Also, we're not a "homogeneous population", you can stop with your pro-racism stereotypes. Immigrants are 20% of our population.

Being big is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It means that the costs to develop a system are spread across a much larger population. Everything we have had to be developed on a comparably minuscule budget.

And I want to be clear in the above: I fully acknowledge the irony, in that the US tech industry has been a powerhouse. There seems to be a massive disconnect in the US between tech innovation and tech infrastructure. The US is a world-leader in the former. It's consistently a deep laggard on the latter. The reasons why the US has so much trouble getting its act together on infrastructure and systems are complex, but it is remarkable to see, as someone who has spent their life in a mix of the US and Iceland. And it's not just Iceland that has it's act together on these sort of things - it's most of the developed world, and even surprising amounts of the developing world.

, with the most sophisticated banking system

Any American who believes this should try living overseas for a year or two. The US banking system is insanely backwards. Numerous aspects of the US medical and government systems as well. It's hard to explain it to you unless you experience it.

Checks are just one symptom (in Iceland, 15 years ago bank tellers would look at you weird and have to get the manager if you had a personal check, and 10 years ago, stopped taking them altogether). For like 15-20 years, we've had free instant bank-to-bank money transfers (no third party involved), everyone on the same service, to the point that if someone is collecting money for a gift for a coworker's birthday, it's always been, they just send an email with their bank details, instead of going around and collecting cash. All your bills - all of them - just show up in your bank's inbox. On and on.

I mentioned the medical system. Let me give a random example. In the US, you go to a doctor and they determine you need a prescription. They or their receptionist have to ask what pharmacy you want it at. It gets routed through SecureScripts (before that, it was all phone based!), and depending, you may also need to also call into the pharmacy before you go there - and if you need it "transferred", it's a multihour process. Here? The doctor just jots it into their computer, that's it. You can literally just walk out of the doctor's office into the pharmacy next door (or any other pharmacy), tell them your name, and they go grab your order.

Everything is connected. Everything is interoperable. All keyed to your kennitala (ID number) . And the kennitala is only a key, not a password. The fact that a SSN in the US is treated as both a key and a password is insane, from a security standpoint; by contrast, you can just post your kennitala online, it's fine. We have multiple actual authentication methods. The most convenient is the Auðkenni system. Our SIM cards store credentials in a separate cryptographic chip. When we need 2FA, for any business or government agency (all on the same system), it sends a special SMS that the phone routes to the SIM card to process, and then (at the OS level) pops up an authentication dialogue, so we have universal 2FA, linked to our kennitala, in all of our phones. It's been this way for like 15+ years.

Or let's talk taxes. You all know what it's like in America, so let's explain what it's like in Iceland. I get an email letting me know it's tax time. I go to the tax office website. I get 2FA login via my phone. My tax forms are right there. They're already filled out, with all of the information already collected. For like 90% of the population, it's just click through, verify it's correct, and submit. Some people may have some things that weren't logged, such as overseas investments or whatnot, but for most people, it's like a five minute process.

On and on. It's been so weird seeing America getting things 1-2 decades after us and acting like, "wow, we're leading in banking technology!", etc. No, you're an aged dinosaur, way behind the rest of the world because none of your systems work together and you're so slow to adapt to change.

Yep. The fundamental problem that requires loops is that opus et al are lazy AF. They do not "implement the plan, make no mistakes". They'll do a subset of {A..M} phases in a plan (90% of A, 70% B, 30% L, 0% M, etc.) and then say "all done!" when it compiles. So, you've got to loop it "do this until it's done". It's fundamentally brute forcing the problem, because the models aren't designed for completeness, just complete-enough, and then lies to you.

The harness exacerbates the problem. People have implemented some privately which do this correctly, but aside from the one I just made available on gh, I'm not aware of any that are public which do so natively/by core design. (And even then, it's sometimes iffy...)

This is all just marketing to try to cover for the fact that Claude Code wasn't properly conceived or designed on the onset to do what agentic tools like Hermes (and others, like Meept, or that Paperclip company with its autonomous employees) already do: create autonomous agentic workflows with clearly defined executors.

"It's a loop" is just bullshit to cover for the fact that they've got no clear, clean way to constrain context or workflows. They're trying to make themselves sound edgy so they can seem at the forefront of something they've clearly fallen far behind on.

Watch, they'll come out with some "new" feature in a couple of months which is already old hat to those at the forefront.

https://www.usinflationcalcula... Biden had 8% inflation during his presidency. Granted Covid was a contributing factor, but it seems to me if anyone got a pass it was Biden. The media certainly never held his feet to the fire the way they do with Trump.

Sigh. Ontogeny is NOT evolution. It is not the same thing as having a low MHC diversity due to a genetic bottleneck as well as lacking tens of thousands of years of evolution to a pathogen. Not the same at all. It's silly to even suggest that. Epigenetic shifts in an individual do not create new HLA genes.

Consider COVID. Novel bat coronavirus, nobody had preexisting immunity. Did everybody die? No. Because we had high HLA/MHC diversity, making it easier to target SARS-COV-2 epitopes. Native Americans lacked this diversity. It left them ill prepared for novel pathogens.

Also, you seem to believe that any disease you've never encountered before is fundamentally dangerous to an adult. That's simply not the case. Rhinovirus is intrinsically mild. It's an upper respiratory infection; it's not adapted to lower respiratory or systemic infection. It's not ebola. It's not going to become like ebola just because you've never caught it before. If a rhinovirus strain was reintroduced after 200 years after having been eradicated, we'd all get a cold, but by and large, we'd be fine.

And what would happen if Yamagata reappeared? We'd just add it back to our flu vaccines. Furthermore, the reintroduction of Yamagata wouldn't be catastrophic without that. You do not have to catch every Influenza B lineage at all, let alone every year. If you had been infected with B/Victoria and you were exposed to B/Yamagata, you'd have little sterilizing immunity against it - you'd very likely catch it. But your past exposure to B/Victoria is still greatly protective against hospitalization and death; B and T immunity against NA and the HA stem and stalk are conserved.

And this is about whether or not to catch every lineage. Well guess what, even with air filtration, that's still going to happen. Air filtration only has a meaningful impact for people at a distance, not people close together. It's about protecting the person across the room, not the person you're standing 50 centimetres away from. What it does change is how often you catch them. And if lineages or whole viruses go extinct, that's great. Worrying about some sort of reintroduction 200 years later is just inventing your own unrealistic misery when we have actual pandemic threats to worry about.

Vs Android:

- The device is relevant (updated and secure) for 2+ years
- Things usually work, and what doesn't work, is predictable and consistent (total grabbag with Android, where nothing will get fixed)
- IPv6 support

Vs Windows:
- No mandatory online accounts
- Stable
- Performant
- It's not Windows

General:
- superior AI inference and memory bandwidth
- Able to play older games (unless they're old mac games, ironically)
- Able to use UNIX-like tools because it's UNIX
- Superior hardware (runs cool, good battery life)
- High performance graphically and otherwise for the cost

You're mistaken. Those H4 headlights are absolutely visually assaulting, and some of the worst on the road.

It's mostly simply kept 'light trucks' out of the US market entirely - or did, for about 20 years, until federal legislation caught up and made them simply illegal for one reason or another (safety, fuel economy).

On the flip side, even most US vehicles are (Ford, GM) are made in Mexico and Canada.

"most people only need a small family size car"

Even in town, I will find myself using my truck's "truck" capabilities at least 2 times a week for things which would be awkward or impossible with a "small family sized car".

* Going to the grandparents' house with the kids and their bikes
* Helping a neighbor donate furniture
* Getting soil for the garden
* Getting plants for the garden
* Camping
* Moving equipment for work

Granted, I've got a Tacoma and not an F150, and I largely agree that large trucks are excessive (and they've been made to be so due to fuel use regulations not consumer desire). But, you can't buy "small family sized car" today with the capacity and capability of a 1980s family sedan.

You used to be able to get a family sedan that's big enough to take you and your family to do things, but 'efficiency' and 'safety' mandated features and capabilities which were no longer possible in smaller vehicles - so they pushed everyone to 'commercially exempt' vehicles, instead, because those have the capability to do the things people want to do. You can track the advent of the double cab pickup to the changes in government regulations exactly.

You realize how silly your cost comparison is, right?

You're evaluating a full sized truck to an 'economy' car. Entirely different capabilities.

I don't disagree with the gist of what you're saying, particularly with new vehicle prices getting insane in the past couple years and the increases in gas cost. Also, Dave Ramsey is a complete bumbling idiot who is out of touch with the economy, and has been for years.

This is almost as dubious as claims of baby car seats saving lives (which, if you look into it, isn't significantly supported by the data and tracks consistently with other vehicle safety changes - it tracks the general population decrease in vehicular deaths/injury).

Did they control for the following (just off the top of my head)?

* Changes in demographics of drivers
* Age and gender of those buying newer/ high-hooded cars and trucks
* General population mental injury (eg. from covid)
* Autonomous vehicles interfering with traffic
* General traffic pattern changes
* Cyclist density

As a counterpoint to their dubious rationalization: cars made 'around the turn of the century' had smaller A pillars and often obscured blind spots and made seeing everything from street signs to pedestrians and cross traffic almost impossible due to their length/horizontal view. They were horrible.

I guess I should be more obvious with the sarcasm in the future ;)