I'm assuming the running of the model is consuming the tokens, and the client coordinating and orchestrating the calls to the model to perform the review is happening in an action runner, thus using action minutes.

I bought hops-flavored sparkling water from a grocery store's beer cooler on a lark and, despite my attempt to explain the logic to the poor cashier, we both bent to the whims of the computer system and scanned my ID to complete the purchase.

There are other drinks that have trace amounts of alcohol, such as kombucha which is regulated to stay under the 0.5% threshold. Fruit juices will also likely contain upwards of the same amount, depending on how much they're processed.

Depends on where you live. My dad is almost 80, grew up in a very rural area, and when he was 16 they'd just gotten indoor plumbing. Up until he was 14, his school was a one-room school house with no heating other than a wood stove. If you were the first kid to arrive for the day, it was your job to get the fire going in winter months.

Housework meant no laundry machine, no dishwasher, and possibly no vacuum cleaner. That means hand washing everything, and beating rugs with sticks and brushes to get the dust off of them.

The early lives of my grandparents (in their 90s) are so fascinatingly different to that of mine. But even by the time my parents were growing up in the 60s, life was not so different in the west. The real differentiators in living standards - energy, household appliances and cooking, modes of transport - were more or less figured out then. By the time my parents were young adults in the early 80s, so many of the aspects of "modern life" had been figured out.

I look at the life my kids live, and it's not so different to my childhood. The toys are similar, their housing is similar. Probably the biggest difference is the availability of content on demand rather than much more fixed TV schedules.

The big difference in the last 30 years hasn't so much been in the kind of middle class life you can live, but the number of people who live that kind of life. In the 90s 40% of people globally were living in extreme poverty. Now its under 10%. The kinds of lives the middle class live in China and Vietnam are closer to those of Europeans today, when even 30 years ago most people in those countries were living much closer to the way your dad grew up.

I wonder if AI will result in a step change of living standards? Perhaps along with robotics we'll finally get to do nothing at all at home? I'm not convinced it'll be quick though. Maybe another 30 years.

It's because the bike lanes are great PR but bad for votes, at least in the short term. City leaders love the greenwashing effect, but in the short term the percentage of people actually biking everywhere is very low, so it doesn't make sense for them to spend a ton of time and money to do it right.

In a few years they'll get to put together a committee to discuss "learnings" and maybe they'll fix it if there are enough complaints, or maybe they'll just spend their time elsewhere as usual.

Slightly long-term thinking is required. Every year, the city I live in, Dublin, does a survey where people crossing the canals (rough proxy for entering/exiting the city centre) are counted for a day. Twenty years ago, 50% of crossings were by public transport, 37% by car, 2% by bike (most of the remainder was talking). In 2024 (the last year for which figures are available; for whatever reason publishing this data takes _ages_), 58% was by public transport, 25% by car, 6% by bike. Cycling's definitely on the rise, and congestion would be worse without it, but it does take time for people to change their habits.

I would bike more if the infrastructure was better and police aggressively dealt with our local bike theft problem (Seattle), as it stands it doesn’t make much sense to invest in it, not like when I was a college student.

America suffers from a severe execution problem in the last couple of decades. We just can’t implement and follow through with real solutions anymore.

There's a pretty significant upfront cost in getting them drilled, and many homes need the vertical drilling if they don't have sufficient yard space for a horizontal system. It gets harder if you have your own septic drain field too, as that will complete for yard space.

The cost difference is pretty massive- 3-10x for a vertical system. If you live in a city or a suburb with tiny lots, that's your only option though.

Nat gas and central AC are way cheaper.

I paid about EUR 4500 for a 114 meter drill hole including installation of brine (ethanol in my case actually) and removal of spoils. My 8kW heat+water pump was about EUR 7000.

I can spec out a gas burner for about EUR 4000 and a central AC for EUR 5000, but I bet the efficiency of the ground source heater would quickly trump the cost of buying gas regularly.

That's insanely cheap compared to what we can get around here. Most installs I've heard of from people in the US are in the $20-50,000 range, depending on the size of their home and number of wells needed.

Yet it did not feel very cheap to me. The price of the pump had increased from 4800 only a year earlier due to the war in Ukraine.

There were a number of steps I had to go through. First I had to file for permission at the County Office, where they verify that drilling in the area is acceptable and that the intended pump follows regulations with respect to cooling media, and that the drilling company was certified to drill for my needs. It did cost about 70 euros.

I needed effective zero plumbing work in the house as it was already prepared to accept heating from a pump like that. Perhaps that is one of the major costs in USA?

I don’t know what’s going on with this kind of stuff in the US - similarly I’ve heard stories of people getting quotes in the States for anything from US$10-15K for the kind of air source mini-split heat pumps you can have supplied and installed for US $1200-2000 in Australia! (That is ~3.5 to 7 kW range - super common and cheap as chips here).

Although if you needed a new septic field, I would think ground source thermal would be significantly deeper than a drain field which is only like a foot or so down so you could stack them.

If you can tolerate the price, I am _confident_ that you will pretty much always have better results using the Earth as your thermal exhaust, because you don't have to dig very far to find a large region that's pretty much always at 50 F.

The downvotes are unfair.

The price of things - heat pumps and alternatives - in different regions - even different regions within the US - varies by what people are prepared to pay not what they cost to produce.

The nordics have traditionally had cheap heat pumps whereas piped gas is only in the biggest cities and I’ve never seen bottled gas in the countryside. The competitor used to be cheap electricity and wood. Ground source heat pumps for rural install have been priced to compete with wood.

In the US the market could be shaped by regulation and taxation etc. It’s the choice of the US to have cheap fossil fuels and not embrace tech instead.

> Air source heat pumps are insanely more efficient

Citation needed?

Efficient how? I'm sure a heat pump designed for a narrow range of input temperatures AND working with water which can transport a lot more heat should easily be more efficient.

https://www.energysage.com/heat-pumps/compare-air-source-geo... Seems to disagree

I assuming he means insanely more efficient than they used to be, not more efficient than ground-source (awkward wording though). I suppose they can also be described as more efficient in installation time, cost and equipment than ground source, but clearly not in operating efficiency.

Yes air source are really good value in cost effectiveness terms, especially when a house has an existing central heating system they can connect to. But their COP - whilst dramatically improving in the last 10-20 years - is still behind ground source, particularly in the north during winter

Of course. The government has bought and paid for your health. It is only by the gracious largess that we have been allowed sugar at all.

There's very few, if any, alternatives to roaming internet access.

AI tools... do what you already do, sometimes faster, sometimes worse, usually both depending on the task.

There's a massive gap of necessity between them.

They would have moved to their own stack regardless. They've got the people and resources for it, and they've witnessed the fallout of globalization and experienced dependency on semi-hostile political powers enough to know that it's the smart move.

It's also more or less the same move that they've been using pretty much since the WTO entry: take on foreign manufacturing, copy the products, sell knockoffs as their own, build new products on top of the that knowledge.

"AI assistance" isn't really an honest representation of the claim of what happened is, though.

To be charitable, they merely pointed out what the article said, even if it is obviously, objectively false.

You're making the parent's point.

These recent storms only got to Cat4.

Similar storms hit the aforementioned areas in 2004-05 including Cat4.

How do these revelations not contradict the article?