I'm assuming that China, with its industrial power and leadership position to produce a bunch of green energy components (like solar panels), is well-positioned to benefit from this.
I’m confused a bit, the premise they produce essentially all solar panels got an “indeed” with article-based assertions that exports doubled in one month, and it’s 14 GW more than the total amount installed in Spain ever, both very impressive. :)
Is there anything there about Chinese share?
I had the understanding they produce the vast vast majority as well, but that seems belied by exports doubling near instantaneously with demand? That made me wonder if there’s a lower cost floor producer(s) with, say, 10-20% of production that quickly got booked
> I'm assuming that China, with its industrial power and leadership position to produce a bunch of green energy components (like solar panels), is well-positioned to benefit from this.
My comment points out that, yes, China is wildly benefiting from this. They have 80%+ of the global solar PV market. They also have a deflationary macro environment encouraging persistent exports, along with 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity.
TLDR China has enough manufacturing capacity slack to support scaling exports at this scale immediately.
> The IEA has stated that China’s solar photovoltaic exports account for 80% of the global market. While there is a wide variety of products that make up the solar supply chain, panels, cells and wafers make up the majority of exports by trade value, and can be expressed in GW terms. Ember tracks these products to give a clearer picture of the global solar supply chain.
> China has invested over USD 50 billion in new PV supply capacity – ten times more than Europe − and created more than 300 000 manufacturing jobs across the solar PV value chain since 2011. Today, China’s share in all the manufacturing stages of solar panels (such as polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells and modules) exceeds 80%. This is more than double China’s share of global PV demand. In addition, the country is home to the world’s 10 top suppliers of solar PV manufacturing equipment. China has been instrumental in bringing down costs worldwide for solar PV, with multiple benefits for clean energy transitions. At the same time, the level of geographical concentration in global supply chains also creates potential challenges that governments need to address.
So is it bad that governments don't allow the processes and manufacturing to take place in their own countries, allowing independence and market dynamics and economies of scale to result in yet another order of magnitude cost reduction in solar? Or is it good that China doesn't do ecological protections, worker protections, or the things that western countries do, so we get to profit from the exploitation and pollution of their people and land?
It'd sure be awesome if regulations and regulators in Western countries weren't stupid. This whole game is just insane.
Let's just pawn it of on China, arbitrage the regulatory and human rights differential, and pretend the value is the same as if it's locally manufactured. Then we pocket the difference! Number go up!
Economists have this thing called "comparative advantage".
E.g. the US specialises in software; China in PV and batteries; EU in industrial equipment; the Middle East, oil; Australia IIRC is minerals; each trades what they're optimised for in exchange for what the others are optimised for, and are better off for it.
This works only so long as nobody is dominating a strategic sector, something that everyone needs but they are such a major player they get to set the prices. Monopolistic behaviour, but from a nation that cannot be sued for it rather than a corporation which can be ordered broken up.
Unfortunately, OPEC was already a thing even before Hormuz, the MAGA tariffs are confused and seem to be trying to make the US into an autarky but also keeping trade open so it can be taxed, and China seems to want to be dependent on nobody else while also keeping everyone else dependent on them, which currently leaves the EU and similar currently holding this particular hot potato and goodness only knows in which direction and on what schedule we'll yeet it elsewhere.
> What about Africa and the rest of Asia? Surely they merit mention more than Australia?
This isn't a term paper, I'm just giving illustrations from a handful of places to demonstrate how comparative advantage works.
And sure, other Asian nations are significant (India: Petroleum; Japan: Cars; South Korea: Integrated circuits; Taiwan's defence policy is making TSMC too important to be allowed to be invaded).
But Africa? No. The continent's exports are mostly dominated by South Africa, which is about one third of Australia's; even in aggregate, the entire continent's exports are only at about the level of Canada's.
> Also, Australia's number one export are Hollywood actors.
Trump cancelled a ton of green energy initiatives, why are we blaming the same regulators you imply are a good thing by pointing out that China "doesn't do ecological protections"?
The Chinese Politbureau is toasting themselves so hard, they're going to be drunk for the next decade.
It's a perfect storm for China, they're leading in EVs, battery production, renewables. While the US is busy undermining itself from all directions: as a military superpower, cultural, political, economical.
Europe is waking up slowly, but it is shackled by high internal energy prices, not enough labor, and low desire for innovation.
To me it seems it is a dictatorship with cult leadership again. Xi reminds me more of a modern version of Mao Zedong (without the focus on starving millions to death though). The main reason I see China having a dictator again is so that he can push ahead with his plans of invading Taiwan.
> Europe is waking up slowly
Where do you see that? I don't see it anywhere. They are sleeping.
Really? Europe looks primed to follow the US, just a few steps behind. They're electing their far right leaders and primed to start mass deportation, and are even ahead of us on cultural decline with respect to mass surveillance being used to actively police speech. What moves have they been making that you think indicate an upward trend? How are they going to recover from stagnation and demographic collapse?
Europe seems to be backtracking on some of their far-right flirtations after seeing the idiocracy in the US. Orban was voted out in Hungary after decades in power. Meloni in Italy is often described as far right but her party also strongly supports the EU, NATO and Ukraine.
France is quite likely to put the far-right in power next year, don't get your hopes up. I wish it wouldn't happen but a lot of people seem like they will not vote in a runoff between a far-right candidate and a left-wing (too left for the regular right) or right-wing (too right-wing for the left) candidate. It's absurd but not much one can do about it...
Mass deportation of who? The far right governments of most EU countries just play on basic fear tactics, none of them will ever do anything remotely close to your mass deportation fantasies. The most hardcore things they'll do is apply the laws which already exists regarding foreign people committing crimes and people illegally entering, and even that isn't given
Just look at the post brexit UK or Meloni's Italy...
Trump, at the end of the day, deported about as many people as Obama. He just made a huge song and dance about it. (And blew the military budget of Saudi Arabia while doing it to boot.)
> They're electing their far right leaders and primed to start mass deportation
No amounts of deportations meaningfully affect the demographics. They can at most slow down the new immigration. For all his bluster, Trump deported barely more people than the long-term average in 2025.
But more importantly, the "far right" in Europe is far less crazy than in the US, and they support re-establishing local industry.
> police speech
Europe has never had absolutely free speech like the US. It's by design.
I see, thanks for confirming that you're just an ignorant troll. Your post history confirmed that once more. It does make me curious. Where do you drink your Kool-Aid that gives you these "opinions"?
Well, they act clever. The more important question is why other countries are not as clever. I am getting tired of the "democracies are the better model", which I would agree with, but then China just pushes through with bulldozer sinomarxism turned mega-capitalism. And that's working. So what the heck are those democracies doing other than failing really hard right now?
I don't think a democracy is necessarily a recipe for utmost economic success, it's more about having the ability to replace the leadership if they are failing the people. Without that, it's only a matter of time until you're stuck with a leader who's terrible, even if you currently have a good one.
I think many democracies have been struggling though, to find a good leader, lots of democracies been replacing their leaders over and over in recent times. That's definitely something to worry about, why aren't good leaders applying to be on the ballot or being voted in?
Democracy works when the population is educated and rational. Its easier to get votes via populism that give short term benefit to certain groups but long term hurts education and makes people irrational.
Many Democracies have learnt that politics cannot be trusted in certain fields due to this reason many governments ensure interest rates are not controlled by politicians such as the Federal Reserve. Perhaps we should treat education as something that cannot be trusted by politicians and controlled by an impartial independent organization.
They have a benevolent dictatorship. 99% of dictatorships are utter and total disasters so the world is right to be wary. Pretty much all post monarchy political studies are about how to prevent the concentration of power because it usually goes horribly wrong. But yes, if you actually find a benevolent dictator it is the best form of government. You can’t really beat one decision maker that is immune to consequences.
Not related to using LLMs for writing email, but something that bothers me about using Gmail lately.
There were a couple of lass action lawsuits (like this one: www.GoogleWebAppActivityLawsuit.com) against Google. The emails from both lawsuits went straight to my Gmail account's 'Spam' folder. I'm glad I review my spam box regularly. Hopefully, it's just the false positive effect of the Gmail's spam filter.
How absolutely terrible is the box where you write the emails in web Gmail? I get you need more features than what a simple <textarea> provides, but how can a trillion dollar company make such an absolutely broken piece of crap as the most important part of one of their key products? You delete something and the cursor goes to the end of the email. You ctrl-z and the cursor goes before the first character of the email, not before modifying a string of a completely random length. Like a year ago, and for like a month, there was an area on the right side that didn't accept any clicks at all. Native keyboard shortcuts constantly violated.
We figured out WYSIWYG decades ago, how can it be this bad? I've resorted to writing my emails on a notepad app and pasting them when they are done. I thought it had to be an issue with some browser extensions or something, because I've never heard anyone else complaining about it, but no, it really is that bad.
I’ll pile on this one. I’ve never quite figured out some of the common formatting icons they use. Text color and text background fill color I guess wrong every single time and think “why is that icon used for that”. I can never find how to edit bullet types. Simple stuff that I never struggle to locate and identify in any other application
YES. Not just the Google class action notices - though those, which Google was court-ordered to send and deliver, are the most egregious - but ALL class action or settlement related emails get automatically chucked into to my gmail spam folder no matter what.
And they don't ever forward spam, even if you've set up mailbox forwarding to an external address. There's no option for it. So to ever see those messages, I have to use a complicated custom rule to force it to forward all the spam to me, too.
I think it's too consistent and longlasting a problem to be accidental. I think they're spam-holing all class action notices, instead of just Google ones, so that they can claim it's just a general error in their automatic spam filter.
> but ALL class action or settlement related emails get automatically chucked into to my gmail spam folder
Every now and then I get a glut of “if you bought X in timeframe Y you might be due a pay-out” junk mail, so this might be genuine false positives rather than something more sinister.
Though the cynic in me, that has been right so many times over the years wrt corporate behaviour, is inclined to agree with your much less generous assessment!
There is exactly zero chance the gmail team is unaware that epiqnotice.com is a legitimate sender of class action messages and getting falsely blocked.
There is also zero chance that there are not a fair few people who consider their messages to be UCE¹ even if they are actually due thruppence-ha'penny as their share of the class action win, and who therefore mark them as such which is a signal that automated filter management algorithms will pick up on.
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[1] They are email, from a commercial entity, and in many cases were not asked for, after all.
> The notice may be from a commercial entity but it's court-ordered. It's not spam.
How is the filtering algorithm expected to know that? Especially if numerous users do mark such messages as spam (or give the more passive signal of completely ignoring it despite paying attention to other messages), or other identification rules say that the messages look like other things that have been thusly marked over time?
> those automated algorithms based on feedback need to not cross user accounts
One of the touted advantages of collective mail systems like gmail is that such filtering can apply globally instead of us all having to individually train everything to our liking. There are conflicting priorities, and unfortunately your preferred priority just isn't winning here.
[Caveat: I don't use Google's mail services for anything other than occasional testing, like sending messages to/from my own mail server after reconfiguration or other admin work]
> How is the filtering algorithm expected to know that?
It doesn't. The humans working there need to add an override.
> One of the touted advantages of collective mail systems [...]
You cut off the most important qualifier in what I said. "In this case." They should be isolating or flat-out ignoring feedback for specifically epiqnotice.com.
If carving out exceptions like that were implemented by their choice, there would be a shit-storm of concerns about how it could be abused, with people immediately accusing them of abusing it because a message from a Google property or political entity got through to them. I wouldn't implement that by choice in their position.
“By choice” is a load bearing member in that sentence structure, and depends on the exact wording of “court-ordered to send and deliver” - it could be interpreted, as you do, as “the messages must be made visible to the user” but I assume it has instead been interpreted as “the message must make it to the account of the user” (and the spam box as part of that account if the filters happen to put it there instead of elsewhere). We'd have to inspect the court order to see how specific or not the wording is in that area before passing judgement on the technical correctness of each interpretation.
You think they have no mechanism for exceptions? And there would be a shitstorm just for having it? That's such a strange view to me that I don't think we're going to get anywhere near agreement on this.
GMail users sometimes don't see my messages because they get sent to spam. (These are just normal person-to-person emails.)
Google used to have pretty good spam detection but now they seem to have cranked the dial over to err on the side of hiding mail the user actually wanted. It's not a good situation.
Same. Last week, my boss, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, dumped an AI-generated proposal (~7 pages) on how to structure semantic layer on top of our dbt models. As the Data Engineering lead, I had to read it and found a few glaring issues; left a lot of comments asking him for details where it's lacking; and proposed a few of my ideas (the path I think we should take without over complicating everything unnecessarily--esp. in the beginning).
Yesterday, one of my coworkers (Senior Dir. of Research Ops) shared with me another obviously AI-generated 5 page draft of an SOP on how to reintegrate old metrics (in the legacy SQL Server environment) into the Azure SQL while keeping everything running smoothly. She's not the most technical person, so it obviously is reflected in the doc generated.
I think we will all become AI-output-reviewers eventually. Not sure how long I can keep doing this though because the volume of materials that need reviewing seems to be growing really quickly these days....
Starting to wonder that we’re going to start being forced to execute on an AI output instead of sharing it with other people. If you can reason yourself into a working system, you know what you’re talking about. If not, then it’s not worth taking the time to figure it out.
That’s not much better in my experience, from a human perspective. You inherit a system that someone designed a decade ago and all the original maintainers are long gone. One is then afraid to change anything, because of ancient landmarks and all that. But now we can actually start to piece together how these things work with AI.
Yes, for legacy--production systems--it's totally useful to generate a high-level overview, surround an unfamiliar feature with tests, and build small harnesses that exercise real functionality.
The sooner one can find an entrypoint, the sooner one can contribute with changes.
the middle manager class. The people whose job is to make other people do work. The people who fought against work from home because it devalued their contributions to an organization. The people most likely to be replaced by AI because they're not the capitalist owner and their not a individual contributor. They're the ones who lick the boot because they dont have to worry about who it's going to stomp on. They're the ones lubing up fascism, and telling us we're all overeacting.
This seems needlessly dismissive. The management revolution in the 20th century built the companies that innovated and built the economic middle class. It's a common trope to hate on middle managers, and not all middle-managers are good middle-managers, but they do play an important role in organizations.
People will either get used to it, or we’ll start seeing automated replies like “This text was automatically generated and has not been reviewed before being sent. It’s AI garbage and I refuse to read it. Do it again. And do it better.”
It feels like a new age version of “that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Basically, “that which can be sent without thought can be responded to without thought.”
If you want to be insulting about it, use a locally hosted "small" AI (under 6GB size on disk GGUF file, Q4 quantized or worse, so quite "stupid"), set to a high temperature value, no thinking mode, with a system prompt instructing it to fire off a rapid response in an absurdist writing style.
I also use this strategy of mutually assured AI slop, with a no-first-use policy. I'll happily respond to AI slop PRs with AI slop code reviews / comments.
I have found using an llm to compress the information instead instead of reading it directly saves time. It's potentially lossy but it's not like the slop you got is going to lose much value by compressing it.
I thought it's just happening to me. I tried to watch my computer's network activity to see if anyone has hijacked my IP. I closed Gmail and YouTube tabs because I find that they are the ones which pings to the outside world a lot more than other tabs I have opened. I even restarted my modem two times. Didn't work.
So I decided to...use Firefox a lot more with DDG (I use FF for mostly privacy-sensitive stuff like checking my financial accounts, but now I use it for a lot more browsing stuff).
Seems like it is the Chrome browser over-reacting.
My spouse is an hematologist+oncologist. She and all of her coworkers use ChatGPT. Before then, they look stuff up on UpToDate [ https://www.uptodate.com/login ] (they sometimes still do). I went to medical school for three years and quit because I couldn't stand the rote memorization part of the studies. Too many facts to remember IMO.
Even as an AI-neutral person, I'm very confident that AI/ML based computer systems, once trained specifically for medicine, will consistently do better than human doctors because believe it or not, there are a lot of human errors made in medicine field (doctors just don't admit that and we don't know) due to lack of time by doctors or incompetence or simply forgetting a fact or two that they should have checked when diagnosing or coming up with a treatment.
I have a lot of doctor friends who tell me they all use OpenEvidence [1] in their practice. They've done a good job of capturing the doctor market while offering a useful product.
UpToDate is SUCH an awful company, pure rent taking. For site licenses, you just give them your sites' IP addresses and they program them into their firewall. No account management at all. INSANELY high prices. We replaced them with OpenEvidence.
These bans, in my opinion, are not the right way to go. Who says that once you are 16+, you are mature enough to interact with the social media apps? I'd argue that if one has never used social media when growing up, it'd even be more dangerous to open the floodgate (so to speak) once s/he reaches 17. Then, that person is not going to know what to avoid and how to curb addiction.
Educating kids about the potential harm, and also making parents take some more responsibility seem like a more positive approach to me.
Drinking is harmful... always. Same for smoking. Yet we draw lines there.
I don't claim there is much consistency in governments actions (ie see weed demonization for past 60 years and misery it brought when cigarettes and alcohol were just fine), but absolutely, 0 zilch sympathy for the cancer that 'social media' are these days. They can go bankrupt overnight and no amount of former facebook employees screaming about needing to feed their families or similar popular excuses would affect the big smile on my face.
The same question I wanted to ask. I'd be very curious to learn about their post-mission analysis to find out how many bit flips occurred and how many times this redundant system prevented the mistakes from causing issues.
My wife is a big movie/drama series watcher. She will occasionally flips through Netflix catalog, but will always check first if the series has finished or not. If it isn't, she'll not bother. There are so many series that Netflix started but didn't finish. That and a lot of fodder movies Netflix produced.
So in the end, my wife usually doesn't end up watching anything on Netflix. We only have that account because it was sponsored by T-mobile. Otherwise, we'd not be subscribing to Netflix.
Agreed. As a spouse of a specialist doctor in the US, average folks don't include doctors when they blame the exorbitant prices of the US healthcare. Sure, big pharma, insurance companies, hospital admins and everyone in between play a part in this big profit-making machine.
But doctors (a lot of them, not all) are complicit in this healthcare complex. American Medical Association is one of the top lobbying groups in D.C. They gate-keep the production of US doctors artificially low by making the candidates go through longer years of education (4 years of college before another 4 years of med school is an overkill for most doctors) compared to other developed nations, resulting in high compensations for doctors AND longer wait-time for patients (due to doctor shortage). They also put up regulation barriers and it requires a lot of certification and exams to become a doctor, so whoever becomes a doctor has the best interest to keep the system (status quo) going.
Average US doctor gets paid a lot more than their counterparts in other developed nations.
The AMA may cause some problems but you can't reasonably blame them for this one. They are not a regulatory or accreditation body. State medical boards control provider certification. Some universities have combined BS / MD programs that cut education time down to 6 years.
Doctors are motivated, intelligent and sometimes self-interested. By no means are all of them against it but like any party there are plenty who unabashedly oppose increased accessibility to their profession in favor of increasing their own value/pay.
I agree. congress actually caps the number of residency slots, which is agreed by many to be the ultimate bottleneck for the amount of doctors produced each year. There are plenty of people willing and well-qualified to go through medical school and become a doctor.
> A recent LinkedIn post that I came across as an example of people trusting (or learning to trust) AI too much while not realizing that it can make up numbers too
Honestly, people make them up just as much or generate equally incorrect graphs.
It's about time our trust into random visualizations is destroyed, without the actual formulas and data behind being exposed.
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