The EU has mildly outperformed the UK in overall economic growth by perhaps 1 percentage point over the last 5-6 years, i.e. ~7% vs ~6%. While of course both massively underperformed the USA.
It's hard to avoid concluding that the actual effects of Brexit have been smaller than this kind of analysis suggests, and while we squabble about such things our countries are missing opportunity after opportunity.
It's not all noise. Being able to live, work, or study anywhere in the Schengen zone has tremendous value. But it doesn't show up in GDP numbers. Brexit harmed the young people of UK, and they hate it.
Regarding the UK specifically, very few people chose to study in the EU when they could while many in the EU wanted to study in the UK. British unis are a huge asset to the country that also brings a lot of money from foreign students. Same for young people wanting to come work in UK/London.
Frankly, I think the "harm" done to young British people is vastly overblown and more symbolic than actual.
They voted 'remain' but, as said, what they feel and what the facts are are not the same thing. They might be pissed off that they cannot just go study in the EU anymore but the fact is that they didn't when they could...
Even today, they can obviously register to study abroad, just need a visa like everyone else, and considering the English unis' tuition fees they would actually save money by doing so but hardly anyone does because of the language barrier (same as when the UK was in the EU).
So IMHO it is a case of FOMO.
It's the EU students who have lost out because they must now pay hefty tuition fees (like £35k+ a year) if they wish to study in British unis so most of them have given up. British unis don't really care because they are in high demand globally, anyway.
Your response amounts to: ignore what the people affected value, only pay attention to a cherry picked number. Even the number you cherry picked is only valued by people who resent students coming to the UK and think they ought to pay steep tuition fee fees, which is just weird. Who benefits? Certainly not the students who would otherwise gain an international perspective.
I have not cherry-picked anything and I think assessing what people value has to look at how they act and behave, not just at what they say.
Not many UK students choose to study in Europe (I suspect in large part because of the language barrier). That was true when the UK was in the EU and it is true now when doing so is not super hard and would save them money. So maybe they valued the idea of being able to 'just go study in Europe' but they didn't do it much... Hence, minimal actual harm.
> Even the number you cherry picked is only valued by people who resent students coming to the UK and think they ought to pay steep tuition fee fees, which is just weird
I have no idea how you got that idea from my previous comment...
It is difficult to discuss anything related to Brexit.
I don't know about that. Canada also tracked the UK more closely than the US and it was not involved in Brexit[1]. The US just did really well during this time.
If you compare UK to its equivalent developed countries (France, Germany, Italy, etc. ), without including the developing EU economies of Eastern Europe, you get that the UK’s GDP growth has outperformed the rest since brexit happened.
Have you a source? Using IMF data for GDP per capita PPP, the UK's growth has underperformed that of France, Spain and Italy over the last 10 years. In 2016 the UK's per-capita GDP in international dollars exceeded that of France by approx. $1600, estimates for 2026 are showing France being ahead by about $1000.
Some effects of Brexit began right after the referendum (eg a business investment flattened since 2016).
2019–2020 are the worst years to start a comparison, because the UK uses a different accounting method to measure the government's contribution to GDP. So, COVID looks much worse in the UK and the recovery looks much better.
Business investment did not flatten after the referendum. Nothing happened after the referendum and the economy continued to grow, with unemployment falling to record lows.
Compare vs the prediction by guys like Portes, the author of the essay: "In the short term, we expect that a vote to leave would result in a significant economic downturn, with unemployment rising by up to 1.7 per cent"
People like the author have no credibility. When they say things like, "Most serious estimates now suggest that UK GDP is several percentage points below where it would otherwise have been" they don't address the fact that "serious" people previously made many failed predictions. Like always in academia, continuous failure is not considered disqualifying for the job.
Many of the UK's post-Brexit trade deals have been the previous EU one with a slight tweak. Even the much touted US beef deal was built on an EU scheme and was rather minimal at that. It's not surprising then that the EU and UK are similar. The lack of UK growth over the EU is a big indictment of Brexit from an economic perspective.
The UK has done alright and London has continued to do very well. Considering that there wasn't, and essentially still isn't, any plans on how to make the most (or anything...) of Brexit, that's telling, IMHO.
There is no making "the most" out of Brexit the same way there isn't a way to make "the most" out of sawing your own leg off. It was completely unforced self-mutilation. The fact they're still hobbling on is commendable, but it's still much worse than they would've been off otherwise.
You may call it self-harm, but I think we need to consider Britain's relatively pragmatic / less than enthusiastic membership of the EU. For a start, Britain has a completely different legal system to the rest of Europe (common law vs. civil law). That was bound to create tensions.
I don't see how you can make such a binary claim - UK vs "the rest of Europe". Your map shows 6 broad categories of legal systems in use across Europe. Even if you put the 5 non-common law systems into one bucket, it still wouldn't make the UK unique as Ireland operates under common law.
- At previous gig relocation of manufacturing to the UK stopped because it would be impossible to operate there due to severe delays in procurement and long delays in securing appropriate visas for employees. Manufacturing sent to different country. (for many projects I work on 1-2 days delivery is the expected norm. With 3-5 days for "slow" shipping)
- Stopped buying from UK companies due a) many UK companies no longer shipping to EU, b) long delays when ordering something from the UK.
Of course, this is what it looks like from my perspective. That doesn't represent the totality. But in my work (which spans a few different sectors), the UK sort of became a black hole that we avoid if we can. Find different locations and sources for products, move on.
Except for Germany, which of the major countries are you referring to? Show me numbers.
It has been 10 years. How long do you think this should take? 20 years? And how long before the lost decade (or perhaps decades) have been made up for and the UK goes net positive? 30 years? 50? (The area below the curve is important. You learned about integrals in school, right?).
Trust me: nobody I talk to is interested in doing business with UK companies or in the UK if they can avoid it. Which makes me curious: who are these companies that have seen a boost in foreign trade?
So... It's an interpreter (together with a virtual filesystem and some utilities) packaged into a program with a graphical display window? Still good for lots of interesting uses, I suppose, but surprising. Since it's introduced as a "virtual computer", I thought underneath the hood it would be emulating a machine. Then people, if they wanted, could tinker a level deeper than the scripting language, write an assembler etc.
You can run all the Office apps in a browser, and update documents that are on SharePoint live in collaboration with someone else. Maybe that's not earth-shattering, but it's quite a big change from huge separate Office legacy apps. It must have been a big effort decreed from the top. Given Microsoft leadership is obsessed with AI, you'd think they'd be pushing hard.
This is a fascinating post but I don't believe it reflects (most) human memory development, which has a pronounced forgetting phase called 'childhood amnesia'. When your kid starts to talk, it's startling what a two-year-old can remember and can tell you about. And it's kinda heartbreaking when they're 4-5 and you realise that those early memories have faded.
Note that your memories might not be accurate, as your brain may have skightly altered them over the years, over and over. There is generally no way for yourself to know (except for some external proof).
This is not just the case for early childhood memories, but for anything - the more time passes, the less accurate. It's even possible to have completely "made-up" memories, perceived as 100% real, e.g. through suggestive questioning in therapy.
Those applications seem pretty weak. In a similar timeframe I seem to recall possessing a standalone dictionary/crossword solver device, and a five-language translator/dictionary. Both of which were much more compact and presumably had small, solid-state data in ROM chips. The monochrome, text-first Data Discman software looks similar to the output of those basic devices.
I suspect the problem with the Data Discman was weak multimedia capabilities, compared to the what can fit on a CD-ROM, in either its API or what the hardware could push. If the software of the Data Discman had been more like Microsoft Encarta, it might have wowed people.
People are reacting negatively to the ads, but there's a bigger point. This is bearish as heck for AGI. If OpenAI were recursively improving their general-computer-using agent, who was going to be superhuman at every job, they wouldn't need to be messing around with things like this.
ChatGPT is a useful product, which they're monetising in a well-travelled internet company way. The bad news is you're going to have ads in your ChatGPT in 2030. The good news is you're still going to have a job in 2030.
I'm surprised this isn't being talked about more. Sure, one could favourably assume that OpenAI just needs a little ad-powered financial push to finally hit AGI and solve every single problem under the sun, but that'd be a reach. It seems more probable that their internal evaluation of their ETA to AGI diverges starkly from what they communicate externally.
Yes, it means they don't expect fast takeoff in the next year, but we already knew that.
Having revenue from their free users might can just be a way to make it more sustainable. And/Or make fundraising easier from investors (which has immediate benefit).
Seeing the message "you're reached your limit..." makes free users switch to other AI providers, and ads are a way to fund higher limits. Their prime competitor, Google, has ad income from users so has an advantage.
They don't need AGI to fire you or not make jobs you would have taken. All these pro ai devs on here talking about 10x productivity gains in their own work like management isn't looking at those claims and thinking about a 10x reduction in headcount.
Sure, but any competitor is looking at their competition maintaining level productivity w/ 10x headcount reductions and wondering "if I use AI and the staff I have without firing them, I can provide 10x the product as the idiot cutting off their own nose over there."
More product more problems. Can you get 10x the sales? If you can't then the headcount reduction looks pretty compelling. If you can get 10x the sales, why aren't you already scaling labor?
Increased productivity increases the value of work and the number of areas it is useful to apply it. Yes, if you are working for a non-growth firm with basically fixed sales, a productivity increase translates to a headcount decrease in that firm, but across the industry it means more jobs at higher pay, as shown by the whole history of productivity improvements in software development.
Increased productivity requires demand to make use of it. And if there was untapped demand on the table already, it would have been eaten already through labor gains even if productivity didn’t shift.
$20/month product with ads, you would have to be an exec to think thats a good idea. Can they even push enough ads to ever make profit? Like the best care scenario for openAi at this point is to declare bankruptcy.
That's a Netflix + Hulu subscription - with ads in both. Before streaming people regularly paid $50/mo (not adjusted for inflation) for cable TV with ads.
While it's easy to bemoan Google pushing ads into every corner of our digital lives, I think they arguably offered an unprecedented level of services relative to the number of ads, and we all got used to that.
Now whether OpenAI could ever push enough ads to make a profit: I have no idea! It's very interesting to see this race actually start.
Maybe it is more successful elsewhere, but over here the type of ads and repetition make me think more money is spent on ad infrastructure than is gained in revenue (eg. three ads in a show, all identical, all advertising the platform you are watching). I'm left with the impression that the actual reason is not to sell ads, but to annoy customers into paying for higher tiers. It is not that we have gotten used to ads, but our dislike is being weaponized.
Sometimes when I see my parents or other non-tech people using their phones I'm just aghast at what they put up with. We truly never left the Bonzi Buddy era of the 90s. Simple candy crush clones with banner ads on the top and bottom + interstitial ads every few minutes. Maybe throw in some gambling...
...or visit any given US newspaper or local TV station site without an ad blocker. Fans will spin, scrolling will stutter, and what little content there is will barely be visible through the videos about how chugging olive oil like jesus will give you abs like judas.
The combination of technical prowess and relative wealth of the average HN commenter means I bet we see 1/100th the ads of the average consumer. It's wild out there.
It's almost like LLMs represents a fairly useful but modest step forward, instead of a complete and utter paradigm shift that will up end society and put everyone out of a job.
I have all my photos back to my first digital camera in 2004. (Plus digital photos a few years further back - I used to use a service that developed and printed your film rolls and also delivered files on CD-ROM). The strategy of keep copying files to newer hardware remains undefeated.
Still, there are big gaps due to prevailing photo-taking habits. Unless you were seriously into photography, people took way fewer photos. Lots of posed pics of family and friends on special occasions, fewer of everyday life. I have like 2 pictures of my undergraduate projects.
I've read this book. It's definitely one of the more interesting and readable maths texts out there. I wasn't exactly sure I'd use the methods. Working as a mechanical engineer I probably go straight to numerical methods, or approximate things even more crudely and approximately than a mathematician's 'rough' work. Though "replace a complicated function with a rectangle" definitely resonated. Overall the impression was that it was full of great techniques for mathematicians and scientists puzzling out every bit of meaning they can from a situation whose true features aren't yet known.
That's kind of how I do maths, too. Working out the lengths of antenna feeders, for example, where a coil of cable is about 30cm across. One turn of that is about one metre, so a coil with ten turns is about ten metres. Roughly. Close enough. I can coil it up shorter but I can't coil it up longer.
If I'm doing really precise stuff, I'm either doing it on a computer already or it's something that's just going to have to be "adjusted" into place when it's done.
In high school my maths teacher said "You'll need to learn all this, you won't always have a calculator!"
My dude, I am walking around with a supercomputer the size of half a slice of bread in my pocket, that probably has a sizeable fraction of the total computing power available in the world when you told me that.
It turns out I don't need either of these things, I just need a good sense of "yeah that feels about right".
Try a gaming store that offers a guarantee? I don't know where you are, but here in the UK, second-hand stores such as Cash Converters are full of PS2s, fat and slim. Dedicated second-hand entertainment stores like CEX will test consoles before buying them off people, and claim to offer a several-months guarantee.
I think the claim is that plugging in the USB device is enough. If people needed to try running an executable from the device, some devices would still be compromised, but with lower frequency. I don't know exactly what happens. Automatically-triggered 'driver' install that is actually malware? Presenting as a keyboard and typing commands? Low-level cracks in the OS USB stack?
It feels to me more like OSes ought to be more secure. But USB devices are extremely convenient.
Still fits "It feels to me more like OSes ought to be more secure."
New USB-HID keyboard? Ask it to input a sequence shown on screen to gain trust.
Though USB could be better too; having unique gadget serial numbers would help a lot. Matching by vendor:product at least means the duplicate-gadget attack would need to be targeted.
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It's hard to avoid concluding that the actual effects of Brexit have been smaller than this kind of analysis suggests, and while we squabble about such things our countries are missing opportunity after opportunity.
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