing Lord of the Rings is actually not just about typing. You have to live a life, go to war, think deeply for years, research languages and cultures and then one day you type all that out
The point of the form is not in the filling. You shouldn't want to fill out a form.
If you could accomplish your task without the busywork, why wouldn’t you?
If you could interact with the world on your terms, rather than in the enshitified way monopoly platforms force on you, why wouldn't you?
And yeah, if you could consume content in the way you want, rather than the way it is presented, why wouldn’t you?
I understand the issue with AI gen slop, but slop content has been around since before AI - it's the incentives that are rotten.
Gen AI could be the greatest manipulator. It could also be our best defense against manipulation. That future is being shaped right now. It could go either way.
Let's push for the future where the individual has control of the way they interact.
you are getting this from the wrong perspective. I agree what you say here, but things you are listing here implies one thing;
"you didnt want to do this before, now with the help of ai, you dont have to. you just live your life as the way you want"
and your assumption is wrong. I still want to watch videos when it is generated by human. I still want to use internet, but when I know it is a human being at the other side. What I don't want is AI to destroy or make dirty the things I care, I enjoy doing. Yes, I want to live in my terms, and AI is not part of it, humans do.
> I understand the issue with AI gen slop, but slop content has been around since before AI - it's the incentives that are rotten.
Everyone says this, and it feels like a wholly unserious way to terminate the thinking and end the conversation.
Is the slop problem meaningfully worse now that we have AI? Yes: I’m coming across much more deceptively framed or fluffed up content than I used to. Is anyone proposing any (actually credible, not hand wavy microtransaction schemes) method of fixing the incentives? No.
So should we do some sort of First Amendment-violating ultramessy AI ban? I don’t want that to happen, but people are mad, and if we don’t come up with a serious and credible way to fix this, then people who care less than us will take it upon themselves to solve it, and the “First Amendment-violating ultramessy AI ban” is what we’re gonna get.
Oh come on, are you 12? Real life doesn’t have narrative arcs like that. This is a real problem. We’re not gonna just sit around and then enjoy a cathartic resolution.
(Maybe skip the mini-insults & make the site nicer for all?)
Anyway I think GP has a point worth considering. I have had a related hope in the context of journalism / chain of trust that was mentioned above: if anyone can produce a Faux News Channel tailored to their own quirks on demand, and can see everyone else doing the same, will it become common knowledge that Stuff Can Be Fake, and motivate people to explicitly decide about trust beyond "Trust Screens"?
A more detailed analogy would be if you owning the robots meant that all food is now packaged for robots instead of humans, increasing the personal labor cost of obtaining and preparing food as well as inflating the cost of dinnerware exponentially, while driving up my power bill to cover the cost of expanding infrastructure to power your robots.
In that case, I certainly am against you owning the robots and view your desire for them as a direct and immediate threat against my well being.
And therein is the problem - if your robots take up so many resources I can't have my dishwasher, is that your right? Is your right to being happy more important than others?
The problem of resource distribution is solved by money already.
If I can't pay for the robots, I am not getting them. And if I buy my robots and you only get a dishwasher then you can afford two nice vacations on top while I don't.
Let's say we have a finite amount of cheap water units between us. After exhausting those units, the price to acquire more goes up. Each our actions use up those units.
If restrictions on water use do not exist, you can quickly use up those units and, if you can easily afford more units, which makes sense as you have enough for robots, you are not concerned with using that cheap water up.
I can't even afford to "toil" with my dishwasher now.
When two entities control essentially the whole "market" for mobile OSes and associated app stores, and use their position to force their app stores on everyone, you no longer have a market. If we just forcibly split Google and Apple into smaller companies with separate app stores then maybe we could see what markets would do.
But the problem is that when everyone has gravitated to the two biggest app stores, there's no scope for market competition. The point is not just to have third-party app stores, it's to not have huge app stores that capture the whole user base.
"There is no market effect"? Why do the market effects disappear if some of the players don't play completely according to the desires of other players? Why couldn't it be that the optimum includes some amount of fee dodging?
You didn't answer my question. Why can't the optimum include some fee dodging? I agree that the app stores provide value to the developers, but it's also true that apps provide value to Google and Apple. If no one developed any apps, no one would use iOS or Android. Therefore it's possible that Google and Apple benefit more from an app that dodges fees but brings in users than from neither having the app nor those users.
They created a market and they are charging to be on the market. If you're saying "I want to be on the market but by my own rules" that's not a free market effect, it's breaking a contract.
If you say "fine, I'll go on another app store" then that is a free market in action - but good luck getting anyone to download your game.
Is there a reason why prompt injections in general are not solvable with task-specific layering?
Why can't the llm break up the tasks into smaller components. The higher level task llm context doesn't need to know what is beneath it in a freeform way - it can sanitize the return. This also has the side effect of limiting the context of the upper-level task management llm instance so they can stay focused.
I realize that the lower task could transmit to the higher task but they don't have to be written that way.
The argument against is that upper level llms not getting free form results could limit the llm but for a lot of tasks where security is important, it seems like it would be fine.
But it can be tricked into delegating incorrectly - for example, to the "allowed to use confidential information" agent instead of the "general purpose" agent
Regulating big tech is good. Kill gatekeeping platforms and engagement-driven newsfeeds that are tearing us apart. I wish they could do that. Big tech competition with banking, on the other hand, would be welcome.
It's too bad, too, because overall the EU in most places has a history of better representing their citizens. I wish that mechanism was more functional.
My experience is living in 3 EU countries as an American - the banks are similarly terrible and entrenched in each.
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