>Communism didn't look great next to capitalism (east europe vs. west europe) but those people were also happy
Which people were happy? Nobody hates communism more than Eastern Europeans. I don't know a single elderly (i.e. lived through communism) person in my country who doesn't hate communism. I think you have a rose tinted view of how communism worked out on Europe.
Let's say EU and US taxes AI tokens. India doesn't, so almost all prompting done by international companies now is outsourced to India, and still not taxed.
Or do you tax AI companies and tax tokens "at source"? Then, obviously, they either lose competition with foreign (let's say Chinese) companies that do the same but are not taxed, or more likely all AI companies move out of EU and US.
My understanding is that you say that taxing things denominated in a foreign currency is difficult? But why? I already pay taxes on my capital gains denominated in a foreign currency (for example dollars). There are official government exchange rates for tax reasons, published daily. I don't see anything to hand wave here, because there's no problem.
I guess to each their own. I enjoyed the style and even laughed a bit at the part you highlighted (writer humorously pointed out the obvious fact that 4th of July is not something UK celebrates).
I think you look for AI too hard. Perhaps that kind of dry humour is not too your liking, or you're not used to this style? FWIW i lived in the UK a bit, so I'm rather familiar with the way locals speak casually.
Btw. you can check his pre-chatgpt writing style, for example [1]. Looks similar enough to me!
To be clear, I found the dry quip about the 4th of July amusing, and specifically pointed out that I thought that specific parenthesised line was inserted by the author. I don't think a British author would naturally reach for "4th of July" as their frame of reference for bombastic celebrations in the first place, though. My point was that seemed to be something the LLM generated and the author riffed off of.
I'm not about to go into a deep dive analysing the author's past writing style, but there is a clear difference just from glancing at the headers alone. Looking at older articles, such as this "featured" one[1], they all share a commonality: the headers are boring. Matter-of-fact. Plainly descriptive. "The reasoning". "The background". "The research".
Then a sudden spate of activity in late 2025 after years of not having written anything other than yearly recaps, and all of the new posts share a different commonality: the headers are 'creative'. "The Childhood Trauma". "Teaching a circle to care". "47 seconds: a villain origin story"[2]. "The uncomfortable engineering truth".
It is quite a noticeable shift to go from always writing useful headers that clearly communicate the purpose of the following text, to always writing clickbait headers that try to hook the reader's emotional attention.
Fair. I understand where you're coming from and you have some good observations. Investigating this in depth is probably not a good use of our time, but who knows, maybe the text is indeed AI assisted? In this case kudos to you for being having a sharp eye and being vigilant. This thought didn't even cross my head.
>He expected them to speak the barest minimum of English, so speakers of Japanese, Bantu, Hindi, and Algonquin do not have to learn more than one foreign language when vacationing abroad.
Why are speakers of Japanese, Banty, Hindi and Algonquin vacationing abroad a problem of locals who just want to live their own life?... Most people do learn English for one reason or another, but "entertaining tourists" is not one of them.
Since I'm also from the region and familiar with local issues: are you sure this was not the good old anti-immigrant hostility? Germany has (or had) a lot of immigration from Poland and some locals could think you're an immigrant who refuses to learn the language. In my country I sometimes see similar behavior targeted specifically at Ukrainian speakers.
FWIW, I only ever experienced the discussed issue (locals who clearly understand English but refuse to acknowledge me or respond in their language) in France. I really suspect it's specific to french speakers. They uniquely feel that their language was lingua franca and lost the status to English.
Could also be anti-immigration sentiment, because I'm from the US, but I traveled to Germany a few years before the pandemic and while there was only ever one German person whom ever gave me crap about English, there was indeed one and it was a very inconvenient person to take such a harsh stance on. It was in a little airport (which, if it matters, was very close to france) that we were taking to leave Germany and head down toward Italy. The person looking over the bins for carryons was herding people through and she pointed at me and said something I didn't understand in German. So I guessed and pointed at a thing or two, and when she kept saying "no", I finally gave the ol' "es tut mir leid, mein Deutsch ist schlecht. Sprechen sie englisch?", to which she replied slowly and aggressively: "noooo. sprichst du deutsch?"
Which... is certainly understandable! I'm sure she sees a lot of tourism and tourists. But for a neurotic person, being singled out as someone holding up the line by someone who is ostensibly there to help things move faster, because I didn't know a language that I expressly said I didn't know and apologized for, was quite jarring. Up until that point, every single person I met with talked to me like I had a second head that they were generally aware of but didn't care about while they tried to be as polite as possible about not bringing it up. It was a kind of clipped politeness that I have been told is just "german". Nobody cares to be friendly, everyone just wants to exchange only the information needed and, while they do so, they would be as happy and pleasant as a person could be. But as soon as the information had been exchanged, they were right back to bewildered disinterest ("why are you still talking to me? we've finished.", while smiling and nodding).
Anyway, whatever it was that she was trying to tell me, the message never got through. When I answered "no" to her question, she just moved me on through. So maybe she was trying to be polite and I showed my ass or something. Or maybe she was just trying to make a joke and then moved past it when there was no way to make me get it. Whatever the case, I left with the distinct feeling that the author described about that French street. "some people here, sometimes, are going to be very uncharitable about your lack of cultural integration. beware of that." Which, on the one hand is pretty obvious; people are just people all over. But on the other hand, it's probably something most cultures would aspire to minimize.
That's a nice story, but I think restricting yourself to exactly one teaching methods is needlessly limited.
Yes, you probably need a proper textbook and (ideally) a teacher to learn grammar and the language rules. This is hard work, but IMO gamified apps make users a huge disservice by handwaving this and hoping the user magically figures it all out. But, like the author found out, grammar alone won't make you fluent.
I'm personally very fond of flashcards (Anki). Yes, memorizing words is just a part of language learning, but it's important and FSRS is extremely good at it. Way better than repeatedly reading a textbook.
I personally hate duolingo for many reasons (it doesn't work for me), but some of my friends use it. This touches another important thing: regularity. Gamified apps and flashcards make it easy to form a habit. You can complete your daily lesson in a bus. And they are (more) fun. Even ineffective learning method is better than nothing.
Finally, ymmv and there's no one size fits all. I got pretty good (fluent and communicative) by in Russian by initially just studying flashcards (followed by reading and listening - another very important component) - because grammar is similar to my native (Slavic) language and I could, actually, figure out most of it. Textbooks came much later. It was not as easy with German...
PS. worth noting that the author explicitly says that this app is meant to teach you just the very basics and numerals, not for language learning
Does it even work with openssh example? Pwning the parser progress will let attacker spoof arbitrary communication, which in case of SSH lets them execute arbitrary commands. Or is there a smart way to work around that?
Which people were happy? Nobody hates communism more than Eastern Europeans. I don't know a single elderly (i.e. lived through communism) person in my country who doesn't hate communism. I think you have a rose tinted view of how communism worked out on Europe.
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