I don't think that's necessarily true. Certainly the video streaming is expensive, but other things like workers and KV store are quite cheap and performant and powerful _if you structure your access patterns accordingly_ .
Cloudflare pricing introduces an additional dimension for when you're architecting software on top of them, but if you do it correctly, your product has the potential to be faster, cheaper, and easier to run than traditional solutions running on multiple geographically distributed VMs. You just can't approach them as if they're just another VM instance provider and expect a similar experience and pricing. What they do and price for is fundamentally different from that.
You can protect human rights without stifling progress. It's not a "pick one of the above" situation.
The EU can and should reform many parts of its sclerotic laws and bureaucracies. Whether it can do so before it becomes a subservient puppet state which serves as a battleground for competing powers remains to be seen.
While AI isn't particularly good with obfuscated code, it is true that code obfuscation in most old games can be removed relatively easily. The attack and defense state-of-the-art has moved on from those days.
Given that 42% of Android devices are unpatched as of now [1] it's an interesting decision on their part to release their research and make them all vulnerable
With malicious HTTP headers, any user could access any repo on Github.com, or on the Enterprise Github instance they might have access to. It's even worse than that because it's remote code execution on the Github server.
It seems like Github has been a mess since the Microsoft acquisition. Definitely feels like another multi billion dollar screwup in the making, like Skype or Nokia were.
Hopefully the incidents in the last few weeks are a wakeup call, and they start getting their shit together.
That's interesting, Kimi K2.5 used through KimiCode was comparable to Sonnet in my tests, and is an excellent alternative to Anthropic models
That being said, I noticed that Kimi being served through Openrouter providers was trash. Whatever they do on the backend to optimize for throughput really compromised the intelligence of the model. You have to work with Kimi directly if you want the best results, and that's also probably why they released a test suite to verify the intelligence of their new models.
Ideally you would want someone like Charles De Gaulle.
The job is inherently difficult, and I think a big problem is institutional decay/drift leading to a bad pipeline of leaders, which is why you have so many poor, weak, and ineffectual leaders serving back to back. The UK is a prime example of this, but I think all of Western societies are struggling with this to one degree or another.
Indeed hindsight is 20/20, and I won't pretend to have all the answers. I just personally think we have a particularly rotten batch of leaders which can't only be explained by the leaders themselves, but also by the institutions and policies which spawned those leaders.
I agree the US has many problems, and I really don't want to make this a EU vs USA thread. I also wouldn't say the US is "successful", whereas the EU is not. I just think the EU has amazing potential and isn't living up to it.
Also I think any success the US does enjoy over the EU is in spite of the things you mentioned, and a large part of that is the US simply has a much larger economy, much more money, and much deeper and well developed capital markets. Which just goes to show how much more the EU could aspire to, being a much larger bloc of countries with a larger population and all.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to engage in tropes, I'll be more specific.
Emmanuel Macron is so unpopular that he has to forestall elections until 2029 to remain in power. In the meantime, his unpopularity means France cannot form a government or pass a budget, while the political center erodes under his leadership, giving way to the far left and far right.
Angela Merkel presided over a disastrous energy policy (outsource the coal mines to Poland, close all nuclear reactors, rely on cheap energy from Russia) which made German industry, and Europe by extension, precariously dependent on outside partners which are proving to be very unreliable. This has resulted in reduced economic performance, increased consumer costs, leading to popular discontent. This coupled with a poorly thought out immigration policy are hallmarks of her time in power, the fallout of which Germany is still dealing with today.
Ursula von Der Leyen is a direct descendant of Merkel, but with much less to show. She was complicit in all of Merkel's poor policies, and has not been able to address any of their negative consequences effectively. She has failed to rearm Europe, she has failed to revive economic growth (indeed, just the opposite, embracing at times a de-growth agenda which might on paper be noble, it incompatible with our current economic systems), she has done nothing to reassert Europe's sovereignty in matters of defense and energy, she has presided over the worst excesses of the European Council, which counter-productively rob individual countries of their sovereignty through a combination of bad lawmaking and policy (see the Draghi report), and poor executive decisions (see EU forcing Poland and Romania to buy $2 billion of vaccines they don't need and didn't ask for last week).
I won't even get into Donald Tusk, Viktor Orban, Karol Nawrocki, Hollande, Sarkozy, and all the pre-2020 Italian prime ministers (special shout out to Berlusconi lol).
Finally, I respect that it might be bad to engage in tropes, but I think it's also frame any criticism as playing to the far-right. Indeed a big problem in Europe is centrist politicians have suffocated any criticism by labeling it as "far-right". Over time, as their incompetence leads to more criticism, they label more people as far-right. This has had the reactionary effect of pushing otherwise normal centrist people into the far-right camp, which explains the rise of Le Penn and AfD, to the point that about 25% of voters in France/Germany are unfortunately voting for these far-right options.
Any healthy society must allow for debate and criticism, without labeling everyone who disagrees as extremists.
As an American living in Europe, I don't think the well-balanced European way of life is the cause of Europe "falling behind". Instead I think it's a combination of the following intertwined factors: bad policies, a stunningly incompetent array of bad leaders, and bad deployment of capital (by both private investors and the state).
One of their journalists also doxxed Naomi Wu, intruding on her personal life, making her lose her income, and possibly getting her in trouble with Chinese authorities:
https://x.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1209815150376574976
Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven't been on their mind for a long time, and them preaching to anyone about ethics is rank hypocrisy.
I've found it quite satisfying compared to the other "new" ones.
As for the original topic, I just want to echo what others have said, and say that I am happiest in Java when writing it as if it were Golang code. That an the first-class runtime and performance and deep ecosystem make it a great choice in 2026.
I've participated in some corporate shit-shows in my day, but man I don't think I've ever seen one burn cash this fast.
Another thought: they say the software you ship reflects your org chart ("you ship your org chart"). Given how far Meta has slipped in the last year in the AI race, their org-wide dysfunction is starting to seriously harm them, from Financials to execution to talent. They need to get their act together, starting from the top.
I'm not a fan of Meta, but I'm a big fan of Llama. It was the first notable open weights model, and paved the way for all the others. Just for that I want to say: I'm rooting for you guys. Hope an amazing Llama 5 release comes after all this pain and churn.
In my tests, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is better, there is no comparison. Better tool calling and reasoning than Qwen3-Coder-Next for Html/Js coding tasks of medium size. Beware the quants and llama.cpp settings, they matter a lot and you have to try out a bunch of different quants to find one with acceptable settings, depending on your hardware.
Getting banned from Gemini while attempting to improve Gemini is the most Googley thing ever :D imagine letting your automated "trust and safety" systems run amok so that they ban the top 0.01% of your users with no recourse. Google really knows how score an own-goal.
Cloudflare pricing introduces an additional dimension for when you're architecting software on top of them, but if you do it correctly, your product has the potential to be faster, cheaper, and easier to run than traditional solutions running on multiple geographically distributed VMs. You just can't approach them as if they're just another VM instance provider and expect a similar experience and pricing. What they do and price for is fundamentally different from that.