It's much much more complex than that. Climate is only one factor and by far not the most important one. Prosperity and structure of the city plays a much more important role. Singapore is an outlier because it's a rich country on an island the size of a city.
Big cities in Europe are usually surrounded by more rural areas in most of Europe for historical reasons (surrounding farmlands used to feed the city), lessening the need for city parks and greenery since the countryside was surrounding the city. If the city IS the country and even isolated on an island, that's of course not an option.
Another factor is also rooted in history. Like most cities in Europe, Singapore is old, though most of its growth happened in the past 60 years with proper urban planning. Europe's cities on the other hand grew over centuries without any kind of modern urban planning and the pressure of rebuilding quickly after the many devastating wars didn't help either.
Finally there's the issue of money - being one of the richest countries/cities on Earth helps tremendously with building a nice, liveable urban environment compared to some cities struggling to keep basic infrastructure running.
> The recent trouble with the Borkenkäfer was just a consequence of monoculture.
Even worse. It was monoculture of trees that aren't even native to the climate zone. The trees were imported from Scandinavia for their superior lumber quality, and were on edge even without the added stress from droughts and heat waves.
It does, though. UB and associated optimisations wouldn't be an issue if defined behaviour would not have an impact on performance. If the cost would be zero or negligible, the compiler wouldn't need to care and hence warnings like this wouldn't need to be explicitly stated.
> Given that Apple has been making its own CPU cores for years now, I suspect overflowing checking on Apple CPUs is virtually free (aside from code size).
Never make guesses based on a particular programming language. In Apple's own C documentation (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/integer-over...) it is stated that "Overflows result in undefined behavior." and enabling wrapping behaviour "may adversely impact performance", indicating that overflow detection is in fact not "virtually free".
> Apparently it is bureaucracy without purpose after all?
No it's not without purpose at all. The purpose is to know who could be drafted in a timely manner should the need arise. There's currently 2 major wars - sorry "special military operations" - happening, one of which in Europe.
A certain government involved in one of these simultaneously calls for allies to assist while at the same time openly questioning half a century of military alliances. So maybe this helps to understand why regulations like this make sense - even for people who never lived through a time when there was mandatory military service and take their own security for granted.
First of all you don't need it. Secondly, the regulation even states that the right is granted automatically anyway. Technically, the rule had been in place for the past 45+ years anyway - even when there was mandatory military service! - so it doesn't make any practical difference.
This doesn't necessarily relate to the inference itself. No models are exposed to input directly when using web-based APIs, there's pre-processing layers involved that do undocumented stuff in opaque ways.
This is an interesting observation. So maybe it has nothing to do with the model itself, but everything to do with external configuration. Token-limit exceeded -> empty output. Just a guess, though.
Look at Python - similar story. Once a reasonably usable global package registry exists, this is exactly what happens. Languages and standard libraries evolve, shipped code more often than not doesn't.
> you don't see C programmers creating shared libraries to determine if a number is odd, or to add whitespace to a string.
Believe me, if C had a way to seamlessly share libraries across architectures, OSes, and compiler versions, something similar would have happened.
Instead you get a situation where every reasonably big modern C project starts by implementing their own version of string libraries, dynamic arrays, maps (aka dictionaries), etc. Not much different really.
Absolute nonsense. Apart from the fact that password length is necessarily finite due to memory and time constraints, passwords aren't stored as clear text. You will get hash collisions, because the number of unique hashes is very much finite.
Your argument therefore doesn't apply in this context.
> Most things can't be taught to do arithmetic, making this "transformer" thing slightly magical.
Yep, for people who don't have know the fundamentals (i.e. maths). To people who don't know the universal approximation theorem, this may seem like "magic", but it's just as much magic as making a dark room bright by flipping a light switch.
The people already doing this work today already do exactly that.
There's no goalpost shifting here - it's l'art pour l'art at its finest.
It'd be introducing an agent where no additional agent agent is required in the first place, i.e. telling a farmer how to do their job, when they already now how to and do it in the first place.
No one needs an LLM if you can just lease some land and then tell some person to tend to it, (i.e. doing the actual work). It's baffling to me how out of touch with reality some people are.
Want to grow corn? Take some corn, put it in the ground in your backyard and harvest when it's ready. Been there, done that, not a challenge at all. Want to do it at scale? Lease some land, buy some corn, contract a farmer to till the land, sow the corn, and eventually harvest it. Done. No LLM required. No further knowledge required. Want to know when the best time for each step is? Just look at when other farmers in the area are doing it. Done.
Big cities in Europe are usually surrounded by more rural areas in most of Europe for historical reasons (surrounding farmlands used to feed the city), lessening the need for city parks and greenery since the countryside was surrounding the city. If the city IS the country and even isolated on an island, that's of course not an option.
Another factor is also rooted in history. Like most cities in Europe, Singapore is old, though most of its growth happened in the past 60 years with proper urban planning. Europe's cities on the other hand grew over centuries without any kind of modern urban planning and the pressure of rebuilding quickly after the many devastating wars didn't help either.
Finally there's the issue of money - being one of the richest countries/cities on Earth helps tremendously with building a nice, liveable urban environment compared to some cities struggling to keep basic infrastructure running.