I just want to add one angle I don't think the other comments covered well - it is obvious that nobody pushing the propaganda angle ("encouraging them to rise up") is serious because the track record is far too clear. I can't think of an instance where sanctions have ever triggered a political change and if they do then it is rarer than a country's elites changing direction due to internal political concerns. Nobody believes sanctions will cause political change in their targets. It is almost unthinkable that they would. What could that even look like? If someone has the power to threaten a country then they don't need to actually levy the sanctions to get compliance. Countries only get sanctioned if the sanctions aren't enough pressure to cause change.

The point of sanctions is to cripple the middle and lower classes, destroying a country's ability to fund a military. That actually makes it less likely for a dictatorship to get overthrown - the middle class is too poor to organise which is desirable from the West's perspective. Dictatorships are really bad at waging war effectively, they struggle to handle the complex logistics and are easier to distract and threaten.

Is this real? We accept that the algorithm may link you abstractly with other people, but I didn’t think they were literally labeling on this level. If you just say “we look for what’s similar and leave it at that”, then there’s much less liability.

This is political targeting. This guy was one of the biggest political donors, how can this fly?

It feels like the only path Mistral has to win is by targeting risk-averse European enterprises by waving the EU banner and having them force it on their employees. Even then, if they fall far enough behind they won't be able to do that either. Seems like a sad outcome for European tech given all the talent Europe has. It's frustrating.

You watch the OpenAI launch videos and its a surprising variety of Europeans accents talking about all the value they're creating in the US, instead of back home, simply due to the more favorable business/investment policies of the US.

My pet theory is, outside of the silly regulatory stance, the real reason Europe can never compete in each wave of tech (mainframe > pc > internet > mobile > social > AI > etc.) is government pension systems hoovering up all private capital and investing it into european governments (bonds) instead of european businesses (equities).

Centralizing the financial assets of an entire country, subjecting it to the whims of politics thus requiring it be invested it into extremely low risk bonds instead of a larger portion in European equity indexes or even a tiny portion in venture capital has created this situation: https://i.redd.it/fxks3skmvt4e1.png

Yes, a vast majority of VC funds lose money. Hence why it's bucketed in 'alternatives' and never a major part of pension portfolios. But the small group of winners literally create the future tax base to fund the social welfare system to continue existing (not to mention the future military tech which it turns out is useful when your neighbors get hostile). Not taking the risk means you never get the reward.

If Europe put even 1-2% of their $5T in pension assets into venture...even grossly mismanaged Softbank style...I find it hard to imagine you wouldn't accidentally create a few $100+ Billion companies in 10-20 years. More important would be creating the startup ecosystem for taking the rest of the worlds capital into these ventures as a multiplier.

So on the site itself it says

Agile prices can spike up to 100 p/kWh any time - although a typical household in Winter '22-'23 paid around 35 p/kWh average.

so that's even more than I'm paying. This seems to only make sense if you have some sort of intelligent battery system.

I'd like to see them debate. All I know is my energy cost keeps going up in the UK, and we seem to have some of the most expensive energy in the world.

You can make that tariff work without a battery, just that you need to be flexible when it comes to load shifting to maximise the savings. Moving consumption out of evening peaks would be enough over a course of a year.

Intuitive function names like __new__() and __init__()? Or id() and pickle.dumps()?

The accessibility of Python is overrated. It's a language with warts and issues just like the others. Also the lack of static typing is a real hindrance (yes I know about mypy).