I live at 51°N and apartments in my building that face the south largely have AC. I've seen a lot of AC company vans in my neighborhood lately, so I guess many people pulled that trigger this year.
Personally I went to the mountains as it's a 2h drive and naturally cool, moist air beats AC every time.
The people who refuse to install it and make up the majority of deaths are simply old - older than the average life expectancy in the US - and thus typically pinching pennies - especially that for the vast majority of their lives it wasn't necessary.
My father had AC installed a several years ago due to his health and it was probably working overtime this season.
My mother lives in a commie block that is well insulated and surrounded by green spaces, so the heatwave didn't affect her nearly as much.
My college friend discovered his heat pump is actually reversible, so now instead of heated, they have cooled floors. Unfortunately the device wasn't smart enough to on one hand use the heat to heat up tap water and the cold to cool the surroundings, but I guess you can't have everything.
In my region of the world this title (and also the title of being "the worst ever made") was reserved for the unnecessarily detailed electric locomotive simulator MaSzyna:
Unfortunately their chatbot, while amazingly fast, doesn't know anything about the company running it.
Anyway I wouldn't mind an ASIC running a diffusion language model locally. Even if eventually it would become dated. Beats outsourcing all that to a company that's running on VC money which in the future might either perish or worse - dominate the market and charge whatever they wish.
I had a fascinating conversation about this with my 5yo, which started with her asking "why won't you play with me?" and me replying "did you know my dad didn't play with me at all?".
That's not entirely true as I have early memories of him teaching my older sister how to play chess and me occasionally participating, but makes one think about this balance that needs to be struck.
I'm doing somewhat better than my father in this regard, but I wonder what is the healthy amount of attachment really? People are saying I'm going to miss these prompts when they'll grow older, but I don't want to do this just because of FOMO.
> However had your existence been different it is not so hard to imagine you might feel differently.
Considering how the vast majority of people don't actively seek to end their lives, I think it's reasonable to assume that they prefer to live.
The crown argument against these musings is that according to them the only way to realistically act ethically is to not have children at all - that is self-defeating and not sustainable.
Also it places emphasis on avoiding harm/suffering etc. Problem is, these are unavoidable parts of life and trying to minimise them at any cost is essentially attempting to not live.
I think the term sometimes used for such things is "death cult".
The question should be "where did they go?" - to Switzerland, years ago already.
How do I know? I've met them there. My project of close to 40 people was over 80% German. Contractors overall were mainly German as well.
And it makes huge sense - in the German part language is largely the same where it matters and salaries are much better. Also there aren't nearly enough Swiss programmers to fill all the positions.
If I were German, I would be in Zürich right now, admiring its hideous bare concrete 20-21st century architecture.
I'm happy I wasn't able to activate cruise control in the Karoq that I rented some time ago. VAG interfaces were always confusing to me and this behaviour would be more so.
I see signs recognized like that all the time, so use satnav as my reference. Unfortunately if it's not up to date (mine hasn't been for years now), it will suggest speeds which have nothing to do with reality.
Back in 2023 when I was reading the "Who's hiring" for March I wanted to ask aloud "truly, who is?".
I'm happy my junior years passed before all this and I don't envy those who are just coming into this field.
And it's not just tech - all over my extended social circle there are people in various fields who were laid off. It's a crawling, largely invisible in the usual indicators, crisis.
As an outsider, but hailing from Germany's eastern neighbor and one of the largest sources of immigrants:
Overall sentiment is that the juice ain't worth the squeeze any more.
Back when my country became a full member of Schengen(2008) the ratio of GDP per capita between Germany and us was around 3.3x - salaries were roughly proportionally higher, so just about any job was worth moving there and potentially going through the hoops required to establish a permanent residence.
Earlier, especially throughout the 90s that ratio didn't go below 5, so a sizeable number of people attempted to move to Germany by any means possible.
Currently it hovers at around 2.1x and most of the discrepancy in salaries is focused on the trades.
A specialist from Poland typically doesn't have access to higher tier salaries, so they don't really enjoy a different quality of life than at home, so they have no reason to move.
I think nominative determinism has it backwards: people are actually nudged into careers which fit their names as whoever is on the receiving end of their services automatically has a more positive sentiment if they notice the name fits.
I experienced this myself as my first name was rare in my generation and normally found in history books or literary classics so I was perceived through that lens.
Same here in Poland. I believe the equivalent term in English is "Bachelor of Engineering". Four years instead of the regular three to obtain a typical bachelor's degree.
I studied at a technical university at its faculty of electrical engineering, but those who study at a "normal" university indeed go through the usual three years and are not engineers.
I guess the main difference is that I learned about analog circuits, semiconductors and all that, while those other guys didn't.
I don't have any special professional certificates, though I could optionally enroll on a course allowing me to work with voltages up to 1000V.
What if you're redirected to a different origin? Not a common use case, but it does occur when you e.g. have several services and select where to go in the sign-in form.
Ideally one should be able to pass structured state throughout, but all we have is `state` really.