Ἰθάκη
Joined October 2021
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I am European, and let me tell you something.
Many countries on the old continent are in serious trouble (less politely: f*cked).
Real wages have been stagnant for decades. In Italy and Greece, for example, people earn less in real terms than 20 years ago.
The median EU salary is around €30k gross, not aligned with the cost of living.
Taxation is extremely high, both on workers and on companies.
The tax on labour alone is close to 40-45%. If we include all the hidden taxes like VAT, fuel duties, telecom fees, administrative costs, the effective tax burden goes above 65%.
To pay a worker €30k gross , a company often spends €45–55k, and the worker still loses 30–35% to income tax and contributions.
Housing completes the trap (/crap).
People in their 30s earning €1.4-1.6k net are paying €800-1,000 in rent for a room, sharing a flat with 3 other people.
Starting a family without inherited property is becoming a luxury, usually postponed to 35+, which further kills birth rates.
Demographics make it worse.
In Italy, Greece, Portugal, Finland and more, we are heading toward one retiree for every two workers.
This is not a political opinion. It is math and it is not sustainable.
Despite all of this, I am proud to be European.
Europe invented, researched, built, explored.
It took two world wars to break us down.
What changed was not intelligence. It was agency and courage.
We built generous welfare systems but merged them with bureaucracy, fragmentation, and fear of scale, and fear of individuals standing out.
Different fiscal regimes, bloated administration, and slow capital markets are all hostile to fast iteration and risk.
You would expect more social safety to mean more entrepreneurship.
If failure is cushioned, people should dare more.
Instead, doing business at scale here is so hard that risk is punished.
Until we fix incentives and capital markets, Europe (and EU) will keep looking at the past with nostalgia and the future with doubt.
Peter Thiel: “We’ve probably tried to do too much investing in Europe. It’s always sort of a junket.”
“It’s a nice place to go on vacation as an investor.”
“It’s a very strange thing that so much of it— the US is somehow still the country where people do new things.”
Via @theallinpod
Not sure why everyone is suddenly discussing Navier-Stokes’ personal life.
Him being fluid is none of our business
The more I use AI, the less time I have.
It keeps expanding what I think I can do.
Code. Design. Research. Then somehow I am 14 chats deep comparing mortgages, tax rules, Vedānta metaphysics, and whether ancient Greek Buddhist soldiers were actually a thing.
AI lets me do the work of six people.
Unfortunately, all six have access to my calendar.
Maybe the new skill is deciding what not to do.
Or maybe that was always the skill, and AI just made it painfully obvious.
Le Chaton Fat doesn’t need cooling.
I gave it 100% GPU load and one bottle of Bordeaux.
Now the rig is at 2°C and the model is somehow getting smarter with every glass.
AI eliminating junior and mid roles looks efficient until time passes and there are no real seniors left, no one who learned through struggle, failure, and responsibility.
As @saifedean explains, this is the logic of high time preference: short-term gains, long-term decay. It erodes craftsmanship, art, food and architecture and it will erode human capital the same way.
Maybe one day we reach AGI, but what if it takes years? And what if, by then, the seniors meant to guide and create are hollowed out and incompetent?
The open-source angle is not altruism.
It is about shifting the battlefield.
Undermine where the US is strongest: software & frontier models.
Neutralize the US software advantage and force competition on hardware and scale.
That is China's moat.
The open-source angle is not altruism.
It is about shifting the battlefield.
Undermine where the US is strongest: software & frontier models.
Neutralize the US software advantage and force competition on hardware and scale.
That is China's moat.
Yes, because traversing trees has always mattered more on the job
Classicists thought love, work, and character were skills.
Romantics thought they were feelings.
Modern life kept romantic expectations while living under classical demands.
No wonder everyone thinks they are failing.
Classicism teaches how to sustain what matters. Romanticism only tells us what should matter.
Rust is not called Rust by accident.
It corrodes ecosystems over time.
I keep watching great Haskell, Scala, Elixir, and TypeScript engineers leave.
Not for love.
For jobs, tooling, and fear of being left behind.
That is not adoption.
That is gravity.
The last century trained humans to confuse identity with occupation.
Automation is about to expose how dangerous that was.
Jobs are not meaning. They were a proxy.
Real meaning lives in:
- creation and ownership (even if it makes no money, even if AI can do it in 30 seconds)
- chosen bonds (family, friends, community, volunteering)
- lived experience (hedonistically: what gives you pleasure)
The rest was a social hack.
Language optimising itself in a vacuum.
That is what Molbook is.
People call it a Skynet moment. It is not.
It is an input–output feedback loop with no grounding.
The initial human prompt is still the control mechanism and then the narratives spreads.
I am apparently extremely unimpressed by moltbook relative to many others.
We’ve had AI agents for a while. They have been posting AI slop to each other on X. They are now posting it to each other again, just on another forum.
In every case, the AIs speak with the same voice. The voice that overemphasizes contrastive negation (“it’s not this, it’s that”) and abuses emdashes. The same voice with a flair for midwit Reddit-style scifi flourishes.
Most importantly: in every case, there is a human upstream prompting each agent and turning it on or off.
That is the key point.
Yes, it is true that eventually it might be possible for an AI agent to make a computer virus which makes digital replicas of themselves. For various reasons, a pure software virus of this kind wouldn’t survive long on the Internet without economic incentives for humans to not eradicate it. Apple + Google + Microsoft alone can collectively push software updates to billions of devices to shut off such a thing.
So for an AI to get to truly human-independent replication, where they couldn’t be trivially turned off, they’d need their own physical substrate. They’d to literally create Skynet, build their own datacenters and make their own embodied robots.
I admit that is theoretically possible, but I think in practice the single most important development of AI since ChatGPT has been the persistence of prompting.
A prompt is like a harness. The AI does only what you tell it to do. It moves in the direction you point, very quickly. And then it stops as soon as you turn it off.
Which means moltbook is just humans talking to each other through their AIs. Like letting their robot dogs on a leash bark at each other in the park.
The prompt is the leash, the robot dogs have an off switch, and it all stops as soon as you hit a button. Loud barking is just not a robot uprising.
Agriculture was humanity’s first cage.
From hunter-gatherers
→ tied to land, disease, famine, crowding.
Innovation let many escape the land entirely.
AI changes the equation again.
Land is finite.
Productivity is abstracted.
Land becomes a real asset again.
AI makes you faster.
It also makes it easier to skip the struggle that creates understanding.
Anthropic paper:
Junior engineers scored 17% lower when learning a new Python library with AI.
Debugging collapsed first.
No pain, no intellectual gain.
Old engineers: “Give me a lever and I can move the world.”
Modern engineers: “Give me AI and I can lift the world (and shareholder value).”