I'm not sure how much that will pay off - it also gives China legitimacy in starting to much more overtly pursue their own interests through force. I definitely wouldn't be surprised if we saw something happening very quickly.
If you need a contractor to ship a macOS / iOS app, upgrade an older Objective-C/legacy UIKit project or integrate local AI (LLMs or Image gen) using MLX or CoreML into a real product, I’m a good fit.
This is a big use-case for me that I've gotten used to while using Open-WebUI. Being able to easily branch conversations, edit messages with information from a few messages downstream to 'compact' the chat history, completely branch convos. They have a tree view, too, which works pretty well (the main annoyances are interface jumps that never seem to line up properly).
This feature has spoiled me from using most other interfaces, because it is so wasteful from a context perspective to need to continually update upstream assumptions while the context window stretches farther away from the initial goal of the conversation.
I think a lot more could be done with this, too - some sort of 'auto-compact' feature in chat interfaces which is able to pull the important parts of the last n messages verbatim, without 'summarizing' (since often in a chat-based interface, the specific user voicing is important and lost when summarized).
The Pitt, The Penguin, Hacks, White Lotus, The Rehearsal, The Last of Us, The Chair Company--all shows off the top of my head that debuted or aired a season in 2025. A few of which won several Emmys, and all of which are critically acclaimed.
China is actively supporting the Russian army. They don't want Russia to lose.
The Russians won't stop in Ukraine.
It can't be more clear than this which country is a greater danger to the West.
> Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat that Beijing can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine as this could allow the United States to turn its full attention to China, an official briefed on the talks said, contradicting Beijing’s public position of neutrality in the conflict. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/04/europe/china-ukraine-eu-w...
> China is actively supporting the Russian army. They don't want Russia to lose. It can't be more clear than this which country is a greater danger to the West.
The Trump administration is overtly cutting support from Ukraine while pressuring Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. At the same time it's also pushing for sanctions to be lifted and economic times with Russia to be normalized. Trump went to the extreme of pressuring the G7 to admit back Russia.
What do you call that?
China supporting glorified golf cars doesn't hold a candle to the damage that the US has done to peace in Europe and the collective west's interests in security.
The US is in fact increasing support right now. Trump lost his patience with Putin.
You also underestimate the Chinese support. The war would have been over in 2023 if it wasn't for China.
> The discovery of a Russian decoy drone made up entirely of Chinese parts is another indication of the growing wartime relationship between Moscow and Beijing.
...
Beyond components, China appears to have provided Russia with at least some complete weapons systems. In May, we reported that Russia was using a new Chinese laser system to shoot down Ukrainian drones. https://www.twz.com/news-features/new-russian-drone-made-com...
For standard credit cards in EU it’s mandatory to pay the full balance every month. And it doesn’t cost anything, there are no interest rates. Not sure how much banks profit on it, if there’s even a profit.
I think most banks only offer if because customers needed credit cards to order stuff on the internet. Before that they were very rare here.
Edit:
I meant the credit is free but I pay like € 2 / month to have my card. So maybe that’s their profit.
> In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice.
We have plenty of oil and gas (normal and fracking). We have just convinced ourselves its better to leave it in the ground and pay foreign countries instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The energy crisis in Europe is a self-inflicted wound.
Gas price are still twice as high as four years ago. Whole industries are collapsing because electricity is too expensive for factories. Personally, just heating my home has become very expensive.
Europe is deindustrializing. Especially Germany, the EU economic engine, has been hit hard. So yes, the word crisis is used correctly here.
> For instance, BASF, a global chemical giant, recently announced plans to downsize its operations in the country with the reason being unbearably high energy prices in Germany. Now, the company is shifting its focus toward expanding its production efforts in China and the U.S. to access more stable energy costs. Germany’s prime power- the Automotive industry, is also struggling due to immense pressure caused by rising energy costs. A recent study revealed that energy costs for Germany’s automotive sector increased by 20% in 2022 and a similar trend followed in 2023.
https://ceinterim.com/deindustrialization-in-germany/
Ok, I'll bite, name 3 collapsing industries - on the verge of extinction due to rising energy prices - that could be fixed by building highly-polluting power generators ASAP?
So no one makes chemicals anymore? Of course they do, but like all industries they're subject to market and government forces and what made sense for an industry in one era does not mean that's true for all of eternity. No one ever said that a 1,000 generations of Dutch chemical engineers are entitled to chemical engineering jobs, let alone near their homes.
Lol, if you don’t understand we need jobs in Europe this debate has no point.
Wow…
> The European Union’s chemical sector is facing a series of headwinds that the European Chemical Industry Council, Cefic, says are pushing the industry to ‘breaking point.’
A joint study by Cefic and Advancy: The Competitiveness of the European Chemical Industry, paints a bleak picture, with the report saying that between 2023 and 2024 announcements were made indicating that 11 million tonnes of production capacity would be closed across 21 major European production sites
To be fair, keeping your own resources in the ground as long as possible is often the strategically right move if your time horizon is long enough. It means they will still be there when other world regions run out.
How up-to-date are you on industrial battery installations? I ask because we're literally in the midst of an energy storage revolution, with battery capacity exploding massively in the last 2-3 years and no slowdown on the horizon. You may be arguing from a point of completely outdated information.
And in those extreme circumstances batteries reduce the gas capacity needed, by letting them run efficiently and the batteries handle the peaks just like a hybrid car. They also let you maximise transmission line usage for imports from nearby countries.
The reason why we have been using fossil gas as peakers for decades are because they are about the cheapest we can build while offering acceptable running costs.
We also have an entire fleet of them, which lives are easily extended as long as we add for example capacity markets to ensure their survival as renewables push down their capacity factors.
If you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to make all your vehicles electric, you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to cover a week or two of not just dunkelflaute but even "why is the moon hovering directly between us and the sun, isn't it supposed to be moving?", which is darker than that.
