-increased frequency and magnitude of destructive weather events
-global weather pattern shifts
-increasingly dysfunctional governments in previously stable nations
-markets dominated by players decoupled from reality
-a stock market bubble of immense proportions
-the end of the post-WWII order
-an interlinked global economy with very little resilience
-an increasing amount of war
I have no idea what shape the world that emerges from all the above is going to be, but I strongly doubt it will be better than it was. The obvious analogs seem to be the Great Depression and the World Wars.
I don't know exactly what will start the dominoes falling, but the current war in Persian Gulf has a lot of potential to do so.
My main concern isn't how or if we survive, but who we survive as- the rewriting of what the context of being human is the biggest threat to me- imagine social media but spreading increasingly depressive and depraved social attitudes. We need social buffer- and contentment and contextualising media to see us through this, alongside everything else.
(A luxury i know as it shows i have a comfortable and stable existence)
I'm using this model for my first python project, coding using opencode along with devstral and Mistral Large 3. I know it's not as capable as other, more expensive models, but working with it this way is teaching me python. More directly to your point though, the speech to text model is really good.
It's funny because I just took a break from it to read some hn and found this post.
Pretty much all of my LLM usage has been using Mistral's open source models running on my PC. I do not do full agentic coding as when i tried it with Devstral Small 2 it was a bit too slow (though if i could get 2-3 times the speed of my PC from a second computer it'd be be a different story and AFAIK that is doable if i was willing to spend $2-3k on it). However i've used Mistral's models for spelling and grammar checks[0], translations[1][2], summaries[3] and trying to figure out if common email SPAM avoidance tricks are pointless in the LLM age :-P [4]. FWIW that tool you can see in the shots is a Tcl/Tk script calling a llama.cpp-based command-line utility i threw together some time ago when experimenting with llama.cpp.
I've also used Devstral Small to make a simple raytracer[5][6] (it was made using the "classic" chat by copy/pasting code, not any agentic approach and i did fix bits of it in the process) and a quick-and-dirty "games database" in Python+Flask+Sqlite for my own use (mainly a game backlog DB :-P).
I also use it to make various small snippets, have it generate some boilerplate stuff (e.g. i have an enum in C and want to write a function that prints names for each enum value or have it match a string i read from a json file with the appropriate enum value), "translate" between languages (i had it recently convert some matrix code that i had written in Pascal into C), etc.
That's likely because they're chasing enterprise - see deals with HSBC, ASML, AXA, BNP Paribas etc... Given swelling anti-US sentiment and their status as a French 'national champion', Mistral are probably in a strong position for now regardless of model performance, research quality or consumer uptake.
Me neither, they're not ready for prime imo. I have a yearly sub and the product is just orders of magnitude behind Anthropic's offering. I use Code for real world stuff and I am happy with the result, Mistral is just not something I can trust right now.
This is amazing! I have a slightly more elaborate setup that allows me to resize from one or another side, similar to what Apple added recently but with more flexibility, but this is super interesting, thanks for sharing!
I am sure in the rich Western world you also have people who work at a gas station, who fetch items from a store.
Helping someone fill their car with gas or sell them an item is useful as well, not everyone should be a software developer. Before feeling sad for other people, think about yourself as well.
Great take. If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that the US can’t really be seen as the “good guys” in such a simple way. Many of these things have been happening for years, but war crimes, disregard for international law, blackmailing allies, killing their own citizens without accountability, and allowing foreign governments to heavily influence policy are all troubling signs.
It’s easy to point to China as a place where freedom of speech isn’t present, but try asking members of the current administration or even Supreme Court judges who won the 2020 election and see what kind of responses you get. That alone says a lot about the current state of things.
>It’s easy to point to China as a place where freedom of speech isn’t present, but try asking members of the current administration or even Supreme Court judges who won the 2020 election and see what kind of responses you get.
Freedom of speech and regard for the facts are independent concerns. People absolutely have the right to call out lies about the 2020 election and have repeatedly done so.
An American and a Soviet Russian were on a plane chatting. The American says "I'm very impressed with the quality of Soviet propaganda". The Soviet says thanks, but it's nothing compared to American propaganda.
The American says "But we don't have propaganda", the Soviet says "Exactly".
If a majority of the Americans believed America was not generally the "good guys" it would be a sign of a failed democracy.
Similarly normal for the population of any country that has net negative externalities from America to view them as the "bad guys".
The current and growing anti-US sentiment is an expected result of an increasing gap between the US and the rest of the first world on economy and defense. The existence of a superpower is precluded on being viewed negatively by the rest of the world
Imagine democracy playing out in literally any measurable field. Think about society getting to vote on who should be on a basketball team, but without any real knowledge of the candidates' abilities beyond what they said and advertised about themselves. And then we put the winners of the vote on a team. They'd get face-stomped by a D-tier NBA team pretty much always.
Democracy isn't about maximizing outcomes, because maximizing outcomes entails the possibility of minimizing outcomes. Marcus Aurelius was perhaps one of the best rulers in all of history. His son, Commodus - raised by him from birth, was certainly one of the worst rulers in all of history. Minority rule systems oscillate between extremes of the best of times and the worst of times. Democracy is always just kind of meh, never particularly great, never particularly awful.
But it creates a stable system because while it's meh in the present, you can always envision that things will be totally different in 4 years. Of course they won't be, but there's this weird bug in our psychology that we can't help but remain optimistic, even though in reality candidate after candidate it always feels like 'well it can't get any worse than this at least' and then the next guy is like 'hold my beer.'
To be fair, almost every society portrays itself as the defender of whatever is right/good.
And, to be equally as fair, the only genuinely good guys are the ones that are too small to enforce their will upon others directly - small countries without arms who are forced to find other ways to engage with others in order to achieve whatever goals they have (resource acquisition)
The Americans have been extremely adept at dominating the discourse via non-government pathways (Hollywood)
But, second, often precisely because they think we’re the bad guys.
If you see the world as dominated by an evil, overwhelmingly powerful empire that uses violence in a way that shows no concern for the continuation or quality of human life outside of the metropole then, even if it is bigoted, repressive, and unjust within the metropole, you still want to be in the metropole rather rhan peripheries.
Well, if that was true then why does everyone get really mad when we try to restrict who gets to come to the United States?
I think, as a formative experience, most Americans should go through the "wow Europe is great (if you go to the right spots)" if only to understand the history and where America came from, and also the "awakening" that happens when one visits Japan. Their trains really do run on time!
Don't ask me, I don't know of anybody who wants to move to the US.
What people get mad about is
1) The hypocrisy of a country created by immigrants, people obsessed with their "heritage" and calling themselves $country-American even when they have zero relation to said $country, now hating immigrants so much.
2) The brutality of the TSA and ICE against anybody they don't like. Do I really need to expand this point?
3) The arrogance of assuming that we all want to move there. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you are not the centre of the world.
I think that should be fairly obvious - money + ease of traveling to. America is, relative to the world, perceived as quite wealthy. South America is full of places that are quite poor. Put the two side by side and many guys coming here speaking not a lick of English, and with no skills to boot, probably envision themselves coming home rich.
It's even relatively easy to put yourselves in their shoes. Columbia's GDP/capita is about $8k. In the US it's about $80k. Imagine how you'd feel if Canada had a GDP/capita of $800k. To many people it'd seem like a great idea to move there completely regardless of everything else about the country. People warning you that you'll end up mowing yards and painting houses while making barely enough to put a roof over your head. Bah! Nonsense! How can that be true on $800k/year!? Canada, here I come!
You can see this play out the same in places like Saudi Arabia. Not many place have the taste for their policies, religion, or much of anything else - yet they have a massive immigrant population, far higher than the US (as a percent) precisely because they pay stupidly high wages, often tax free, and have a low cost of living. You can easily become a dollar millionaire teaching English there if money is what you're after simply because you can easily save thousands of dollars a month. And if you get bored you can go watch somebody get crucified for witchcraft on a weekend now and again.
I can't imagine working as a developer at a place where manager/founder "does NOT allow" tests to be written. This, combined with four pivots mentioned in the article seems like they are just riding the hype and trying to brute-force a product without having any basics or PMF.
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