So: while running in circles might be a bit of an exaggeration, it seems (which maps to my experience) these things are much less AGI than reporting might suggest...
that might indeed be a problem for all the pulp-producing labrats of STEM in southern europe and the third world.
However I think this area has so much decoupled from industry and solid research institutions that they might not notice at all (beyond their use of AI-generated slop to augment the slop they already produce)...
300 to 4000 lines of "production like" (whatever that is) cobol code which is easily ported to a non-mainframe env. Our's sometimes uses assembler in its innards, so good luck with real legacy code spanning a dozen files and 50k loc...
I recently threw in (want to check those intelligence metrics!) some real production code into a non-agentic system (just to get a feel how things perform without a custom harness) and results where ... interesting. The particular program uses some preprocessor no LLM we have access to (newest was GPT 5.5) has any clue about - so they confabulate what it could do (Gemini 2.5 didn't even notice there was a preprocessor...). This is expected of course but it somehow seems the problem of this technology that unless you feed it masses of data or mechanically break up the tasks in rote subunits, it just doesn't do anything sensible still...
Yeah that’s why they delegated code gen to deterministic tooling and saved the model for input fuzzing - let it fight the data instead of legacy syntax
I have not researched this, but I see some 4 to 10 year olds in the family being on the phone every time I see them. Usually they stream "brainrot" on youtube on the tablet while they play roblox on the phone. From time to time there are ads.
In school they still perform ok for what is required there today, but from what happens when you say "oh, wifi doesn't work today in our place" I would argue they behave like addicts... It might be a fun addiction insofar as mental problems are usually not the cause but possibly the result if this runs for years on end.
My pet theory is that these kids will graduate to online-gambling around 12-14 because that's exactly the kind of gameplay they prefer on roblox currently. Even when I was 16 there was a noticable share of classmates gambling online - and this was pre-facebook.
Probably the best way forward would be to make KYC mandatory for large, data-selling public fora like we do with banks. Noone complains there and noone is forced to use platforms.
If you don't want to do KYC (such as on hn or a model train forum) you are liable for any criminal activity you enable (such as pedophiles using your private messages or whatever...).
there is a reason the gambling regulations are being eased up on and polymarket is so popular. Gambling addiction is notably harder to get rid of the earlier you acquire it.
are they? It's all the same company with the brand today just used for appealing to localized government funding (because we can just shutter that factory you have there!). In the small marketshare electric future these multiple brands will be useful to kill one by one without tarnishing the remaining brands too much.
You might be confusing Renault with Peugeot, that is indeed Citroën with a lion (or is Citröen a Peugeot with two angles?). Anyways, Renault is actually half-merged with Nissan and Mitsubishi.
- Malta is selling passports and harboring criminals who kill journalists (we all remember Daphne Caruana Galizia don't we?).
- buying votes/parties there would get you 10 times the MEPs you get in Germany or France.
- their mayors can veto EU policy... This EU-thing really is democratic!
so: I doubt anyone has to care about that pesky GDPR if they buy the government of Malta.
I saw those in use 20 years ago, when physics-class visited the local nuclear-science research center. It felt like Sci-Fi then and I have not yet seen this replicated anywhere else sadly...
So: while running in circles might be a bit of an exaggeration, it seems (which maps to my experience) these things are much less AGI than reporting might suggest...
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