Seriously, when I am in Italy, I think of ancient Rome most of the time. The country is just chock-full of Roman structures and you won't be walking for a long time before bumping into one.
When holidaying in Italy I had the luck to pick the day trip one day. Really glad I found Paestum (an ancient Greek city): it is every bit as captivating as Pompeii imo.
Went to Italy for the first time a few years ago and picked paestum randomly when we needed a break from Naples. Went back last year and will probably go again.
At one side, people are unhappy about AI, at the other side, who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them.
It looks like the "car problem" in yet another form. Many people will agree that our cities have become too car-centric and that cars take way too much public space, but few will give up their own personal car.
> who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them
Me. I never use AI to write content that I put my name to. I use AI in the same way that I use a search engine. In fact, that is pretty much what AI is -- a search engine on steroids.
Good. I can believe that a few people are principled enough, but principled people tend to be in a minority, regardless of the topic.
I am also a bit afraid of a future where the workload will be adjusted to heavy AI use, to the degree that a human working with his own head won't be able to satisfy the demands.
This happened around the 'car problem' too: how many jobs are in a walkable / bikeable distance now vs. 1925?
I don't think AI is comparable to cars. The problem with cars is that they necessarily use the commons. The more roads you build, the less space you have for trains, parks, housing, etc. AI isn't like that. I can continue to think for myself and look for ways to add value as a human even if everyone around me is using AI. And if that fails, if I can't find a way to compete with AI, if AI really is capable of doing everything that I can do as well as I can do it, why would I not want to use it?
Tell that to anyone who was hoping to upgrade their RAM or build a new system in the near future.
Tell that to anyone who's seen a noticeable spike in electricity prices.
Tell that to anyone who's seen their company employ layoffs and/or hiring freezes because management is convinced AI can replace a significant portion of their staff.
AI, like any new technology, is going to cost resources and growing pains during its adoption. The important question which we'll only really know years or decades from now is whether it is a net positive.
Nope, we have a lot more sprawl. Look at the old maps of cities and compare them to the current ones.
In Ostrava, where I live, worker's colonies were located right next to the factories or mines, within walking distance, precisely to facilitate easy access. It came with a lot of other problems (pollution), but "commute" wasn't really a thing. Even streetcars were fairly expensive, and most people would think twice before paying the fare twice a day.
Nowadays, there are still industrial zones around, but they tend to be located 5-10 km from the residential areas, far too far to walk.
Even leaving industry aside, how many kids you know walk to school, because it is in a walking distance from them?
I never use AI to write an email, and if I ever found out a coworker was using AI to sent emails to me I would never read those emails. It would be a tacit admission that the coworker in question did not have anything worth actually reading.
I am a fairly prolific writer, having published ten books since 2018 and averaging some three articles per week, all of that next to my programming work.
But I understood quite early that I am a fluke of nature and many other people, including smart ones, really struggle when putting their words on paper or into Word/LibreWriter. A cardiologist who saved my wife's life is one of them. He is a great surgeon, but calling his writing mediocre would be charitable.
Such people will resort to AI if only to save time and energy.
And the LLM can parse out total garbage in and understand the intent of the writer? I know when I'm vague with an LLM I get junk or inappropriate output.
As an optimist I would say that it could be better at teasing out your intent from you in an interactive way, then producing something along those lines. People aren't ashamed to answer questions from AI.
That might drift in the future. I've actually found myself leaving small errors in sometimes since it suggests that I actually wrote it. I don't use literal em-dashes -- but I often use the manual version and have been doing so much longer than mainstream LLMs have been around. I also use a lot of bulleted lists -- both of which imply LLM usage. I take my writing seriously, even when it's just an internet comment. The idea that people might think I wrote with an LLM would be insulting.
But further and to the point, spelling / grammar errors might be a boutique sign of authenticity, much like fake "hand-made" goods with intentional errors or aging added in the factory.
Unless you are using a proprietary, dedicated grammar checker, auto grammar check is far from perfect and will miss some subject-verb agreement errors, incorrect use of idioms, or choppy flow. Particularly in professional environments where you are being evaluated, this can tank an otherwise solid piece of written work. Even online in HN comments, people will poke fun at grammar, and (while I don't have objective evidence for this) I have noticed that posts with poor grammar or misspellings tend to have less engagement overall. In a perfect world, this wouldn't matter, but it's a huge driving factor for why people use LLMs to touch up their writing.
I started at a new job a few months back and I got an obviously AI-written reply to my manager's "welcome" email from some contractor type person who got CC'd on it. Fortunately I don't have to interact with the bozo in question, but it was really offputting.
I actually think that AI is a great use case for writing emails, starting from a draft or list of what you want to say and getting it polished to a professional tone. You need to prompt it correctly, review and iterate so it doesn’t become slop, but very useful.
OTOH, I’d never use it to write emails to friends and family, but then I don’t need to sound professional.
I think you have a good point, but are getting a lot of pushback because of your example. Most AI-hostile people won't use ChatGPT directly but are still happy to use a lot of modern AI features/products such as speech-to-text, recommendation engines, translation services, et cetera.
OK, what sort of systemic change you propose? Note that bans on anything digital are really hard to enforce without giving law enforcement draconian powers.
Yes, that's the meme. "We should improve society somewhat" doesn't mean the peasant has actionable proposals, only pointing out there's a problem.
My comment was instead highlighting how your analogy to the "car problem" might be right, in that where we see big shifts to reduce the car problem, like in Paris, it comes from systemic changes from a car-centric form to a diverse transit form, rather than an individual choice model.
My go-to these days is to heavily tax the rich, place a staggering tax on the the superrich, introduce meaningful UBI, put strict controls on housing rentals, etc.
Why waste time using ChatGPT to write work email slop when you don't need to work?
I presume the student is using ChatGPT for assignments in order to get the credentials (a degree) needed for a job - while companies off-load their training costs onto young people, who are then encourage to go into debt, resulting in a mild form of debt bondage.
Reduce the need for a job, so the students who go to college are more likely to be those who want the personal education, rather than credentialism.
But hey, I'm just a peasant programmer saying there are flaws, and we should do something about it. Talk to an actual expert, not me.
Those experts (I hear them on podcasts) will also say things like having strong consumer protection laws so people aren't forced to deal with AI (and human!) sludge.
These new urban systems are simply a way to cram as many people into a small boxes as possible and make citizens culturally flex with their bicycle life and not just seem like a poor peasant. Few give up their personal car because of decades of entrainment. I just think for better or worse, North America is always going to come out with the most selfish (for better or worse) system.
It can be clean tech but we need it to be personal or else we feel like we are declining in standard of living. They don't struggle with these issues in Europe or Asia because Europe and Asia are fundamentally different societies. I don't really see any other way around this dilemma.
blaming the individual instead of the system is a sign of shillbottery
i'd give up my car tomorrow if we had better rapid transit in these parts. And they're working on it, but it takes billions and decades. And I need to drop my kids off at school tomorrow...
It's much worse than "designed for cars." It's more like "not survivable without a car." It's the same with apps on my phone. I don't want to use them, but sometimes there simply is no alternative in today's world.
We may end up building a world where AI is similarly necessary. The AI companies would certainly like that. But at the moment we still have a choice. The more people exercise their agency now the more likely we are to retain that agency in the future.
I lived in Prague, whose center is medieval and the neighbourhoods around it pre-1900, and even though what you say is true (fewer people drove everywhere), the streets were still saturated to their capacity.
It seemed to me that regardless of the city, many people will drive until the point where traffic jams and parking become a nightmare, and only then consider the alternatives. This point of pain is much lower in old European cities that weren't built as car-centric and much higher in the US, but the pattern seems to repeat itself.
Helsinki made a major push to reduce cars to get to Vision Zero and succeeded in no car fatalities in 2024. It’s now hard to get a taxi and you’re expected to walk / other transport it’s a little bit annoying but worth it
The comment explicitly mentioned "cities". Of course rural and suburban areas don't make it practical to be without a car, but many people in cities could use public transportation but handwave it as beneath them or dangerous or unreliable. When in reality it works just fine. Car travel has its own tradeoffs that can be just as easily exaggerated.
> At one side, people are unhappy about AI, at the other side, who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them.
As Newsweek points out*, the people most unhappy about AI are the ones who CAN'T use ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments because they NO LONGER have access to those jobs. There are many of us who believe that the backlash against AI would never have gotten so strong if it hadn't come at the expense of the creators, the engineers, and the unskilled laborers first.
AI agents are the new scabs, and the people haven't been fooled into believing that AI will be an improvement in their lives.
A lot of things can cause dementia. IIRC, men who use Cialis have a lower risk of dementia, which indicates that better blood flow is beneficial as well.
Our skulls are hard for a reason. Brains are sensitive.
Yes, many things can cause dementia. Repeated traumatic brain injuries can cause dementia.
But the leading form of dementia is Alzheimer's. Somewhere in the order of 40% of us are expected to get Alzheimer's before we die. The list of things that have been demonstrated to cause Alzheimer's is much, much shorter.
For the last 40 years, the leading theory about Alzheimer's is that it is caused by the beta-amyloid plaques that are found in the brain after death. This theory has produced exactly zero treatments that meaningfully affect clinical symptoms, despite many drug trial and literally billions in research per year. Seriously, between various sources, we've spent something like a quarter of what it cost to put man on the Moon. (It is hard to make a precise comparison, because a lot of that funding was private.)
This single study represents more progress on effective treatments of Alzheimer's than all of that work combined. The importance of the result should not be dismissed.
I don’t think that there are many things known to have as strong of an effect as HZ vaccines. The current evidence is that the vaccine eliminates like 20% of all cases, suggesting that HZ (aka chickenpox) is directly responsible for at least 20% of dementia cases, possibly much more.
Pushing covid-19 vaccinations onto kids was always controversial. Covid isn't smallpox, people under 30 only get a serious case very rarely, and the vaccine isn't sterilizing anyway.
If we want to use medications responsibly and rationally, we must be careful about the cost/benefit analysis to the intended recipient groups. It makes great sense to vaccinate old people against Covid and teenagers against HPV. The other way round, much less so.
Of course the vendors will push for blanket use, as they make more money, but that is also the problem.
No system consisting of humans is ever stable. We can dampen various events, but building a stable system is impossible. Too many things change constantly around us.
Not even old ossified feudal systems were stable. Either the Mongols came, or Black Death, or some smart-ass with his moveable type, and nothing was like before.
The world is pretty brutal. Evolution depends on death, economy depends on resources extracted from the ground, which is usually an unclean process.
We have at least managed to get the worst pollution out of our cities (nothing like London's Great Smog [0] is happening in the developed world anymore), and we can protect at least some natural parks, but it will realistically take at least a hundred more years of technological development until we can run an economy that does not damage the Earth anymore.
And that will likely mean mining of stuff elsewhere, such as the asteroid belt.
Agreed that the world (the Universe) is quite brutal, and often it requires brutality to just survive.
I will point out though that the companies mentioned in the article don't have humanity's survival as an objective. Only to increase their profit. And that a lot of people see them more like a risk to humanity than an ally.
The trend has been away from local pollution, especially in the richer parts of the world, and our differences seem to lie firmly in the "how fast or slow this process can realistically be" territory.
I'm sympathetic to your arguments but I'm fairly sure that nationalizing Nokia would not have staved off the inevitable, though, selling it to MS certainly accelerated the fall.
I still have my trusty N-800 tough, and I expect it will last another decade but that phone was made well after the Nokia brand effectively ceased to exist and is more of a reboot than a successful pivot. Clearly I'm not the 'ideal consumer' but I'm also the exception, I don't know anybody around me except for my 90 year old uncle who still has one of these and even he's been eying a smartphone.
I just wish for once that the palms were being greased to do something net positive. There is a lot of money to be made actually solving climate, energy, and housing problems. It would easily be a net economic benefit with many profits being made along the way, with benefits for affordable housing.
I blame an international right that is more intent on looking backwards than forwards, and a left that sees only the real problems, but tends to proscribe surface level direct fixes while eschews grabbing the more indirect budget and financial levers that the right happily throws around.
> There is a lot of money to be made actually solving climate, energy, and housing problems.
Yeah. That's the problem. These sleaze-bags get the laws and the rules and the theoretically optional best practices that aren't actually optional crafted so that their buddies or the industries they represent get work and money shoveled at them.
I can't put up solar panels, without a goddamn government fee, the fee is nominal, it's a pretext to force me to have an electrician do it or pay him to sign off on my work. And the useful idiots eat that shit right up because "what if your house burns down" as if the positive of the solar panels isn't a difference between a 1/1mil and a 2/1mil chance of that.
That's just one example. Examples abound in every industry. It's not about the climate or the environment or safety or any other one of the "public goods" that gets half the population to turn their already malfunctioning brain off. Those are just bullshit pretexts because they know that people care about those things on surface level so if you can make legalized graft sail under that flag then people will support it.
The EU green laws will have to be rewritten anyway. They are not of this world.
In the next tab, I am reading (in Czech) an article titled "Shall we produce tanks out of wood?" which addresses the fact that pushing all steel production out of Europe through unrealistic pollution demands and other regulations cannot be squared with maintaining any ability to defend ourselves.
All steel production is pushed out while the EU still produces some 10% of all global output?
Sweden has been researching and deploying technologies for foundries to not rely on fossil fuels for steel production (since steel is a major export), regulations are doing what's intended to do: move steel production to non-fossil fuel dependent processes.
The issue with the green steel production in Sweden is not about regulations, nor even about energy. It is that every aspect of green hydrogen is more expensive in reality than what was promised/predicted 20 years ago, and the prices are not going down in the way that people wished. 90% of Steel foundries work through using natural gas, and when natural gas prices went after Russia invasion of Ukraine, the result has been a struggling steel industry and production moving to countries which continue to buy gas from Russia (at a discounted war price).
The market price for energy regularly reaches close to 0 in nordpool during periods of optimal weather conditions, but the market price for green hydrogen do not. It has been and continue to be quite more expensive than natural gas. Hydrogen is also a very tricky and expensive to work with, and the cost to modify or construct new foundries to use hydrogen is not simple nor a cheap upgrade. Regardless of what they do with regulations, the problem with green hydrogen are not one that politicians can solve without reaching for subsidies and pouring tax money into the black hole (which is what the Swedish government decided a few days ago).
Agree that green hydrogen is still in its infancy but I don't think it can be considered a "black hole", it's a new technology which requires, as any novel technology not yet proven commercially, government investments for research and further development.
I believe it ties quite well with the build out of renewables, the necessary plan for renewables is to overprovision since it can fluctuate, energy storage is one way to use the excess production, and another is to further develop hydrogen technology to be better suited for industrial processes requiring natural gas.
Without government investment there won't be any private enterprise developing it, it's quite known that capitalism doesn't help in taking massive risks with not-yet-proven technology, it can work for scaling, and getting into economies of scale but before that I don't think it's a black hole to bet on the future of it. At some point it will be needed to be done, rather develop the technology early, and export it rather than wait until China does it anyway (because the USA will definitely not be the first mover in this space).
I describe it as a black hole since there is no limited on how much funding it will take in, and once in, there is no reasonable expectation that we will see anything come back out. Fundamental research is useful for humanity as a whole, and rich countries should use some excess money for that purpose, but this technology was sold to the population as already solved and commercial viable.
Sending large amount of subsidizes to a single commercial entity is also very risky. The bankruptcy of Northvolt demonstrated this quite well, including how wages and costs can get inflated when a commercial venture relies a bit too much on subsidies in order to exist. The size of government funding need to be balanced with the need for government oversight in order to verify that citizens money get used correctly. Time will tell if Hybrit will share the same fate, and for now it doesn't look great.
There need to be honest and clear information when the government funds commercial ventures, especially when it involve untested research. The biggest problem with green hydrogen is that it was presented as an already solved problem that was already commercial viable. Every year for the last couple of decades it was just "a few years" before it would be cheaper than natural gas, even as natural gas prices went up in price. Some municipalities even went as far as building hydrogen infrastructure on this promise that everything from heating to transportation to electricity would be operated on green hydrogen. Now most of that is being removed as the maintenance and fuel costs has demonstrated to be way higher than expected. That was not a well use of citizens money.
You need A LOT of electricity to have coal free steel production. Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc. That's why Sweden have undersea power cable with Poland LOL
We are talking here about REALLY huge amount of Entergy
It's not purely electricity-based, your greenwashing statements are based on a false premise/assumption [0][1].
Secondly, Sweden is an exporter of electricity to the EU, the huge undersea transmission cables are for selling electricity to the detriment of ourselves as shown after the Russian war against Ukraine when we had to pay the massively higher spot prices for electricity set by the gas/coal plants in Poland, and Germany. You can check right now that Poland is importing ~2-3% of its electricity from South Sweden (SE-4) [2] using 98% of the available transmission, Poland is always saturating the undersea transmission from Sweden with imports.
> You need A LOT of electricity to have coal free steel production.
Yes. And?
All that matters here is the cost. Is the cost of the energy (+equipment wear etc.) needed per ton of coal-free steel higher or lower than the cost per ton of whatever the current best coal-based method is?
That's not constant by time or place, so I can easily believe that the Scandinavian Peninsula does this with a bunch of cheap hydro, that Iceland does it with a bunch of cheap geothermal, that Denmark and Germany lose whatever steel industry they might have, that the UK does with cheap wind, that Spain does it with cheap sun, that France does it with state-subsidised "cheap" nuclear.
> Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc.
i.e.: the shitshow that is going on with ILVA, our past government of grifters tried to screw over AM, which was trying to go the green route but didn't want to get sued over and over for natural disaster (caused by the previous ownership. Government promised to get that into law but at some point they did a 180), and they pulled out, since then the goal for our current government of grifters has clearly been to close the plants and send workers home with redundancy funds paid by whoever was going to buy the plants (and the taxpayers). For the last couple of years the projected job loss was around 6000 units (coincidentally the exact amount of workers in the Taranto plant), for the last two months it was around 13000 units (so like 90% of the working force) and yesterday it was 20000?
It is absolutely viable to produce steel with much lower emissions. Hell, doing so would be a competitive advantage. We don't need to be stuck with centuries old technology.
I actually live in a steel-and-coal city (Ostrava).
Go ahead and do it. If you are right, you will make a lot of money.
I've heard many such theories from people who never smelled molten iron, but actual factory owners say that it is not viable without truly massive subventions and massive tariff protections, which aren't that far from trying to build a decarbonized autarky.
A big steel foundry in Třinec delayed their decarbonization project in May 2025, for two years, because it just isn't competitive against cheaper steel from Asia and the European authorities, while being very vocal about green tech, aren't giving out billions left and right to compensate.
What's really happening is that China and India have been beating them on price for years now and are currently buying out European production capacity, so those factory owners are just pulling every lever they have to stay afloat.
It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete. It's all the same across your northern border with coal - the coal miners want a graceful phase out because they understand that Australian pit-mined coal is cheaper despite being hauled across the world, but the owners want to keep the status quo and associated government subsidies.
"It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete."
So they lost all the ideas since the 1980s or so, when they were top of the heap?
Maybe, but increasing cost of inputs has more than nothing to do with economic balance of any business. Even regular households feel the increase in heating and electricity costs. A factory which needs orders of magnitude more energy will feel them even more.
Cheap energy is very important to any industry, no way around it. That is why China builds so many power stations.
No, it's just that Chinese and Indian steel is produced in ways that would not work in the EU (or even the US). The main reasons are (1) a disregard for environmental damage (2) state subsidies (more so for China than for India) (3) a disregard for safety.
The playing field simply isn't level, the ideas are there, the technologies are there but you can't compete if the competition is not bound in the same way.
While this might have been/is true for China, that country is speed running when it comes to automation and "green" in general. I wouldn't be surprised if they are on par in environmental concerns to the EU in a few years. People forget but the country only stopped taking garbage in 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban
> The playing field simply isn't level
It never was. European and Western countries had a significant head start. There should be a "right for CO2 emission" per capita offered for countries that didn't industrialize and are way behind. And exported CO2 shouldn't count.
All true. China is moving at a very high speed, but they are still more than capable of killing competition in a way that would not be legal for instance in the EU between EU countries. Clearly they are not bound by the same rules but we'll all pay the price for this eventually.
China isnt super magical or anything, they can be emulated. I think they're a prime example of when and where central economic planning can work. Other countries can do that for specific industries, like energy, if they want.
Those people who have large investments in traditional production facilities? Hmm, I wonder what they have to say about disruptive tech on the horizon..
"Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.
I'm sorry, but you don't ask the fox if the chicken coop should be protected.
Of course their capitalist interest would suffer if they had to make investments, but I don't really care if the monopoly man can have one fewer yacht.
> "Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.
That's very country dependent. In Germany, some "actual factory owners" founded kindergartens and maternal leave, before it was enforced by activists. They first understood that not everything is about money and they need to look their employees in the eyes when they sit next to them in the church on Sunday and also understood, that a happy, worry-less employee is an employee that can focus on the work and work harder. Lenin said about the Germans, that they are to lazy to do a revolution, but I think the actual issue is, that German countries mostly got rulers actually interested in the well-being of the population.
In Germany a lot of regulation used to be introduced by grassroots movements and was followed voluntarily and later the state adopted the winner of the regulation competition. See TÜV, FSGV (basically a random association deciding how to build roads that the state just adopts) etc. A large part of German economic and social failure is, that we don't have that culture of self-regulation and enforcement anymore.
The Stell argument is actually valid and not fear mongering.
The steel industry simply can't survive with current CO2 emission prices (there is a financial instrument for it).
History does not begin in 2001. There were a lot of invasions which devastated the region, and they went both ways. The Hindu Kush mountains are often described as "Hindu killer" in India, because of how many Indian slaves lost their lives when being forcibly transported over them.
Maybe the whole region would have been better off if it stayed Buddhist.
"Well, ask people in Kabul how they feel about Ostrava compared to where they live."
If "being visibly more developed than Kabul" is the same as "Capitol of global capitalism", then global capitalism did a good job lifting people out of poverty. Because at least a few billion people live in a way that, from Kabul, will look attractive. Even most of India is now developed well beyond Kabul standards.
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