It's a conversational black hole. Every meeting with tech folks converges on what they're doing with LLMs these days.
Our local tech meetup is implementing an "LLM swear jar" where the first person to mention an LLM in a conversation has to put a dollar in the jar. At least it makes the inevitable gravitational pull of the subject somewhat more interesting.
I agree, and I think the answer is that what used to be free, and is now infected with all sorts of enshittification, will be paid-for to be useful.
I pay for email via Fastmail, don't really have a spam problem. I think this addresses your point above, that to have an effective spam filter takes money, and free email doesn't generate money.
I pay for search via Kagi, don't see all those crappy Google Ads and actually get useful search.
I can see the other services (socials, messaging) moving to a paid model to solve the same issues.
All frameworks make some assumptions and therefore have some constraints. There was always a well-understood trade-off when using frameworks of speeding up early development but slowing down later development as the system encountered the constraints.
LLMs remove the time problem (to an extent) and have more problems around understanding the constraints imposed by the framework. The trade-off is less worth it now.
I have stopped using frameworks completely when writing systems with an LLM. I always tell it to use the base language with as few dependencies as possible.
The thing I'm seeing in people's use of LLMs is that there's still a strong contrast in technical usage of them.
I went to the local Claude Code meetup last week, and the contrast between the first two speakers really stuck with me.
The first was an old-skool tech guy who was using teams of agents to basically duplicate what an entire old-fashioned dev team would do.
The second was a "non-technical" (she must have said this at least 20 times in her talk) product manager using the LLM to prototype code and iterate on design choices.
Both are replacing dev humans with LLMs, but there's a massive difference in the technical complexity of their use. And I've heard this before talking to other people; non-technical folks are using it to write code and are amazed with how it's going, while technical folks are next-level using skills, agents, etc to replace whole teams.
I can see how this becomes a career in its own right; not writing code any more, but wrangling agents (or whatever comes after them). The same kind of mental aptitude that gets us good code can also be used to solve these problems, too.
France stopped Yahoo! from selling nazi memorabilia in France (because it's illegal to do that in France). This actually went through the US courts and they agreed, mostly [0].
It's kinda voluntary, though, there's no international agreement about this.
True, but the the UK has under 30% of the population of the US and less than 6% of the population of China.
If you compare per capita, it's a very different story. USA is around $93k, UK $61k and China $15k. So about 2/3 of the USA's and more than 4x China's. This was using my figures calculated from your table and the population figures I found elsewhere.
An actual source of GDP per capita [0] puts the USA at 9th globally, UK at 20th globally and China at 74th.
When you factor in that the US's GDP figures are quite skewed because there are lots of multinationals headquartered in the US. If you ignored just the Mag7, who all derive the majority of their income outside the USA, the USA would be significantly further down that GDP list.
Given that the nukes that the UK has is Trident, which is a US system that the UK cannot use without US cooperation [0], it seems entirely appropriate that the USA gets to decide if the UK has nukes.
[0] Yes, the UK can fire them without US approval, but the actual hardware is maintained and supported by the USA, and they have to be shipped to the USA regularly for maintenance. If the USA decided that the UK should not have nukes, there's not a lot the UK could do about it, the Trident system would have to be scrapped entirely and replaced with some completely different system. Which the UK doesn't really have the capability to do and it would cost a fortune to acquire that capability.
That's only the delivery method, the warheads are UK-designed and built.
So yes, if the US withdrew support then the existing nuclear program would be pretty fucked for a while, but the US couldn't unilaterally de-nuclearise the UK.
Our local tech meetup is implementing an "LLM swear jar" where the first person to mention an LLM in a conversation has to put a dollar in the jar. At least it makes the inevitable gravitational pull of the subject somewhat more interesting.
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